One of the most pleasant surprises of 2024 was seeing the ongoing development of the fan-made Dreamcast port of Grant Theft Auto III. Built using the KallistiOS software, this port is achieving what was previously thought impossible.
Developer SKMP has now released the game – known as DCA3 – so everyone can enjoy it. You'll need to have legally purchased the PC version in order to build your version of the Dreamcast port.
Originally released on PS2 in 2001 and later ported to Xbox and PC, GTA 3 has sold almost 15 million copies worldwide and is considered to be one of the most important sandbox video games of all time. It also arguably laid the foundations for the GTA franchise, which, up until this point, had been a top-down affair.
"DCA3 is developed upon the RE3 project, a free reverse engineering of GTA 3, with the goal of pushing the Dreamcast's capabilities to the limit,"
. "Our challenge is to take a game that was technically complex and innovative for its time, making it run flawlessly on the Dreamcast, a machine with considerably less resources than other platforms available at the time."
Speaking back in September, original GTA 3 developer Obbe Vermeij commented on how impressive the Dreamcast port was looking and mentioned that the first few months of its development were actually done on Sega's console. "The first months of development of gta3 (back in 99/00) were done on the Dreamcast. For commercial reasons, we switched to ps2. At the time, we did think it was technically possible to pull it off on the DC, and these guys are actually doing it."
Head over to dca3.net and follow the guide to build your CDi image of DCA3.