GTA on Nintendo: fan ports bring GTA III to Wii, Vice City to GameCube
In two months, fans brought GTA III to the Wii, Vice City to the GameCube and GTA V to the Switch. How they did it, what you need and why only one has been shut down.
Nintendo's home consoles never got a 3D-era GTA: not the GameCube, not the Wii, and GTA V has never come to the Switch either. Between August and October 2026, fans filled those gaps with three unofficial ports: GTA III on Wii, Vice City on GameCube and GTA V on Switch. All three run natively, with no emulation. Only one has already been hit by Take-Two's lawyers, though, and that's no accident.
The three ports at a glance
- GTA III on Wii: by elmasas, built on re3 (reverse engineering). First shown in September 2026. You supply the files from your own PC copy. Playable on Wii and in Dolphin.
- Vice City on GameCube: the gamecube-reVC project (origami-ltd), built on reVC (reverse engineering). Code published in August 2026. You supply the files from your own PC copy. Boots from a GameCube ISO; still a work in progress.
- GTA V on Switch: by M0jso (Paralympics Productions), built on source code leaked in 2023. First shown in July 2026. The game files are bundled with the port. Shut down on October 3, 2026.
GTA III on Wii: playable in under a week
elmasas, who would go on to bring Liberty City Stories to PC, pushed the first re3-wii code on September 3, 2026. The port started from GaryOderNichts' Wii U version of GTA III and was adapted to the original Wii's processor, graphics and controllers. Within about two days there were two releases, with controller fixes, lower CPU load and USB loading.
It runs from the Homebrew Channel on real Wii hardware and in the Dolphin emulator. You can play with a Wiimote and Nunchuk, a Classic Controller or a GameCube pad, and you'll need the files from your own PC copy of GTA III.
Vice City on GameCube: a whole game on a mini-DVD
The gamecube-reVC project published its code in August 2026. It's built on reVC and, according to its own credits, borrows from the GTA III Dreamcast port. Technically it's probably the most impressive of the three, squeezing all of Vice City into the limits of a 2001 console.
According to the project page, here's where it stands:
- It boots from a GameCube ISO through the movies, menus and intro into free roam, with 30-minute-plus sessions running crash-free.
- It holds 30 fps most of the time, dropping to around 20 in rain, crashes or police chases.
- To fit in memory (24 MB of main RAM and 16 MB of audio RAM), motion blur is off, and occasionally a car fails to spawn or a building briefly drops to its low-detail model.
- The entire game, converted to the console's formats, fits in a 1.46 GB image, small enough for a GameCube mini-DVD.
- Missions beyond the opening, memory card saves and long sessions haven't been tested yet.
Like every reVC-based project, it ships nothing from Rockstar: the image is built from your own PC copy of Vice City.
GTA V on Switch: the one that didn't make it
The third port is a different beast. M0jso, leading the Paralympics Productions group, had been showing GTA V running natively on Switch since July, built from the source code leaked in 2023. To squeeze it into the console's 4 GB of memory, most DLC was stripped, assets were compressed and draw distance was cut, and it still weighed in at 49 GB. On a modded, heavily overclocked console, it was running full missions by September, even on a Switch Lite, at around 30 fps in many areas.
It didn't last. On September 28, 2026, M0jso announced that Take-Two had sent a cease-and-desist and that the group would close on October 3. That cancels a planned performance update for the Switch port and an Android version in development, and the source code won't be released. M0jso conceded that Take-Two had solid grounds and that a court fight would likely be lost: "I'm sorry I didn't meet your expectations or give you what you were hoping for."
Why one fell and the others haven't (yet)
It comes down to where the code came from. GTA V on Switch was built on leaked Rockstar code: that isn't reverse engineering, it's stolen material. The Wii and GameCube ports use re3 and reVC, code rewritten by the community, and require your own files from a purchased copy. That's no guarantee, but it's a far more defensible position.
Even so, none of the three complies with Rockstar's new mod guidelines, published in September, which explicitly ban adapting its games to consoles it hasn't released them on. That rule has already been used to close the Switch port, and it leaves everyone else on thin ice.
Our take
It's hard not to admire what these developers have pulled off, especially on the Wii and GameCube, working with twenty-year-old hardware and limits few people know how to handle today. But the cases deserve to be kept apart: a GTA V port built on leaked code was never going to last, and its shutdown was only a matter of time. The classic trilogy ports are another story, closer to preservation than piracy. With GTA 6 around the corner, Take-Two now has a written rule it can use against all of them; the question is whether it wants to.
