I love getting to do some investigative work into retro gaming’s past. Ok, it’s not the kind of work that would excite Professor Layton as there are no number equations or puzzles to crack, but I have uncovered a pretty exciting slice of news about one of the PS2’s seminal titles which might surprise some of you. GTA 3, one of the most iconic games for Sony’s best-selling console, is being ported onto the Dreamcast by developers. The crazy thing is that the game was supposed to have been made for the Dreamcast in the first place, but development was shifted to the PS2 in the early months of the project due to commercial reasons.
Developer Obbe Vermeij, who you might know from his work on GTA 3 and of course one of my all-time favourite N64 games Space Station Silicon Valley, has taken to X to promote the efforts of Dreamcast Developer Falco Girgis and his partners in this ambitious project, even saying in some areas of the gameplay footage that their work looks ‘better than the original’. In his original post, Obbe says that ‘At the time we did think it was technically possible to pull it off on the Dreamcast and these guys are actually doing it.’
Obbe goes on to say that if they can get GTA 3 working fully on the Dreamcast, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t get Vice City working on there too because they’re virtually ‘the same game’. That would be two of the most popular games of all time working on a console that A) one of the games was actually intended for; and B) that ended production back in 2001.
I’ve reached out to both Obbe and Falco to see if we can delve even deeper into both the early development work on the Dreamcast and the ongoing efforts to bring the project to the console it was initially intended for. I’ve also shoehorned Silicon Valley into the conversation because it’s still one of the most bonkers games I’ve ever played to this day and an N64 must-have title!
