Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is now playable everywhere through a browser port
The wait for Grand Theft Auto VI has been torturous, to say the least—but fans eager to return to Vice City may also be interested in playing the original Grand Theft Auto: Vice City rather than the recent remasters, and some went as far as to port it to HTML5-supported web browsers. A demo of the HTML5 build is available to play on DOS Zone, but full access to the game is locked behind the player both checking a box confirming they own the original game and uploading a file to prove it, similar to the open-sourced reVC project demanding you already own a legitimate copy before attempting to build it.
For players who don't own the full game, that is of course a major limitation to keep in mind. The story is completely unplayable without the original game's files, since the first story checkpoint at Hotel Ocean View will immediately trigger the upload check. The upload must also pass a checksum validation check, meaning obviously cracked versions of the game will not suffice.
This HTML5 port of Vice City is based on the open sourced version of the game (from which the unofficial Switch port was also derived) and packed with modern features, including support for all resolutions, gamepad controls, touch controls, and even cloud saves if you have the appropriate js-dos key. It's a truly impressive porting job, and the developers claim that it's a demo "provided for educational and research purposes only, to showcase the technical capabilities of running complex game engines in a modern web environment".
In my own testing, the HTML version of Vice City does indeed live up to that hype, besides the fact I couldn't get my controller working on desktop. Still, though, it reminds me of the fervor around Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City being ported to Android devices back in December 2011 and December 2012, respectively. It even gives me some distant pangs for Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, the first fully-3D portable Grand Theft Auto game, released for PlayStation Portable back in October 2005.
But unlike those official ports to (at the time) low-end hardware, this one is quite a bit different. Not only is it thoroughly targeted at modern platforms and widely runnable on virtually any recent phone or desktop web browser, it's also a fan work standing on what might be dubious grounds, legally-speaking. A dedicated "Copyright Compliance" section on the page claims that the title is built only from publicly available open-source code, that it is operated in accordance with applicable copyright laws, and "respects the intellectual property rights of all rights holders", but only time will tell if Rockstar Games will actually allow it.
Who is behind the project?
Running both js-dos and dos.zone is, if the Team section of the latter is any indication, a handful of guys mostly based in ex-USSR states: Alexander Guryanov (Александр Гурьянов), Nikita Aksyonov (Никита Аксёнов), Evgeny Okhmanyuk (Евгений Охманюк), Sergey Vasilyev (Сергей Васильев), Aleksey Timofeev (Алексей Тимофеев), Lev Potoskuev (Лев Потоскуев), Dmitry Zubov (Дмитрий Зубов).
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