With the help of the Anti-Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), modifiers can once again access certain reverse-engineered GTA 3 and Vice City codes.
Earlier this year, a group of creators successfully reverse-engineered Grand Theft Auto 3 with GTA Vice City The code allows modifiers to update and adjust classic games in an unprecedented way.
The code for this project is called re3 and is published in its entirety on GitHub. Of course, it is foreseeable that Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, moved in to delete re3 in February, while GitHub followed the order and deleted the main repository and more than 200 other forks.
Due to the way the DMCA works, anyone can claim to own the copyright of any material hosted on the company’s servers and delete its content. The original creator of the project suspected that this was not actually the “second challenge” behind it, but the anger that further angered them by filing a counterclaim may have been too high.
Until Theo, the developer behind one of the code branches, decided to do so. Theo told Torrent Freak that he did not believe that Take-Two could claim ownership of the code because the code had been modified and he managed to bring the fork back online.
“It seems that the code in the re3 repository is reverse engineered, not directly decompiled. I believe that if this is the case, Take-Two’s claim is completely incorrect, because the code may be functionally identical. But it’s not exactly the same, so they don’t claim any rights to the code,” he said.
However, as Torrent Freak pointed out, this only means that the fork will be available until the copyright owner takes legal action. In other words, if “Take-Two” decides to take such measures further, it will go offline again and may trigger a legal battle.
This project has greatly helped people bring modern features and optimizations to classic games, and even led to the development of GTA 3 self-made switch ports.
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