The fan-made mod that finally brings Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the Nintendo GameCube was supposed to be out by now. Its creator, a solo developer who goes by EBellumat, had promised the source code and an ISO generator on August 21. Then, the day before, he hit a bug he could not ship past. So instead of releasing a broken mod, he took a page out of Rockstar Games' book and delayed it instead until he could figure it out.
The GameCube is ancient, cramped hardware by modern standards, and squeezing a Grand Theft Auto onto it means constantly scrapping for every last byte of memory, so every bit counts, and it can't afford to run out while you're out and busy exploring Vice City. EBellumat says he is working on it as fast as he can but will not commit to when he'll finish it as revealed on X.
Part of the reason why he discovered the problem is a change in how he was testing it. Previously, he'd ran the game off an SD card reader through a Nintendo Wii. Now he is testing with a proper ISO file so people could burn and boot it and doing it this way exposed a new issue that he hadn't encountered before.
When someone floated the obvious modern fix, which is to just ship version 1.0 now and patch it to 1.0.1 later, EBellumat said no. If the game freezes too early, he figures, it kills the hype and poisons the first impression. Or, as he put it, "A delayed game could be good, a rushed game is bad forever."
EBellumat can't lay claim to this line. It is a paraphrase of Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's legendary designer, who said essentially the same thing decades ago. So here is an unpaid hobbyist, someone with every excuse to just dump it and walk away is the one insisting on doing it properly, which is something that a lot of people can learn from, including Rockstar when it released Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition in whatever state it was.
Fan-made GTA Ports Keeping Dead Consoles Alive
Project | The console | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City | Nintendo GameCube | Delayed by a memory bug, no new date |
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City | Sega Dreamcast | Beta already released |
Grand Theft Auto III | Sega Dreamcast | Running well, and even modded |
A small, stubborn scene forcing GTA onto hardware it never officially reached.
There is a whole quiet scene of people lovingly forcing Grand Theft Auto onto hardware it was never meant for at all. Fans got Vice City running on the Sega Dreamcast after finding a way to make Grand Theft Auto III runn surprisingly well on that same dead console, and then started modding that port too. The GameCube project is the newest entry in that stubborn little tradition, and honestly, the delay is a sign that the folks who are responsible for it are taking it seriously than just cobbling it together.
So there is no release date right now, and the mod will land when it stops freezing. A a time dominated by talk of Grand Theft Auto VI and its enormous budget, there is something quietly refreshing about one person, working alone and for free, refusing to release a twenty-year-old game until it runs exactly the way he wants it to.