reGTA Brings GTA III, Vice City and Liberty City Stories to New Nintendo 3DS Hardware

Developer EpicReds0817 ports re3, reVC and reLCS to the New Nintendo 3DS family, with all three main stories playable and lower-screen maps and touch interfaces, requiring New 3DS hardware and user-supplied game data.

A fan project has brought reverse-engineered versions of three classic Grand Theft Auto games to the New Nintendo 3DS family. Developer EpicReds0817 has adapted re3, reVC and reLCS, the community reverse-engineering projects corresponding to Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City and Liberty City Stories, into a combined 3DS-focused collection. The ports restructure controls around Nintendo's handheld and use the lower screen for game-specific interfaces, maps, touch functionality and a cheat-code keyboard. GTA III receives a dark-blue lower-screen design, reduced loading times, smoother streaming, removed motion blur and fixes for crashes and vehicle materials. Vice City uses a pink interface and adds work around particles, highlights, geometry, water seams and flight-related crashes. Liberty City Stories is particularly notable because the developer completed elements of the unfinished reStories or reLCS campaign implementation for New Nintendo 3DS, alongside mission, save, cutscene and world-state fixes. All three main stories are reported as playable from beginning to end, although optional side activities have not been exhaustively verified. Hardware requirements are important. These ports are intended for the more powerful New Nintendo 3DS, New Nintendo 3DS XL and New Nintendo 2DS XL family rather than the original 3DS and 2DS models. The additional CPU performance and memory of Nintendo's later revision are required to make the games practical. Users must also build the ports themselves and supply legally obtained game data; finished commercial executables are not simply distributed as downloadable copies. The project demonstrates how unusual the modern retro-port scene has become. Grand Theft Auto III once represented a technical leap associated with PlayStation 2 and desktop PCs. Two decades later, reverse engineering has made it possible to translate its engine onto a discontinued Nintendo handheld that Rockstar never officially supported. The lower touchscreen even enables interface arrangements impossible in the original release. Native ports like these occupy a space between emulation and remake. They reuse reconstructed game logic while adapting rendering, input and platform services directly to new hardware. For New 3DS owners, the result turns a machine already prized for Nintendo's catalogue into a pocket-sized host for three major pieces of early-2000s open-world history.