According to former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij, Grand Theft Auto 3 was originally developed for the Sega Dreamcast before switching to PlayStation 2 after just four months. 23 years later, fans are going back to the original idea and imagining a world in which Rockstar never switched gears, porting the still-influential classic to older hardware.
Vermeij confirmed rumours that the game was in development for the Dreamcast earlier this year in April, revealing that they pivoted to the PS2 for "commercial reasons", not because the Dreamcast wasn't powerful enough.
Funnily enough, the PS2's memory limitations actually stopped GTA 3 from having working planes .
A talented group comprised of skmp, Falco Girgis, PH3NOM, Frogbull, and jaxyn have managed to get GTA 3 running at a steady 30fps on the Dreamcast in just a month. proving Vermeij right. There are still some problems, like the glitchy HUD, but the team has made enormous progress, ironing out most of the major problems to get the game in a comfortable, playable state.
It's hard to overstate just how influential GTA 3 is. It completely reinvented the open-world genre with the still-impressively dense Liberty City that...
