The endless creativity on show from the hacking and modding community never fails to impress. This time, we’ve got GTA Vice City being played on a modded TP-Link wireless router… Just the way that Rockstar intended.
As one of the best PC games ever made, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City saw its popularity surge recently as it was rumored to be the setting for GTA 6, alas, this turned out to not be the case. Still, the remastered collection has seen Vice City hold up surprisingly well, but playing it on a wireless router? We’re not even sure where to start with this.
The mod was posted to KittenLabs and it’s here that we can learn a lot more about how the project works. Created by Manawyrn and tSYS, a TP-Link TL-WDRR4900 v1 has been used thanks to its PowerPC CPU, which offers more performance than a wireless router from 2013 requires.
It was then hooked up to an external AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU via PCIe, and runs Debian Linux to play Vice City. We fully recommend checking out the KittenLabs entry to get a full breakdown of the project, the challenges they faced throughout, and how the final product came to be.
The game runs fine, no better than any of its various ports, but that really isn’t the point of this project and it’s commendable nonetheless. While we won’t use the explicit language that one commenter chose, we agree with the sentiment that we need some backstory on how an idea like this even comes about.
Regardless of its origins, we love the ingenuity of this project and would love to see more mods and hacks just like it. Maybe one day we’ll reach a point in technology where we’ll just be seeing what obscure tech can run Crysis.
If you’re after a more traditional system to play your games on, check out our guide on how to build a gaming PC in 2024, it’s much easier than modding a wireless router, we promise.