Take-Two took them down, then couldn't be bothered to carry on the fight.
Cast your minds back to February—a fan project which released reverse-engineered source code for both Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City popped up on GitHub. Unsurprisingly, Take-Two Interactive swooped in with a takedown notice a week later, and the project vanished. Now, four months later, both games appear to be back in action.
As reported by Eurogamer, the modders recently filed a counterclaim against Take-Two's original takedown notice for the projects, dubbed Re3 and ReVC. Turns out, Rockstar's parent company has yet to respond, meaning GitHub has put the projects back online.
Part of the code has already been back online for just over a month now. In May, New Zealand coder Theo filed a DMCA takedown counterclaim for his contributions to the project. It was restored, though it still left over 200 forks of the code offline.
Though the official versions of GTA 3 and Vice City have been available on PC for some time, GTA 3 especially is a bit of a rubbish port. The fan projects did a ton of tidying up and quality-of-life improvements. Bugs were squashed, a debug camera was added, and loading screens between islands were removed. The reverse-engineered code also makes for more freedom with mods, which is always a nice thing.
While it's all good news so far, this doesn't mean Re3 and ReVC are in the clear—it's just how DMCA rules work. Any challenged content has to be restored within 10 to 14 days unless copyright holders take action. Take-Two is yet to do anything, so everything is back up… for now, at least.
