Take-Two Shuts Down re3 Project (GTA III and Vice City) for Copyright Infringement
The creators of the re3 project, who reverse engineered the source code of GTA III and Vice City, received a C&D letter from Take-Two and were forced to remove all files.
- The devs of the re3 project had to delete files from GitHub after they received a DMCA notice from Take-Two.
When we wrote a few days ago about a project reverse engineering GTA III and GTA: Vice City to get the source code, many indicated that either Rockstar or Take-Two will quickly crack down on the project. It happened just as thay predicted.
On Friday night, GitHub received a notice from Take-Two, in which the owner of the rights to the Grand Theft Auto franchise demands that all files related to the re3 project be removed from the website. We're talking about not only the official channel, but also all copies owned by people who decided to save them "just in case".
Eurogamer contacted the authors of re3, asking for a word of comment. User aap, project's lead, said at first that he wasn't 100% sure if the letter actually came from TT, or if someone decided to troll them and use GitHub's automated tools to delete their files. After a while, however, he added that he had expected such a turn of events, and despite the fact that copyrighted files were not shared in the project, he tried to keep everything secret as long as possible in order to finish working on the whole thing.
Aap also revealed that re3 became the most talked about when a port of GTA III and Vice City to Switch came out. However, no one from Take-Two or Rockstar Games took any interest in their work, so the whole team decided that both companies had no problem with what was released.
Of course, nothing is ever deleted from the Internet and the files will still be available for download, but those interested will have to dig after them a bit. In addition, we can currently forget about the previously announced improvements, the most interesting of which was the removal of the 30fps frame cap.
