GTA: Vice City finally comes to GameCube in unofficial native port

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City never came to Nintendo GameCube. More than two decades later, that gap has been filled in an unexpected way. Brazilian developer Ebellumat has created an unofficial native GameCube port of Rockstar North’s 2002 open-world game, getting Vice City running directly on Nintendo’s original hardware rather than through emulation. The project is still a work in progress, with a release likely next week, but the current build already has driving, combat, wanted levels, the radar and city streaming working on the console. That’s what makes it interesting. This isn’t simply the PC version being displayed through another device. Vice City has been adapted to run natively on the GameCube itself.

Vice City running directly on GameCube

The port is based on reVC, a reverse-engineered recreation of Vice City’s original game code. That gives developers a workable codebase that can be adapted for hardware Rockstar never officially supported.

The GameCube version is targeting a 640 x 480 resolution and a 60fps frame-rate cap. PC-quality textures are also part of the plan, along with visual effects, stereo audio running at 32kHz and support for several widescreen aspect ratios. Performance has already gone beyond the target in some tests.

With the frame limiter disabled, builds have reportedly reached around 90fps in certain situations. That doesn’t mean the finished game would constantly run at that speed, of course. Frame rates in an open-world game can change heavily depending on traffic, effects, geometry and what’s happening around the player. Still, it gives a useful indication of how much headroom the GameCube can have when the code is adapted specifically for its hardware.

The GTA game Nintendo missed

Vice City originally launched on PlayStation 2 in October 2002, with Windows and Xbox versions following later. It arrived just a year after Grand Theft Auto III and pushed Rockstar’s new 3D formula much further. The basic structure will be familiar to anyone who’s played a modern GTA game. You explore a large city, take missions from different characters, steal cars, buy property and gradually unlock more of the map.

Players control Tommy Vercetti, who arrives in Vice City after being released from prison. A drug deal quickly goes wrong, leaving Tommy to track down the people responsible while building his own criminal operation across the city.

Vice City also pushed harder into atmosphere and period styling than GTA III. The fictional Florida-inspired setting, 1980s cars, clothing, architecture and radio stations gave the game a very different feel from Liberty City. But Nintendo players didn’t get it. The GameCube never received GTA III, Vice City or San Andreas, despite competing directly with PlayStation 2 and Xbox during the same generation.

The GameCube wasn’t simply too weak

It’s easy to look back and assume Vice City skipped GameCube because Nintendo’s console couldn’t handle it. The hardware tells a more complicated story. The GameCube used a 485MHz IBM PowerPC-based Gekko processor and had 24MB of main system memory, plus another 16MB of auxiliary memory. For its time, it was a capable machine, and plenty of technically demanding games appeared on the system.

Storage was a bigger difference. Nintendo used small 8cm optical discs with a capacity of roughly 1.5GB. PlayStation 2 and Xbox games could use full-sized DVD media with considerably more storage available.

That would’ve mattered for something like Vice City. The game contains a large amount of spoken dialogue, music, textures and other data. A commercial GameCube edition may have required heavier compression, reduced audio quality, altered assets or multiple discs. None of that proves why Rockstar didn’t release it. It simply shows that the decision wasn’t as simple as the GameCube being unable to run the game.

Modern tools change the picture

This new port doesn’t tell us exactly what Rockstar could’ve shipped in 2002. Developers now have reverse-engineered source code, modern compilers, better debugging tools and more than 20 years of knowledge about the GameCube’s hardware. That’s a very different development environment from the one studios worked with during the console’s commercial life.

Even so, the results are interesting. Vice City isn’t just booting. It’s running as a native GameCube program with ambitious performance and image-quality targets. That gives us a much clearer look at what the console can do when someone writes specifically for it.

Don’t expect an official GameCube release

This is still an unofficial project. Rockstar Games isn’t releasing a new GameCube version of Vice City, and Nintendo isn’t suddenly adding the game to its old console catalogue. The project exists because developers have adapted reverse-engineered code for hardware that the original game never supported.

That distinction matters, but it doesn’t make the technical result any less notable. For years, Vice City on GameCube was simply something that never happened. Now it runs on the real machine. 24 years after the original release, we finally have a pretty good idea of what GTA: Vice City on Nintendo GameCube can actually look like.

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