A developer named Jessica Natalia has gotten Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, a game that has only ever properly existed on Sony's old handheld, running natively on Windows, and she did it without an emulator.
Vice City Stories is a 2006 prequel set in Vice City, originally built for the PlayStation Portable, Sony's mid-2000s handheld, and it never got an official PC release. In fact, it never got much of anything. The only way to play it outside of the long-forgotten console is through an emulator, which is a technical workaround and a potentially legal issue considering Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games' stance.
With that said, what Natalia built is a static recompilation.
Instead of making your PC impersonate a PSP in real time, it takes the game's original compiled code and translates it into a proper native Windows program, its own .EXE file that just runs. It's faster, stand alone, and similar to the native PC version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask that's currently available and running off the back of its Nintendo 64 code.
Well aware of the risks of the project, Natalia is exercising extreme discretion and caution about how she describes her work. The project, she stresses, contains no reverse-engineered code and none of Rockstar's proprietary code. It does not hand you the game, either.
You have to dump your own copy from PSP hardware you actually own to supply the assets. The recompiled program is the only thing you will get your hands on, eventually, on GitHub, once she's finished smoothing out the final performance issues.
Take-Two has spent years swinging at nearly anything that touches its back catalog, especially Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a pseudo-prequel to Grand Theft Auto VI. The company recently hit a gorgeous fan remaster that rebuilt Vice City inside a newer engine with a DMCA takedown. It has leaned on modders so hard that some have resorted to disguising their engine ports as fake AI videos just to slip past the takedown letters.
Take-Two History With PSP-Only GTA Mods on PC
Approach | What it actually is | Do you need your own copy? | How Take-Two has reacted |
|---|---|---|---|
Emulator (e.g. PPSSPP) | Software that makes your PC mimic a PSP so the original game file runs | Yes, you supply the game file | Largely left alone; emulators themselves are legal |
PPSSPP-based "PC adaptation" | A repackaged emulator dressed up to feel like a PC port | Often bundles the game files for you | Gray area; bundling assets invites takedowns |
Decompilation (re3, reVC) | Reverse-engineering the game back into source code, then rebuilding it | Yes | Sued the developers in 2021 |
Static recompilation (this project) | Translates the original compiled code into a native Windows program, no reverse-engineering, no Rockstar code | Yes, you dump your own PSP copy | No public action yet; legally untested |
Official PC port | Rockstar releases it on PC itself | No, you just buy it | Has never done this for Vice City Stories |
The ways to play a PSP-only Grand Theft Auto on PC, and how Take-Two has reacted.
Vice City Stories is playable natively on PC in 2026 because one fan did the work, and it is only necessary because Rockstar has left a two-decade hole where an official version should exist even after acquiring a studio specifically dedicated for stuff like this, then has historically reached for its lawyers whenever someone successfully fills it. The good news is that this static recompilation probably won't find itself in hot water, or at least, not as fast, as compared to the re3 and reVC decompilations.
Natalia getting this running and on GitHub may just be the easy part. Keeping it there is the unfortunate but very important question anyone who'd like to play Vice City Stories on their PC is asking right now. Whether it quietly survives the way single-player mods mostly do now, or gets swatted the way other mods were, is something we won't know until much later on.
It's the reality of how Rockstar operates. Because Grand Theft Auto takes up so much of its bandwidth, with GTA 6 and its roughly eight-billion-dollar launch sucking up every available resource for its November 19 launch, it's now up to a single developer to resurrect a forgotten 2006 handheld game the company itself may have genuinely forgotten.