"Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" is now playable via internet browser

Decompilations have opened up all kinds of possibilities and technical wonders when it comes to porting games to other devices that they weren't officially designed for, and one of the most impressive and notorious examples of this are the ports to the SEGA Dreamcast of both Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which took some major reworks and technical prowess to achieve them, and much more so to get them running at playable framerates.

But there are times when porting a game goes beyond video game consoles, and sometimes it gets ported to the most interesting of places, with the latest being browser port of Vice City, meaning the game runs entirely through the internet browser, all thanks to the reVC decompilation.

Gaming website DOS Zone has achieved such an endeavour, with their efforts being worked on making the entirety of Vice City playable through an internet browser. DOS Zone is a website ran by gaming enthusiasts in which they "adapt historical gaming heritage" by porting titles to browser and making them accessible to everyone.

While the guys over at DOS Zone have indeed ported over the entirety of Vice City, playing the game through the browser does come with some caveats, as DOS Zone does try to work alongside copyright law:

DOS Zone said:

The game is given as a limited demo. You can travel and enjoy the gameplay as much as you want but upon going to the 1st story checkpoint (Hotel Ocean View), you're required to upload an original game file to continue. For example gtavc.exe The fact of uploading the original files of the game is checked by checksums.

By this, you are proving that you have bought the game. This version of the game is provided solely for educational and research purposes and demonstrates the technical capabilities of running complex game engines in modern web. The port is created using open source code available on the internet (Github repos, projects re3 / reVC), in accordance with the licenses.

As mentioned above, players can play a demo of the game running through the browser, and those that do wish to continue playing through DOS Zone the full game, can do so by providing the original files for Vice City, in this case, "gtavc.exe", and the website will perform a checksum run-through to verify that the provided file is correct, and then let the player continue playing with the full game unlocked.

DOS Zone also provides multiple videogames aside from Vice City, so for those interested in checking out what other videogames are there to play through, be sure to visit DOS Zone's website.

"Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" on DOS Zone
DOS Zone Website

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