Rockstar literally just took down a Liberty City GTA 5 mod, but that's not stopping these modders porting Vice City into GTA 4 - and they might just get away with it

News
By published

It looks gorgeous

Vice City
(Image credit: Rockstar)

Modders have finished porting all of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City into GTA 4's engine, and the game is available to play later this week.

Vice City: The NextGen Edition is coming to PC this Saturday, as revealed by a final trailer for the mod project. "It’s a fan made project that ports the ENTIRETY of Vice City into GTA 4’s game engine," writes GameRollGTA on Twitter. "It includes all story missions, collectibles, music & more."

It looks wonderful in the trailer, which has racked up almost 100,000 views in just one day. It looks bold and vivid, like the '80s Miami movies that inspired the original game. It also includes all the original cheat codes. I played so much GTA: San Andreas that I had those cheat combinations committed to muscle memory until I was 20 years old.

Article continues below

"This is the closest thing to a Vice City remaster that we'll get," GameRollGTA continues. There is, of course, the official GTA The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition that you can buy, but it had a lot of teething issues at launch that put people off it, myself included.Honestly, the best way to play these games still remains a PS2, but I understand that's quite a faff to source and set up these days.

If you're worried the mod is going to get taken down because it may steer people away from Rockstar's paid game, GameRoll reassures people that the team behind it is Russian. I'll be honest, I'm not sure how exactly this shields them from Rockstar, but it likely hinges on a Russian governmental decree from 2022 that suggested it would not be taking copyright requests from "unfriendly" countries particularly seriously. Modders have been issued with DMCAs by Rockstar before, so the concern is warranted.

Rockstar may be too busy with GTA 6, which should be launching this year, to notice. An analyst report states some companies are hoping the game is priced at $100 so that other games can follow suit, and a Baldur's Gate 3 dev says "You’re not supposed to say this out loud!!!!"

Check out our ranking of the best GTA games if you want to go back and play some of those gems while you wait for GTA 6.

Issy van der Velde
Issy van der Velde
Contributor

I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.