Take-Two DMCA takes down reverse-engineered GTA source code

• Shots from the reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto III showing off the graphical improvements over the 2002 original.

A Github project that generated reverse-engineered code for Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City was taken down over the weekend as the result of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request from publisher Take-Two.

The project—comprising hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code generated over years of painstaking analysis—did not distribute any of the copyrighted image or music files needed to recompile the game. Those files needed to be sourced from an authentic copy of the PC version of the games, originally released in 2002 and 2003.

This didn’t prevent Take-Two from claiming that “the content in the links below consists of copyrighted materials owned by Take Two,” as the DMCA notice reads, in part. “The use of our copyrighted content in these links are unauthorized and it should be removed immediately.”