As a series, Grand Theft Auto has spent decades cycling between the same three locations, with each variation of Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas being more detailed than the last. But players haven’t been able to explore all three locations at once since the release of the original.
Until now. A modder has done what Grand Theft Auto hasn’t since 1997, creating a mod that lets players travel instantaneously between the settings of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. And it’s all thanks to that most underutilised of game technologies—portals.
Veteran Grand Theft Auto tinkerer DryxioGTA posted a video of the mod—which is still in development and doesn’t seem to have a proper name yet—on YouTube (via GamesRadar) The clip shows the player travelling between three brightly coloured portals located in San Andreas’ Grove Street. Walking through each portal transports the player instantly to the relevant game and location, switching to the appropriate player character in the process.
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DryxioGTA provided some technical details in the video’s comments. He confirmed that all three games are running “inside the same process, sharing one Direct 3D device” and that “each portal is a live GPU texture” with the relevant game “actually running behind it, it’s not a video or a captured window”. DryxioGTA also says that the three worlds maintain their own saves, missions, and settings, and that they continue to run the world state, including traffic and physics, in real time.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the mod is that the portals don’t just let the player travel between cities, they also allow for interactions between those cities. DryxioGTA demonstrates this by shooting through a portal, gunning down several civilians. This causes peds in his current world to attack him and triggers a wanted rating.
It’s seriously impressive work, and the GTA fans responding in the video’s comments are clearly bowled over. “The fact that you can shoot the peds and other objects through the portals is just beyond unimaginably insane,” writes li_B4shar_il, while ross3695_basedhax observes that “We got inter-GTA portals before GTA 6.”
In fairness, it’s not that long before Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar’s hugely anticipated sequel is due to land in November, and that fact alone has already had a substantial impact on gaming. Every other developer is scurrying to get out of the way of Rockstar’s behemoth, resulting in the next three months being crowded with dozens of highly anticipated launches.
