Achievement images for the upcoming (but still officially unannounced) remasters of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas have spilled online, in the latest leak pointing to the buffed up trilogy's imminent reveal.

The new achievement art, posted to Twitter by GTANet, come from an update to Rockstar's own game launcher made available this week. Game icons for the three remasters were also found.

Kotaku reported last month that the three remasters were being developed by Rockstar Dundee (formerly Ruffian Games) and worked on in Unreal Engine. They will resemble a "heavily-modded version of a classic GTA title" - alongside an updated UI, but with gameplay which sticks "true to the PS2-era GTA games as much as possible".

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A listing for Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition has been spotted on South Korea's game rating board's site.

According to the details of the listing, the application for an official rating was made by Take-Two Interactive for an action game originating from the United States.

The game has been rated 18 or unavailable for youth in the country.

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The makers of another long-running GTA San Andreas mod have pulled it offline themselves amid the ongoing crackdown by Take-Two.

The lead developer of GTA Underground, one of the largest, most ambitious mods for the 16-year-old Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, announced development had ceased and all downloads hauled offline after six years of work.

This was "due to the increasing hostility towards the modding community and imminent danger to our mental and financial well-being", chief developer dkluin wrote in a post on GTAForums.com.

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This week, Kotaku reported Rockstar is working on remastered versions of Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, using Unreal Engine to create a mix of "new and old graphics".

The news helps explain Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive's recent GTA mod takedown spree - particular mods that recreated the games in question.

But it also helps explain why Rockstar nuked a San Andreas fan remake trailer in July 2020, too.

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Rockstar is reportedly putting the finishing touches to remasters of its open-world PlayStation 2-era classics Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas for release later this year.

Rumours of possible remasters for the games first bubbled up over the summer as fans began wondering why Take-Two's lawyers had suddenly started issuing a raft of takedown notices for classic GTA mods. Speculation grew further following Take-Two's recent confirmation it had three unannounced "new iterations of previously released titles" in the works.

Now, however, an investigation by Kotaku has revealed more tangible details, with its sources - who, the website says, have a proven track record providing accurate information on GTA Online and Red Dead Online - claiming Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas are indeed getting the remaster treatment.

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The makers of a 14-year-old Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas mod have pulled it offline themselves over a fear of a takedown from Take-Two.

GTA United is a mod based on San Andreas for PC. It unites the maps of Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto Vice City in one game area within San Andreas, effectively replacing San Andreas' map.

Work on the free, non-commercial mod began in 2006. The first beta of what was then known as "Vice City 2 San Andreas" came out in early 2007. The beta for "Liberty City 2 San Andreas" came out soon after. Then, in late 2007, the beta for a combined effort called GTA United was released. Five years later, in December 2012, GTA United 1.2 was released. It remained available ever since - until now.

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Late last week, sharp-eyed internet surveyors noticed that Grand Theft Auto 4 had suddenly, without warning, been delisted from Steam. With no official explanation, fans were left to speculate on the reason for the move, but now Rockstar has spoken, pointing the blame finger squarely in the direction of Microsoft's now-defunct Games for Windows Live.

In a statement provided to USgamer, Rockstar explained it was forced to suspend sales of GTA4 on Steam simply because it's now "no longer possible to generate the additional keys needed to continue selling the current version of the game", given that Microsoft has officially ended support for the Games for Windows Live platform baked into the title.

Although this means Grand Theft Auto 4 is unavailable for purchase on Steam at present (standalone expansion Episodes from Liberty City is unaffected), Rockstar says it's "looking at other options for distributing GTA4 for PC".

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Joining the likes of Blizzard and Ubisoft, Rockstar has created its own games launcher allowing players to access its PC games from one place, regardless of what digital store you bought them from.

The Rockstar Game Launcher is available to download right now, and also lets fans buy games directly from the developer via its shop.

For a limited time, as an incentive to install the launcher, you can claim a free copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when you download it, which will be permanently added to your Social Club account's library.

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Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency channel has returned to the world of video games for the first time in a couple of years with the release of Queer Tropes, a new three-part miniseries.

This trio of episodes sees host Carolyn Petit examine the ways video games have portrayed queer and trans characters over the years.

As you might expect, there are plenty of awful examples from the past which portray LGBTQ characters in a negative light because of their sexuality or identity - and use queer stereotypes as a shorthand for a character which the player is designed to feel repulsed by, feared, or laughed at.

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There is a familiar pattern to media coverage whenever Rockstar publishes a game. There is talk about how the developer has used its newest game to iterate upon and redefine the open world genre. There are almost always articles on how various Hollywood films influenced Rockstar's development process. And there are at least one or two polemics that attack the developer for transgressing established norms about what can and cannot be done in video games. This last type of essay inevitably concludes that video games are bad, and lead to an increase in interpersonal violence as well as the downfall of civilisation.

What's interesting about this pattern of coverage is how often it overlooks Rockstar's own development and publishing habits, most notably the company's steady development and publication of games set in the past. Indeed, if we were to remove the typical narrative surrounding Rockstar games related to game mechanics, cinema and satire, we might instead see Rockstar as a publisher of historical games on par with Firaxis (Civilization), Paradox (Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis), or Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed). It's now commonplace to see articles, podcasts and videos criticising those publishers' appropriation of the past, but Rockstar remains remarkably unscathed even though the company has developed and published a series of games that, taken together, chronicle modern American history. These games include Red Dead Redemption 2 (set in 1899), Red Dead Redemption (1911), L.A. Noire (1947), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (1986) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (1992).

Whenever one attempts to analyse the history in historical fiction they'll always run into the hand-waving argument that "it's fiction, not history". This defense has been used by Red Dead Redemption 2 lead writer Dan Houser, who stated recently: "[the game] may be a work of historical fiction, but it's not a work of history.". Yet we know popular historical fiction often plays an outsized influence on the way the public remembers historical figures or important time periods. Consider, for instance, the impact of Shakespeare's plays on the reputations of Cleopatra and Richard III. Or the importance of Saving Private Ryan to public commemorations of D-Day. To take an example from my own life, I've probably had more conversations with students on the influence of Blackadder Goes Forth on our memory of the First World War than I've had on the actual history of the First World War (although that probably says something more about the quality of my teaching than anything else). The truth is better than fiction, but it's often the fiction we remember the best.

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