The GTA Source Code That Got Taken Down Twice

In early 2021, a group of fans finished reverse-engineering the source code for Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, publishing the results on GitHub as two linked projects, re3 and reVC. Reverse-engineered source code is not the original source code, but it is close enough to let modders rebuild the games for new platforms, fix long-standing bugs, and add features Rockstar never shipped. For a preservation-minded fan, that is close to the best outcome short of an official source release.

It lasted about a week. Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar’s parent company, filed a DMCA takedown notice arguing the reverse-engineered code contained material it owned, and GitHub pulled both repositories along with every fork. The project’s lead filed a formal counter-notice, the legal mechanism that lets someone argue a takedown was mistaken and forces the rightsholder to either sue within roughly two weeks or allow reinstatement. Take-Two did not respond within that window. Four months after the original takedown, GitHub restored re3 and reVC.

That reinstatement was not the end of it. In September 2021, Take-Two sued the people behind the counter-notice directly, fourteen programmers across several countries, arguing the counter-notice itself had been filed in bad faith. The modders’ defense rested on fair use. The case dragged through 2021 into 2022 before both sides filed notice, on February 6, 2022, that they had settled in principle; the exact terms were not made public, and the broader legal question, whether fan reverse-engineering of a game’s engine for interoperability counts as fair use, was settled by negotiation rather than by a court ruling that other cases could cite.

The practical lesson for anyone doing this kind of preservation work is less about the law than about leverage. A fan project’s survival depended entirely on whether the original rightsholder chose to escalate, twice, and on volunteers having access to a lawyer willing to fight a multinational publisher. Most reverse-engineering efforts for less commercially sensitive, less actively-franchised games never get tested this way, for better or worse.