The reverse engineered source code of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City has been taken offline after a DMCA takedown request. The sender claims to work for the publisher of the games and while the project manager is not sure, he has been on the safe side.
That is what the project manager tells Eurogamer . Not only are the original GitHub pages of re3 and reVC no longer accessible, all known forks of the project have also been boarded up. The creators behind the project also had no official permission to put the reverse-engineered code online.
The fact that a copy of the original games was mandatory for the use of assets did not help either. The request has been put online.
The new variants of the two games offered multiple benefits that the original games, dating back to 2001 and 2002, did not. It included support for modern screen ratios, anti-aliasing, shorter loading times, a debug menu and support for modern controllers. The source code also made it relatively easy to transfer the games to, for example, the Nintendo Switch, which also happened.
In an interview with Eurogamer, the head of the project, who uses the nickname monkey and lives in Berlin according to his GitHub profile, says that after this project he will reverse engineer Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories.
Those games came out for a limited number of platforms and the PC was not one of them. Whether that will continue now is the question. Aap expressed the intention to start with those games in a background story on Eurogamer .
