Fans vs. official releases: the broken GTA Trilogy and the re3 and reVC projects Take-Two took down

Fans vs. official releases series, part 2 of 9: fan projects that went beyond what official releases delivered, and what happened to them.

If Black Mesa is the happy ending, this is the other side of the coin: an official remaster that disappointed, and fan projects the brand owner took down a month earlier.

What the official version delivered

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, with GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, launched on November 11, 2021, developed by Grove Street Games for Rockstar. It arrived full of bugs and visual problems, and on November 19 Rockstar publicly apologized, saying the games did not launch at the quality level it and the fans expected, and promised updates.

Worse, before launch the original versions of all three games had been pulled from digital stores. After the backlash, Rockstar put the classic PC versions back on sale in its store as a bundle, and gave them for free to anyone who bought the Definitive Edition for PC on the Rockstar Store through June 30, 2022.

What the fans did

The re3 and reVC projects reverse-engineered the code of GTA III and Vice City, recreating source code that let the games run on other systems and fixed long-standing problems. They did not include the games: you needed the original game files.

Take-Two, Rockstar’s owner, had the projects removed from GitHub in February 2021. They came back after a counter-notice, the company sued the developers in September 2021, and the code went down again in October, a month before the Definitive Edition. The case ended in 2023 without a court ruling on the reverse engineering.

Why it matters for preservation

The case brings together everything that worries anyone who wants to play classics 20 years from now: the original disappears from stores, the new version arrives broken, and the work that kept the games alive on modern systems is blocked. Rockstar fixed much of the trilogy with updates in the following years, and it remains on sale for PC and consoles.

Earlier in the series: Black Mesa.

Source: Rockstar Games, Take-Two and public court filings.