GTA: Vice City, the legendary 2002 game, but on the RAGE engine? With nice modern graphics, animations, lighting, detailed models? Which fan hasn’t dreamed of this? Replace Liberty City from GTA IV with a tropical paradise island?
Today, on the January 25th 2025, that dream came true! The mod brings new Vice City experience to GTA IV. Yes, this mod is not based on GTA V as resent public version of RAGE (unlike GTA V, GTA IV and it’s RAGE version is researched enough to base this mod on it), but with an addition of ENB enhaсements it looks fantastic in the graphical aspect and not worse as GTA V.
Now we have a brand new, awesome updated version of GTA: Vice City with all missions, cutscenes and GTA IV‘s RAGE benefits. It was done by Revolution Team and called Vice City Nextgen Edition.
Enthusiasts vs Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.
This project is the exact realization of legendary Vice City remaster we didn’t get officially from Rockstar Games and their Take Two Interactive Software, Inc. governors. A group of Revolution Team fans teased screenshots from Vice City Nextgen Edition the whole 2024 year. We don’t know exactly were they contacted by T2 representatives, but we can’t share any doubts the concept of project itself is already the guaranteed reason to have massive attention from the unfamous corporation.
The general complaints from T2 against modders are all about creating unwanted ‘competition’ with their products and disrupting their marketing strategies. The ‘competition’ can be not only in the product concept and implementation, but also in media attention. They interpret this as their own lost profits. This is not the only aspect of the T2‘s approach (we’ve seen a whole wave of old mods being taken down without any visible logic), but still the most significant one.
The logic is following:
- The ‘purpose’ of Red Dead Redemption V project being taken down in 2017 was the RDR map being remastered officially in the upcoming T2‘s release of RDR2 in late 2018 and possible plans for official PC RDR release (happened in 2024).
- The ‘purpose’ of re3 reverse engineering project being taken down in middle 2021 were T2‘s plans for late 2021 release of GTA Trilogy: The Definitive Edition.
- The ‘purpose’ of Liberty City to GTA V conversion made by OpenIV Team being taken down in 2017 and Liberty City Preservation Project (shared the same idea of Liberty City to GTA V conversion) being taken down in January 2025 were possible T2‘s plans for an official GTA IV remaster.
Needless to say, the Vice City Nextgen Edition project is at once in the ‘competition’ with the T2‘s GTA Trilogy: The Definitive Edition (presenting a new result of Vice City remaster) and the upcoming T2‘s GTA VI (presenting Vice City location in HD Universe). It’s a very sensitive situation.
On January 23rd 2025, the Revolution Team videos on YouTube (including pre-release trailer) were taken down by T2. It was only two days before the announced released on January 25. The modding community stood still in expectation. Will there be a release? Will T2‘s corporate harassment stop the developers this time? The overall mood was disappointing and frustrating.
Two days later, the situation has changed.
On January 25th 2025, the developers published the release as a torrent file 🎉. It was incredible🥳. A fantastic case after all negative events of the past years 🎊. This is a huge victory for the modding community over the infamous T2 corporation.
It’s worth saying, it wasn’t an easy decision. The team obviously approached it from all sides of risk management. What we can say for sure now is that they feel confident for their personal data safety: sensitive info was not public and was not leaked. Their location is Russia (or ‘disguised as Russia’, who knows?) which is legally near-safe location among other former ex-USSR states. Most locations of former Soviet Union, India and China, are the best for enthusiastic development of such projects as Vice City Nextgen Edition.
There’s a bit symbolic moment in this whole story. The quote of AndrewMulti, the Revolution Team leader is significant:
Initially, the modification was planned to require the original game in order to show respect to the publisher. However, over the past two days, we have completely rebuilt the project, and it is now available as a standalone “installation-ready package”. Just download, install, and play. There are no issues with version compatibility since the mod is now fully autonomous. In light of the current uncertainties, we had to make this change to ensure the mod’s stable performance for the widest possible audience.
This is the biggest impudence T2 has seen yet. Not only their warnings were ignored, but were actually made a mockery of. We don’t support piracy (sharing the whole game is definitely a piracy, i.e. the case when presence of original legally purchased GTA IV is not necessary to run mod), neither does most of the modding fan community.
But there is still feeling of something fair in the emotions of the project leader, isn’t it? T2 just brought too much negative impact in recent years. Speaking of legal side, maybe Revolution Team are in the ‘gray area’ (objectively speaking, the situation can be analyzed from different angles, since legality is always territorial), but at least they have moral rights to act they way they act.
The outcome still remains uncertain
We don’t know how T2 will behave since now. Will they take down every single video related to Vice City Nextgen Edition project and try to reach every source that provides download links, or lose all interest in the project because they already failed all attempts to prevent it’s publication.
But we do know for sure only one thing. Since now modders are starting to have an advantage in the battle with huge greedy corporation continuously trying to assassinate them. Who knows, probably the glorious example of Revolution Team and Vice City Nextgen Edition project can inspire dozens and hundreds of talented mod developers to continue working on their creative projects.
It’s worth adding that fans who dreamed about HD Vice City and have played the Vice City Nextgen Edition mod are happy and absolutely excited!
