Flip on a television in GTA San Andreas and static or a looping cutscene is about all you’d anticipate — certainly not an entire second game playing live on the screen. Yet that’s precisely what one modder managed to do, and the reality is even odder than it appears.
Sharing the entire creation on YouTube, a modder known as DryxioGTA has delivered one of the strangest San Andreas experiments seen in some time. The feat: both GTA 3 and Vice City running in full inside a working television that a mod embeds into the game.
No, it’s not a pre-rendered video
Here’s where things get interesting. That TV isn’t showing a recorded clip. It’s a fully functional version of GTA 3 and Vice City, rendered directly onto the San Andreas television by the GPU.
With a single button, DryxioGTA can hop from CJ into the protagonists of GTA 3 and Vice City, taking control of the other game shown on the screen.
And here’s the detail that makes engineers look twice: as you bounce between the games, the San Andreas world never stops running. Nothing freezes. The city beyond the TV keeps living and breathing.
One engine running another, in the same room
In the words of Tweaktown, this stands as a genuinely impressive example of one game engine rendering another one live within the same space — two Rockstar worlds layered on top of each other, both active simultaneously.
If you’d like to watch it running on your own hardware, the mod is available to download.
Somewhere in San Andreas, CJ is watching Tommy Vercetti pace around a TV set — and he can flip the channel to become him.