Projects in Vice City and GTA 3 reverse-engineered are now back online

Take-Two knocked them out and then couldn’t bear to continue the fight.

You can go back to February, when a fan project that released reverse-engineered source codes for Grand Theft Auto 3 & Vice City was discovered on GitHub. The project was quickly vanished after Take–Two Interactive sent a takedown notice one week later. Four months later, both of the games are back in play.

Eurogamer reported that modders filed a counterclaim against Take-Two’s original takedown notice. The projects were dubbed Re3 & ReVC. It turns out that Rockstar’s parent company has not responded, so GitHub has put these projects back online.

The code is back online after just over a month. Theo, a New Zealand programmer, filed a DMCA counterclaim in May for his contributions to this project. Although it was restored, there were still over 200 forks.

Although Vice City and GTA 3 have been available for some time on PC, GTA 3 is an especially poor port. Fan projects made a lot of improvements and cleaned up the game. Bugs were fixed, a debug camera was installed, and loading screens between islands were eliminated. Mods are also more flexible with reverse-engineered codes, which is always a good thing.

It’s good news, but it doesn’t mean Re3 or ReVC are free. This is how DMCA rules operate. If copyright holders do not take action, any challenged content must be restored within 10-14 days. Take-Two has yet to take any action, so all is good, for the time being.