Grand Theft Auto III took the market by storm when it hit shelves in October 2001. Its open world design, its quick arrival on PCs, and the M rating in some regions made it one of the most sought-after titles that year. However, there was one console that didn't make it to the GTA3 party: the Sega Dreamcast, discontinued seven months earlier. Since then, fans have wondered whether a port compatible with that hardware would be possible, and despite its limitations, the answer is a resounding yes…
Not everyone remembers this detail, but the first technical demos of what would become Grand Theft Auto III were prototypes compatible with the Sega Dreamcast. Why didn't DMA Design and Rockstar continue their development? The official reason was simply “financial”: the PlayStation 2 was sweeping everything in its path, and Sega had pulled the plug on the Dreamcast in March 2001. GTA3 became the fifth best-selling PS2 game (11.6 million units), and the Grand Theft Auto franchise occupies three spots in its Top 5 (San Andreas sits at the top, and Vice City takes third place).
Other darker rumors suggest that Sony refused access to PS2 devkits for any studio developing games for the Dreamcast, but fans have been debating the simple possibility of having GTA3 on Sega's hardware for decades. Its open world requirements pose a huge challenge; however, that didn't stop those behind the DCA3 project.
DCA3: Grand Theft Auto III, now on Dreamcast
A bit more history: Modern Vintage Gamer mentions in his video that Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas have undergone reverse engineering processes in recent years, giving rise to ports for the Nintendo Switch and PS Vita. The same happened with its graphics engine, RenderWare, and as expected, that didn't sit well with Take-Two Interactive, which threw lawsuits and takedowns in all directions.
But everything that reaches the web stays there in some way, and that code was no exception. One of the DCA3 developers, Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis (better known as "skmp"), determined that running GTA3 on the Dreamcast was not impossible. The console's natural RAM and VRAM limits complicated things, but with some changes in texture size, the DCA3 team managed to make it "fit", so to speak.
There is still work ahead. The game is in alpha stage and doesn't reach the minimum framerate of 30 FPS, but it already has other notable details such as lighting and the display of statistics on the VMU of the gamepad. Preparing the image requires multiple steps and the original files of the PC version, however, there is a more important point of tension: how Take-Two will react. Considering its previous behavior, I recommend all interested parties hurry up.
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