Ever find yourself playing 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas thinking, “I wish I could be playing a different Grand Theft Auto right now. At the same time. Golly, I wish I could be playing three Grand Theft Autos simultaneously.” Well, fantastic news, you. A modder figured out how to get the previous installations working as a texture within the game, turning Grand Theft Auto III into Grand Theft Auto³.
Earlier this week, Grand Theft Auto modder Dryxio posted a video playing Grand Theft Auto III on a TV within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In the first few seconds it appears as a gag, but soon it becomes clear that the modder is capable of running the entire game, from start to finish.
The same video demonstrates that Dryxio could also boot up Vice City on the same set. Within 48 hours, the modder upped the ante, giving CJ a gigantic, cul de sac-wide flat screen so he could play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on a billboard within Grand Theft Auto III. Each game rendered into a real time texture, lapsing over each other. Capable of mission progression, save files, the works. Condensing the legendary trio of Rockstar sandbox games into a singular lucid, Inception-style thought bubble.
We are still in the calm before the storm before the all-consuming Grand Theft Auto VI lands in November, a landfall so heavy its gravity is bending all the other games around it. This is all enabled by the post-2000s legacy of the series, where Rockstar’s smooth-running, mayhem generating trilogy expanded what was possible on consoles and upended the industry. Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas seemed like dense, living metropolises in their day. That Rockstar could smush them on to a PSP disc seemed like total sorcery.
Now the expanse and fidelity expected from players is in the stratosphere, and getting a new Grand Theft Auto to that level has been a tortured affair. Meanwhile, all three games that set these standards can be run on an in-game TV that traditionally runs My Five Uncles.