You Can Now Play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the Browser
Key topics
The nostalgia is palpable as gamers revel in the ability to play Grand Theft Auto Vice City directly in their browsers, with many marveling at how seamlessly it runs on various devices, including older phones and PCs. Commenters are thrilled to relive childhood memories, with some noting the impressive 120 fps performance, while others credit the re3 project on GitHub for making this possible. However, the conversation takes a turn towards the topic of game preservation and copyright, with some arguing that games older than 10 years should be open-sourced, while others counter that even older games continue to sell well, citing examples like GTA V and Skyrim. As the debate unfolds, a few voices suggest rethinking copyright durations, proposing a more reasonable 15-year limit after release.
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- 01Story posted
Dec 19, 2025 at 2:12 PM EST
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Dec 19, 2025 at 2:40 PM EST
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Dec 29, 2025 at 10:59 PM EST
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Big kudos to https://github.com/SugaryHull/re3/tree/miami on which this is based on. Wholeheartedly agree with authors, every game older than 10 years, and that is not in active development, should be made open source so that community can keep games alive instead of letting them rot.
Note that GTA V is now 12 years old and still sells ~20M copies per year. So that’s going to be a tough sell in some cases.
You could argue it’s still actively developed, particularly due to online, so fair enough.
But that’s also sort of true for Vice City. They’ve released mobile version (playable on Netflix) over the past few years at least.
Nevertheless, I’d be thrilled if that was a standard practice.
Moddable games are like prescription pills that add one ingredient to a patent-expired recipe, to repatent it as new.
Or we could shorten copyright to something reasonable, like 15 years after release.
I feel nostalgic for Vice City the same way people felt nostalgic for the 80s when the game was released.
Subjective time speeds up as we age, probably based on how long a give period is vs the rest of your life.
16 years was a much bigger % of your life then than it is now.
Think of 2 year old, a year ago was half their life !
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto2/
https://dos.zone/carmageddon/
Now I gotta find that other game he had, but I don't remember what it was called. It was kinda like reverse GTA: you played as a female cop and you had to stop the criminals. Iirc there were corrupt cops later on in the game.
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-1997/
I can't get the music playing, unfortunately.
If you know, you know.
It could be that I'm a bit old-school, but this really seemed to confirm that ready to play fun gameplay trumps realistic graphics any day!
how is this done ?? what engine is used ? it feels exactly like the original
also the whole website dos zone seems to have all these browser versions of half life etc ???
how are people making these things and how are they legal ?
so many questions
Is it legal? Well, the reverse engineering typically is as long as you follow the rules, but hosting all the game assets on a public web server so you can play it probably isn't.
This isn't just reverse engineering, it's a decompiled source from the original binary.
they are not, but then again so are many things. We choose what laws to enforce (see 18-20 year olds drinking, unmarried cohabitation, etc). just because it is not legal does not mean that law enforcement will care.
It's most likely using reVC, a reverse-engineering of the original binaries by decompilation, and then built for the web using emscripten, which does a fairly good job making OpenGL code work on WebGL.
My Tomb Raider web build I linked here elsewhere was done the same way (reversing by the amazing people in the TR1X project).
The originals are amazing but I have to say for all their faults, the Definitive Editions figured out the camera. For anyone that played the OG versions you were stuck with the “follow cam” unless you had a PC + Mouse
Can't speak to the Deck HW or Steam OS specifically, but the SilentPatch and GInput mods have been working great for me on Proton under Linux Mint.
[0]https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/gta-vc/
I never carry a controller with me. I'd love to just be able to pick up and play in a waiting room or something without needing to plan for it or having an awkward setup. The MCON looked promising, but still probably bigger than what I'd want to carry around.
localStorage.setItem('vcsky.haveOriginalGame', "true")
I haven't checked further than the third mission
Thanks to whoever made this possible. There goes my weekend.
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/
(Here with a fan level to avoid copyright concerns.)
https://dos.zone/norton-commander/