A fan has taken it upon himself to bring back the original Grand Theft Auto.
Originally released in 1997 for MS-DOS and Windows, the first Grand Theft Auto had the idea for an open world game that Rockstar North already launched with Body Harvest.
However, unlike that Nintendo 64 title, Grand Theft Auto was limited to a top-down perspective. Many fans who got into the game on the PlayStation 2 can’t quite get into the franchise’s beginnings, but there are still hardcore Rockstar fans who were there from the start.
PCGamer interviewed LukeStorm, the dev behind a fan project called GTA Ready2Play. LukeStorm’s work includes the London missions, added languages, widescreen, DirectDraw, and other modern accountrements.
LukeStorm talked about how satisfying it was to get feedback and improve the project, and the fans managed to even get it working on the Steam Deck.
Unfortunately, Rockstar themselves pulled their version of the game from Steam and their own store. The last time Grand Theft Auto was officially released was as part of 2018’s PlayStation Classic.
In our humble opinion, Rockstar should entrust GTA’s and GTA 2’s preservation to GOG, but until then we have this.