GTA publishers shut down GTA 3 & Vice City remakes amid remaster rumors
Rockstar GamesGTA publishers Take-Two have shut down a fan project of reverse engineering GTA 3 and Vice City amid rumors that a remastered trilogy of classic GTA games could be released soon.
Over the years, Grand Theft Auto fans have messed around with the games that Rockstar have released, with some digging into the code to improve upon the normal release.
That’s given us some hilarious mods, the rise of GTA RP, as well as different cities and modern graphics for GTA 5. Of course, Rockstar and Take-Two – the publishers behind GTA – own the copyrights and can strike down modders if they choose to do so. They did recently go after GTA Online cheat sellers.
However, they’ve now shut down a fan project that was reverse engineering both GTA 3 and Vice City to bring the games up to date with a few modern changes.
Rockstar GamesThe project, which came from a group of GTA Fans, was being worked on over the course of the last few years, with videos showing how they’d changed the iconic titles.
- Read More: Best GTA RP servers and how to join them
As RockstarIntel noted, the DMCA request from Take-Two was posted on GitHub, showing that they’d shut down all the files that were being used in the reverse engineering project.
The full DMCA takedown notice accompanies these files on the GitHub page, showing the complete copyright claim. It shows that they’d taken fair use into context but in this situation, it wasn’t quite applicable.
Remember the reverse-engineered GTA 3 and Vice City project with "fan-created source code"?
Take-Two has taken it down. Not really surprising since it hit mainstream media only a few days ago.https://t.co/Vp0BPyIHNp
— Tez2 (@TezFunz2) February 20, 2021
What’s interesting to some GTA fans is that the takedown of the project comes amid rumors that Rockstar will be releasing their own remastered trilogy for GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas.
Given that they’d want to protect that, if it’s real, and probably make a few similar changes to the reverse engineering project, it makes sense that they’d go after it.
Though fans will be hoping the copyright claims don’t extend to other projects, otherwise it could spell the end of some popular GTA-based things like RP.