[The source code for "Grand Theft Auto III" and "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" was reverse engineered. The project was years in the making, and its main purpose seems to have been to improve the experience on modern machines (widescreen support, etc.) and as a sort of collaborative tool to make it easier for modders to tweak the games (Eurogamer has an interesting background (Eurogamer has an interesting article on the background).

They demonstrate quality-of-life improvements for both titles (the Steam port of GTAIII is not very good) and the functionality of things like debug menus. The use of PC assets and reverse-engineered source code from existing games has given them the respective names Re3 (Reverse Engineered 3) and reVC (Reverse Engineered Vice City).

After its release on February 17, the project received a great deal of attention and big fists shattered by Take-Two's lawyers (Take-Two is the parent company of Rockstar). The work and various forks were removed from Github and a DMCA notice received from Take-Two was posted.

"The content of the links below consists of copyrighted material owned by Take-Two. Any use of our copyrighted content in these links is unauthorized and should be removed immediately."

Take-Two issued a notice for the links on the main mod project page and the hundreds of individual user pages that hosted it." This work is not licensed in any form. The best and only solution is to remove the aforementioned page altogether."

The note from Github makes it clear that they are acting against any appearance of the project on the site, not just against the examples cited by Rockstar." When this DMCA takedown notice was received, the parent repository was actively forked and the submitter had identified all known forks at the time the takedown notice was submitted, so GitHub processed the takedown notice for the entire forking network."

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This may not come as a surprise. While most fan-made projects fly under the radar for a variety of reasons, Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest brands in the world, and the game in question is still available on multiple platforms. As soon as this was brought to their attention, Take-Two's actions were inevitable.

Of course, the project will live on in many archives, no matter how much whack-a-mole whacking Take-Two's lawyers endure. But the kind of collaboration that the creators of Re3 and ReVC had hoped for may now be a pipe dream. There are no winners. But if anything will come of it, perhaps Rockstar will wake up to the fact that people want optimized versions of older works.