Rockstar Games today announced Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition, a collection of remakes of three previous Grand Theft Auto games for modern consoles, PC, and mobile devices that will be launching sometime soon.
This trilogy of remakes is being released in honor of the 20th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III, and will include that game, Vice City, and San Andreas. The games will feature “across-the-board upgrades including graphical improvements and modern gameplay enhancements for all three titles” while not deviating from the look and feel of the original.
According to Rockstar, the games will be launching for just about every platform, including PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS, and Android. We don’t have a specific release date, but the timeframe given by Rockstar for the mobile release is “the first half of 2022,” so presumably we’ll be getting the trilogy on other platforms before then. Rockstar says that it will remove the originals from digital retailers starting next week, so if anyone wanted to buy San Andreas or Vice City in its original state from a digital storefront, now would be the time to do it. The trilogy will be released on PC via the Rockstar Games Launcher.
This remake has been rumored to be happening for quite some time, most recently with a rating for the trilogy popping up in South Korea. Earlier this year, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick (Take-Two is Rockstar’s parent company) mentioned to VGC that the company’s strategy was that remakes/remasters should never be a simple porting job: “We’ve done differently than the competition – we don’t just port titles over, we actually take the time to do the very best job we can making the title different for the new release, for the new technology that we’re launching it on. So, we improve the technology, we upgrade the visuals, and we make performance enhancements.”
Rockstar says more information about Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition will be announced “in the coming weeks.”