A modder crammed all of GTA 3 and Vice City inside San Andreas — playable, simultaneously

In February 2026, modder dryxio2 got the full campaigns of GTA 3 and Vice City running, playable, from inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This isn't a reskin or a texture swap — it's three separate game engines running independently, each with its own save progress, launched from a TV placed inside San Andreas's world. CJ turns it on, and GTA 3's intro plays. Inside that running copy of GTA 3, you can place another TV and boot Vice City.

Why this is harder than it sounds

Each of these three games runs on its own build of the RenderWare engine, with different internal memory layouts and asset handling. Getting one game's engine to boot and render live inside another, without crashing the host game's own memory allocation, is a genuine reverse-engineering problem — closer to building a compatibility layer than making a content mod. That's why nobody had pulled this off in the twenty-plus years since these games shipped, despite an enormous, technically skilled modding community around all three.

The legal line that makes this fine

The mod ships with zero original GTA 3 or Vice City game files. It only works if you point it at legitimate copies of both games that you already own. That's the same distinction we've covered before on emulation's legal line: the tool itself is legal engineering, distributing someone else's copyrighted assets is not — and this mod stays firmly on the legal side of that line by design, not by luck.

What makes it worth covering past the novelty: modding communities keep finding new value in engines their original studios finished with two decades ago. That's the same instinct that keeps retro hardware and emulation software relevant on this beat — old, finished, unsupported systems turning out to have more left in them than anyone assumed.