A modder known as Dryxio has created perhaps the most ambitious mod in the history of Grand Theft Auto. He combined three games from the series, GTA III, GTA Vice City, and GTA San Andreas, into a single interconnected universe with fully functional real-time portals. The mod allows seamless travel between titles without loading screens, keeping each world fully active and interactive.
Portals that act as windows into other worlds
In the demo video, CJ from San Andreas stands on Grove Street and shoots at NPCs on The Strip. He then moves toward a pink portal, walks through it, and emerges in Vice City as Tommy Vercetti. After causing chaos, he returns through the portal and ends up in Liberty City in GTA III. The most impressive part is that the portals genuinely act as windows: you can stand in one game and shoot into the other. It is unclear if there are limits to interaction, such as whether vehicles can be driven through portals, but the technical complexity is remarkable.
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Three game engines running simultaneously in a single process
The modder explains that all three games run concurrently within one process, sharing a single Direct3D device. Each portal is a live GPU texture; there is no video capture faking realism. The transition happens instantly via an engine swap. When you walk through a portal, the system switches to that game's engine while the others keep running in the background. Each world retains full native functionality, including AI, traffic, physics, saves, missions, and settings. There is no loading screen.
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Reverse engineering and open-source reimplementation
This feat is possible because the source code of each game has been decompiled and recompiled using open-source engines. Dryxio modified re3 and reVC, community projects that decompile the original source code of GTA III and Vice City into clean, readable C++, and used plugin-sdk to interface with San Andreas. Since these games used the proprietary RenderWare engine, which cannot render multiple spatial scenes together, an open-source reimplementation called librw was used to compile all three games into a single unified process.
The mod is not publicly available yet, but the community is already captivated. It is arguably the most technically complex GTA mod ever, requiring no programming knowledge to appreciate its ambition. It remains to be seen how Rockstar Games will react, as they might consider it copyright infringement. For now, it stands as a testament to human ingenuity and modding passion. For other examples of creativity in gaming, see the article on Shigeru Miyamoto defending remakes or the recent Xbox Series X|S sales surge. For technical details, refer to the original article on Tom's Hardware.
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