You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser
43 comments
·December 19, 2025wiseowise
tobyjsullivan
> agree with authors, every game older than 10 years, and that is not in active development, should be made open source so that community
Note that GTA V is now 12 years old and still sells ~20M copies per year. So that’s going to be a tough sell in some cases.
You could argue it’s still actively developed, particularly due to online, so fair enough.
But that’s also sort of true for Vice City. They’ve released mobile version (playable on Netflix) over the past few years at least.
Nevertheless, I’d be thrilled if that was a standard practice.
superasn
This works amazing well. I started playing and just 5 minutes in, I was completely hooked and ended up playing for almost half hour.
It could be that I'm a bit old-school, but this really seemed to confirm that ready to play fun gameplay trumps realistic graphics any day!
emilbratt
Pushing the nostalgic effect aside, I agree. The gameplay is the important part and is why I can still play snes games to this day.
amarant
This got me thinking that one of my childhood favourites ought to be playable in the browser too, and sure enough, here's GTA 2 if anyone else is as old as I am:
djeastm
GTA 1 was the first computer game I ever remember buying with my own money:
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-1997/
I can't get the radio music playing, unfortunately.
jtokoph
This is great. I also played the heck out of GTA2. I had a lot of fun attempting to mod the textures to get my favorite cars in the game. Respect is everything.
doublerabbit
Carmageddon is another old classic of mine, https://dos.zone/carmageddon
I used to watch my older brother play this when I was younger and he always hid the CD.
dashzebra
wsdfqfcf
If you know, you know.
dailen
And it consumes less RAM than msn.com
Exuma
Which was the GTA where you rode around on a dirtbike out in the california mountains, and there was like bootleggers and stuff.... man i have serious memories of that game
eftychis
San Andreas
MinimalAction
Crazy! Brought back the summers of my childhood where I mindlessly roamed around the Vice City with my custom MP3 list of songs. For so long, I was stuck on flying the RC helicopter in an abandoned skyscraper level. It has been years, and now I have the itch to try that again!
Thanks to whoever made this possible. There goes my weekend.
agentifysh
this is one of the most impressive thing i've see on HN
how is this done ?? what engine is used ? it feels exactly like the original
also the whole website dos zone seems to have all these browser versions of half life etc ???
how are people making these things and how are they legal ?
so many questions
sva_
If I had to guess, by being hosted in Russia they probably ignore the legality.
basch
If you boot the game, it only loads the demo, and it tells you to supply your own game file to play the rest.
bossyTeacher
> how are they legal ?
they are not, but then again so are many things. We choose what laws to enforce (see 18-20 year olds drinking, unmarried cohabitation, etc). just because it is not legal does not mean that law enforcement will care.
stevezsa8
In which country is unmarried cohabitation not legal?
kg
For the "how" see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330258 - the game has been reverse engineered. There are reverse engineering and reimplementation projects like this for a lot of older games, i.e. Mario 64, Diablo and at least one of the Sonic games
Is it legal? Well, the reverse engineering typically is as long as you follow the rules, but hosting all the game assets on a public web server so you can play it probably isn't.
charcircuit
reVC is clear copyright infringement distributing a derivative work based off the code of the game.
sehugg
GTA Vice City was released for iOS devices in 2012, and IIRC it ran pretty well. Not surprising that it runs well with WASM/WebGPU, given the massive increase in GPU performance. I'd imagine that the CPU-bound paths are well-optimized for 2002 Pentiums.
ekjhgkejhgk
I'm so old that GTA in 3D still feels new.
_fat_santa
Haven’t tried this yet but I literally just loaded the OG PC version on my steam deck.
The originals are amazing but I have to say for all their faults, the Definitive Editions figured out the camera. For anyone that played the OG versions you were stuck with the “follow cam” unless you had a PC + Mouse
pinus-cembra
Web browsers really have come a long way. Will be interesting to see where we'll be in 10 to 20 years.
pipes
I came here hoping to see some technical explanation of what this is. E.g.JavaScript emulation of PS2 version? Recompilation + wasm? Something else entirely?
Still remember how my PC was freezing on VC 20 years ago, and now I can play it in a browser in 120 fps. Wild.
Big kudos to https://github.com/SugaryHull/re3/tree/miami on which this is based on. Wholeheartedly agree with authors, every game older than 10 years, and that is not in active development, should be made open source so that community can keep games alive instead of letting them rot.