The Trilogy Price, Release Date, Footage

After Kotaku was the first to tell you Rockstar were remastering the first three 3D Grand Theft Auto games, all manner of leaks and rumors have flown around, until the developer finally officially confirmed their existence two weeks ago. Today, they’ve announced a release date—November 11 for the digital version—and the official pricing, that’ll make your eyes water. And, at last, video footage comparing the originals to the remasters.

Rockstar’s official page for the games has just gone up, revealing that the trilogy of classic murder-fests—GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas—will be yours in 20 days if you get a digital version on PC, Switch, or PS5 (it’s somewhat ambiguous about Xboxes). For physical editions on all formats, it’ll be December 6 in Europe, December 7 in the United States. Any of those versions will cost you a blistering $60 on PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and the Xboxes.

Of course, you’re getting three absolutely enormous games here, so 60 bucks might not immediately seem so bad. It’s just that we’re talking games ranging from 17 to 20 years old. Which is to say, announcing the pre-orders with less than three weeks to go, and slapping on a premium price, is asking players to exercise a lot of faith.

However, we can at last see a short glimpse of how the three games will be looking, compared to the originals, in this just-released video:

The games’ site explains that the games have been remastered by Grove Street Games, the same Florida studio that ported the original versions of the games across to mobile. They’ve always done a good job with those, but of course no one’s hand a chance to play these yet, to get a feel for how they work, two decades later.

As to what’s being updated? Rockstar explains they will have, “brilliant new lighting and environmental upgrades, with high-resolution textures, increased draw distances, Grand Theft Auto V-style controls and targeting, and much more, bringing these beloved worlds to life with all new levels of detail.” Combined with the video above, it doesn’t immediately suggest the dream of the classic games in the GTA V engine.

The PC specs do offer some clues as to how grand the improvements might be, and they’re pretty low. The minimum requirements are an i5-2700/FX-6300, with 8GB RAM, and a GTX 760 2GB/Radeon R9 280. The recommended tech still won’t be stretching many a PC: i7-6600K/Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB RAM, and a GTX 970 4GB/Radeon RX 570—those are five-year-old graphics cards. However, they will be occupying 45GB of your hard drive—the original version of San Andreas, the largest of the games, was only 4.6GB on release.

Things definitely look a lot nicer, and they’ve leaned in to a much more cartoony vibe—a smart move if this is really more of a texture upgrade than a true remastering. Cartoons forgive a lot, where an attempt at more realistic depictions would likely have looked pretty ropey.

As ever, don’t pre-order video games. Especially in this case, where no press have had their hands on this at any point.

Updated: 10/22/21, 09:05 a.m. ET: This post has been updated to add that Rockstar have, since original publication, uploaded video footage of the games running.