Modder Runs GTA Vice City Inside GTA 3 Inside GTA San Andreas

A modder called Dryxio has pulled off a layered GTA inception trick — running GTA III on an in-game TV inside GTA San Andreas, then stacking Vice City on top by playing it on a billboard inside GTA III, itself still running inside San Andreas.

Dryxio first posted a video earlier this week showing GTA III running as a real-time texture on a television set inside San Andreas. It looks like a gag for the first few seconds, but the mod supports full mission progression and save files — the entire game, start to finish, rendered live inside another game. Within 48 hours, Dryxio escalated: CJ now stands in front of a cul-de-sac-spanning flatscreen playing Vice City inside GTA III, which is itself still running inside San Andreas. Three games, nested, all playable simultaneously.

The trilogy — GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas — defined open-world design in the early 2000s and pushed console hardware to its limits. Rockstar famously squeezed all three onto a PSP disc for GTA Liberty City Stories and its follow-ups, which felt like a technical miracle at the time. These three games collectively set the expectations for sandbox scale and density that the industry has been chasing ever since, which makes it quietly funny that they can now all run on a fictional TV that normally plays My Five Uncles.

The timing is notable. GTA VI is still on track for a November release, and its gravitational pull is already reshaping the release calendar around it — other studios are shuffling launch dates to avoid the collision. While the industry braces for that, Dryxio is out here collapsing two decades of Rockstar history into a single recursive screenshot.