Turn on a television inside GTA San Andreas and you’d expect static, maybe a looping cutscene. Not a second game running live on the screen. But that’s what one modder pulled off, and it’s stranger than it sounds.
A modder who goes by DryxioGTA posted the whole thing to YouTube, and it’s one of the weirdest San Andreas projects to surface in a while. The trick: running all of GTA 3 and Vice City inside a working television built into the game through a mod.
No, it’s not a pre-rendered video
This is where it gets good. The TV isn’t playing a clip. It’s a functional copy of GTA 3 and Vice City, rendered straight to the San Andreas television through the GPU.
DryxioGTA can swap from CJ over to the protagonists of GTA 3 and Vice City with a single button press. You control the other game on the screen.
And the part that makes engineers do a double take: while you jump between games, the San Andreas world keeps ticking. Nothing pauses. The city outside the TV goes on breathing.
One engine running another, in the same room
As Tweaktown put it, this is a genuinely impressive case of one game engine rendering another live inside the same space. Two Rockstar worlds stacked on top of each other, both awake at once.
You can grab the mod for yourself if you want to see it run on your own machine.
Somewhere in San Andreas, CJ is watching Tommy Vercetti walk around a TV set. And he can change the channel to be him.
