GTA modder brings Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas together at last - with portals

Ever since the early days of Grand Theft Auto, there's always been the beautiful dream of bringing all of its worlds together into one seamless experience. It's something Rockstar has flirted with on occasion - The Saint Mark's Bistro mission in GTA: San Andreas sends you back to a tiny segment of GTA 3's Liberty City for a one-off hit - but for the most part, each game has stuck to its own region. All signs point to GTA 6 following suit and keeping the action to Vice City and the surrounding state of Leonida. One intrepid modder, however, has just brought the series' breakout trilogy together in unique fashion, with the help of portals.

The practicality of combining several different open-world games into one creates a few potential problems. That GTA: San Andreas mission, for example, requires you to head to the airport and grab a jet, then fly it out to the edge of the map. Once you get far enough, you're magically dropped in Liberty City, cutting out the rest of the lengthy trip from the West Coast locale across to Grand Theft Auto's take on New York City. As if that journey wasn't far enough, toss Leonida (based on Florida) into the equation, and you've created a triangle that encompasses the vast majority of the United States - not something you can travel in an instant.

Unless… we introduce portals. What if you could simply step through a magical doorway and transport yourself between the various virtual worlds in the blink of an eye? GTA modder 'Dryxio' has done exactly that with their latest creation, which you can see in action below. Three large, square windows in the heart of Grove Street give us real-time glimpses across the complete PS2-era trilogy. The player is able to shoot directly into them, or can step through any of the windows in order to transport themselves fully between games.

Dryxio explains that the effect is achieved by running all three games (GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas) live within the same process. "Each portal is a live GPU texture, the other game is actually running behind it, it's not a video or captured window." Each region runs all of its usual physics, traffic, and NPC AI in real time, and each is being saved independently. Bullets pass through these portals into the other realms, causing appropriate reactions from characters (and law enforcement) as they do so.

When stepping through, a near-instant transition swaps into the other area; in this instance, it also hands control over to the game in question, meaning you'll change character to the relevant protagonist (Tommy Vercetti if you're entering Vice City, for example). There's then a return portal to go back to the hub. In addition to this, Dryxio shows off using a 'portal gun' to move the windows around the world, allowing them to be set up anywhere you like.

Dryxio has toyed around with such features before, previously making Vice City playable within San Andreas on a console in CJ's house, but this latest experiment is a significant step up. It might not make up for the lack of GTA 6 on PC in 2026, but it's certainly another reminder of the ridiculous and impressive feats that can be achieved through modding. Getting the teleportation feature to work is one thing; actively being able to shoot from one world into another and have it take effect in real time is even more outstanding. I can't even imagine what the community might think of next.