I, like many others, am not over the premature death of the Sega Dreamcast. Any console that brought Dynamite Cop to the home deserved a better shot, but the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube (but let’s be real, mostly the PS2) were too powerful for it, and that was that. Although, if anything could have saved the Dreamcast, it would’ve been GTA 3. The game was originally in the works for Sega’s platform, and a group of developers are looking to correct the timeline and bring the game to the Dreamcast over 20 years later.
While the GTA 3 Dreamcast port released a playable build late last year, the development team hasn’t given up on improving the version (despite already working on a port of Vice City for the platform). While the previous demo was undoubtedly impressive, it was a bit rough; the framerate was choppy, and there were a ton of jaggies. However, the new look at the port that developer Falco Girgis shared on Twitter blows it out of the water. The new look shows the game running far smoother, with less texture pop-in, all while having what seems to be a more populated world.
However, the developer admits that this version of the game "would’ve previously been a slideshow"; but, thanks to some extra tinkering with the engine on Girgis’ part, "I went through all of the low-level common math infrastructure in both the engine and at the RenderWare driver layer and made numerous optimizations before slowly working my way up to optimizing individual algorithms at the application layer using the new math routines."
While these developers cannot go back in time and save the Dreamcast from its fate, it’s undeniably a fascinating look at what could have been if Rockstar hadn’t made the (right) decision to go with the PS2 for commercial reasons.
Speaking of the GTA 3 that could have been; a former Rockstar developer revealed the game originally gave you a wanted level for running a red light, but it "was not popular with the team" so it was nixed.
