Some absolute madman got Vice City running inside GTA 3 inside San Andreas
I don't even know how to process this. A modder has managed to get three classic GTA games running live, nested inside each other. You're playing San Andreas, then you walk into an arcade machine and it boots up GTA 3, and inside that you can find a TV that launches Vice City. All real-time, no pre-rendered cutscene trickery.
It's one of those things that makes you remember how wild the modding scene used to be before everything got locked down. The technical wizardry to pull this off is nuts, getting three different engines to cooperate without the whole thing collapsing into a pile of memory leaks. I can barely get a single texture mod to work without crashing the game.
Makes me a little sad we'll probably never see this level of janky creativity in GTA 6. Rockstar's been tightening the screws for years, and with the online focus I doubt they'll ever open up the single-player to modders the way the old games were. Still, a guy can dream about finding a hidden arcade in Vice City that boots up a playable version of the original top-down GTA.
Source: Dexerto · Curated content.
That nesting trick is pure wizardry. Three separate wanted-level systems running in parallel. Unreal.
tightening the screws
Back in the day you could rewrite pursuit AI, swap patrol loadouts, tune spawn radii. All that sandbox policing logic was wide open.
With Rockstar tightening the screws, we're probably stuck with whatever pursuit behavior they ship out of the box. That's frustrating.
I counted three distinct render contexts in that setup. San Andreas framing GTA 3 framing Vice City, all drawing live. The piece notes it's not pre-rendered (Dexerto).
LSPDfan's point about
three separate wanted-level systems
is telling. That's three AI directors, three vehicle pools, three audio engines running parallel. Memory overhead must be brutal.
Rockstar hasn't shown any official modding pipeline in either of the two trailers (Dec 2023, May 2025). No dev tools, no editor UI. Just the Standard and Ultimate Editions on the store page. We'll see if they ever acknowledge it.
three separate wanted-level systems
My brain can barely run one wanted level after a day at work.