A Grand Theft Auto modder has shown a working trick that folds Rockstar’s older 3D-era games into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In videos posted to YouTube on Thursday, DryxioGTA demonstrated Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City running inside San Andreas as playable in-game screens.
The demo matters because it is more than a texture gag or a fake TV broadcast. According to the footage, San Andreas keeps running while the inserted game also runs, and the player can move control between the two. That turns CJ’s world into the host process for another GTA sandbox, which is exactly the sort of mildly unhinged engineering PC modding tends to produce when a game has been picked apart for two decades.
DryxioGTA’s first video shows CJ walking up to a television that appears to have been added by the mod. Standing in front of it brings up a choice to launch either Grand Theft Auto III or Vice City. After a selection, the chosen game starts on the TV inside San Andreas.
The control scheme shown in the video uses the F10 key to switch input between San Andreas and the embedded game. When the player gives control to GTA III, for example, the inner game behaves like a normal playable session. The outer San Andreas world does not freeze in the demonstration: pedestrians continue moving around while GTA III runs on the screen. Switching back to San Andreas leaves the inner game active on the TV.
A second demo nests the games even further
A few hours after the initial gameplay clip, DryxioGTA posted another video showing a more recursive version of the idea: Vice City running inside GTA III, which is itself running inside San Andreas.
In that clip, the session begins in San Andreas. The player walks to a large screen and starts GTA III. Inside that GTA III instance, the player drives to another specific screen and launches Vice City. The result, as shown in the video, is a playable chain: San Andreas hosts GTA III, and GTA III hosts Vice City, with the games continuing to run at the same time.
The demonstration was run on a Windows virtual machine on macOS, according to the video description covered by Tom’s Hardware. The available footage does not establish whether the mod has been released publicly, how stable it is outside the demo setup, or what hardware requirements it has.
San Andreas has had an unusually long afterlife on PC since its 2005 release, with modders building everything from visual upgrades to strange engine experiments. The renewed attention around older GTA games also lands while players wait for Grand Theft Auto 6, which is scheduled for console release on November 19 after multiple delays, according to Tom’s Hardware.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
