The new Grand Theft Auto 3 Dreamcast port is an astonishing achievement

The Dreamcast burned brightly from 1998 to 2001 but Sega’s financial situation famously ended its life early. As a result, many games – both announced and unannounced – were abruptly cancelled and as new games arrived on other platforms, many often wondered, would these titles have been possible on Dreamcast? Well, with an unofficial homebrew release of Grand Theft Auto 3 on the classic Sega machine, we finally have an answer for at least one of those questions.

GTA 3 itself really needs no introduction – it was a cultural event, after all, but before GTA 3 took the world by storm, the development team at DMA Design, creator of Lemmings, had released multiple Grand Theft Auto games across PlayStation, PC and, yes, the Dreamcast. That’s right – GTA2 received a port to Dreamcast during its short life. The result is certainly interesting but as a game designed for PlayStation first and foremost, it’s limited. It runs very poorly on Dreamcast, which feels unacceptable to me given its origins. Yet, if you can ignore that, many of the ideas that would come to define the series started here. GTA was popular but not popular in the way that the series would become after GTA 3. The Dreamcast version is also, unfortunately, of rather low quality given the platform it’s running on, which only serves to make GTA3’s port that much more impressive.

The new Dreamcast version is derived from the RE3 reverse engineering project – a from-the-ground-up, non-emulated version of the Rockstar Engine. When creating a playable image, you’ll need to use the PC version from which data is extracted and converted to the proper file formats. It is currently optimised for use with Optical Disc Emulators, which replace the Dreamcast’s optical drive, but it is possible to play from a burnt CD-R though there are caveats. Fundamentally, this is the complete version of GTA3. All missions, maps, cutscenes and audio made the cut albeit with some reduction in quality in spots, which we’ll get to.

Kicking off with the comparisons, GTA 3 has seen many releases over the years, but I wanted to stay contemporary and compare it with the original PlayStation 2 release. In capturing the game, I used original consoles but with the PixelFX Gem installed in each of them for pristine HDMI digital output.