someone got GTA 3 and Vice City running inside San Andreas — three engines at once, launched from an in-game TV. it's a genuine reverse-engineering feat, and it's legal for one specific reason.
In February 2026, modder dryxio2 got the full campaigns of GTA 3 and Vice City running, playable, from inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Not a reskin, not a texture swap — three separate game engines running independently, each with its own save progress, launched from a television placed in San Andreas's world. CJ walks up to a TV, 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 corrupting the host game's memory allocation — is closer to building a compatibility layer than to making a content mod. That's why nobody had pulled it off in the twenty-plus years since these games shipped, despite an enormous and technically skilled modding community around all three.
The nesting is the part that makes people laugh, and it's also the part that demonstrates the achievement. Booting Vice City inside GTA 3 inside San Andreas means the technique generalises rather than being a one-off hack against a single pair of games.
Vice City, running inside GTA 3, running inside San Andreas. The nesting is what proves the technique generalises. · Unsplash
The legal line, which the mod gets right
The mod ships with zero original GTA 3 or Vice City game files. It only works if you point it at legitimate copies you already own. That's the same distinction that governs emulation generally — the tool is legal engineering, distributing someone else's copyrighted assets is not — and this project stays firmly on the right side of it by design rather than by luck.
What it says about old engines
Beyond the novelty, this is part of a pattern worth paying attention to: modding communities keep extracting new value from engines their original studios finished with two decades ago. It's the same instinct that keeps retro hardware and emulation software genuinely relevant — old, finished, unsupported systems turning out to have far more left in them than anyone assumed at the time.
There's a preservation angle too. Every one of these projects is, incidentally, documentation of how these engines actually work — knowledge that otherwise exists only inside a studio that has long since moved on. When the official versions of these games get delisted or broken by a storefront update, this kind of community understanding is frequently what keeps them playable at all.
Common questions
Do I need to own all three games?
Yes. The mod ships with no original game files — it requires you to point it at legitimate copies of GTA 3 and Vice City that you already own.
Is this legal?
The mod itself is, because it distributes no copyrighted game assets. Distributing the games' files would not be. That distinction is the same one that governs emulators.
Do the nested games actually run, or is it a video?
They genuinely run. Each maintains its own separate save progress, which wouldn't be possible with pre-recorded video.
Why hasn't this been done before?
The three games use different RenderWare builds with different memory layouts. Running one engine inside another without corrupting the host's memory is a reverse-engineering problem, not a modding one.
Will Rockstar take it down?
Nothing has been announced. Because it ships no original assets and requires owned copies, it sits in a considerably safer position than projects that bundle game files.
