GTA San Andreas mod links GTA III and Vice City with live portals
A modder runs GTA III and Vice City inside San Andreas at the same time and connects all three with real-time portals: step through and swap CJ for Tommy or Claude.
It looks like an edit. It isn't. On July 21, 2026, modder Dryxio (DryxioGTA on YouTube) posted footage of GTA San Andreas, GTA III and GTA Vice City all running at once in a single program, linked by real-time portals. CJ walks through one and comes out in Vice City as Tommy Vercetti; he heads back, takes another and he's Claude in Liberty City. No loading screens anywhere.
How it got here
This has been building for months, with each video upping the ante:
- February 2026: TVs inside San Andreas boot full, independent copies of GTA III and Vice City, each with its own save files.
- July 17, 2026: CJ switches on a TV in his front yard and GTA III is running on it live; inside that copy of GTA III, a billboard-sized screen is running Vice City.
- July 21, 2026: portals you can place anywhere across all three maps, walk through and even shoot through.
What's actually going on under the hood
According to Dryxio, all three games run inside one process and share a single Direct3D device. Each portal is a live GPU texture, so what you see on the other side is the other game genuinely running, not a capture. Stepping through triggers an instant engine swap, while the other two keep running in the background.
Every world keeps its own AI, traffic, physics, saves, missions and even settings, and since nothing has to load, you arrive exactly as you saw it a moment earlier.
The foundation is reverse engineering. Dryxio modified re3 and reVC, the community projects that rebuilt GTA III's and Vice City's code as readable C++, and hooked them into San Andreas with plugin-sdk. The last hurdle was graphics: RenderWare, the engine behind all three, can't render several scenes at once. librw, an open-source reimplementation of RenderWare, solved that and let all three games be compiled into a single program.
There's some irony here. Take-Two had re3 pulled from GitHub in 2021 and sued its authors, before dropping the case for good in 2023. Five years on, that same code is running inside a Rockstar game.
Can you play it?
Not yet. The mod isn't publicly available and there's no release date. If it ever comes out, it won't ship with GTA III or Vice City's files: you'll need all three original PC games, the same rule every re3-based project follows.
Our take
This is probably the most technically impressive mod the classic trilogy has ever had, and a very visual way of showing why reverse engineering matters. Once a game's code stops being a black box, it can be ported, fixed or, in this case, stitched together in ways nobody planned for. Whether it ever gets released is another matter, given how Take-Two handled projects like Vice City Nextgen Edition. Either way, we got inter-GTA portals before GTA 6.
