The Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City reverse-engineering fan project has been hit with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
This week, Eurogamer reported on how Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City fans had fully reverse-engineered both games – a passion project from a small group years in the making.
Fan-created source code for both games was made available on GitHub, offering a raft of eye-catching improvements over the original games officially available to play today on PC.
The work opened up the possibility of new mods, ray-tracing tech and ports to new platforms. Already we’ve seen some interesting work-in-progress ports spring up from re3, including Wii U, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita versions.
re3 and reVC Showcase Watch on YouTube
This morning, the project’s chief creator alerted Eurogamer to a DMCA takedown, supposedly from Rockstar parent company Take-Two, that has hauled both re3 and reVC offline. The DMCA on GitHub claims the project uses copyrighted materials owned by Take-Two, and that this use is “unauthorized and it should be removed immediately”. All files have now been removed, seemingly automatically by GitHub.
Project lead aap tells Eurogamer he’s not sure the DMCA takedown is actually from Take-Two. “It’s not impossible it’s just a troll,” he said. “Hard to tell. But better to assume it’s real.”
We’ve asked Take-Two for clarification.
aap is now faced with a dilemma. He can file a counterclaim, but he’s worried this may spark a lawsuit. It seems he is currently trying to find out the nature of the claim before working out what to do next. “No idea how exactly the project will continue, we’ll see,” aap said.