A developer cum programmer recently pulled off the impossible by getting Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) running inside a web browser. We are talking the full game, running on Chrome, for all but a few hours.
We say a few hours because, as of this publication, the site that hosted the game in its entirety has already been taken down, most likely by Take Two, the parent company and studio that owns the IP. For the time it was running, Pixel Gamer 4K demonstrated the game running on Google Chrome using an Apple M3 Pro system, and through the site playGTA5.com.
Game Runs Locally On Browser
For its duration, the browser basically downloaded around 700MB of data before starting, while additional assets would download as they played the game. At least, that was the goal of the project. But again, the site is no longer active.
It was also observed that the web browser version of GTA V didn’t appear to run on a conventional cloud gaming service: Pixel Gamer 4K wasn’t running the game on another computer and streaming the video feed of the game to the browser. Instead, the game was being executed locally, using browser technologies like WebAssembly.
Unfortunately, and because of the takedown, there is no technical explanation of how they got it running.
On a related note, this isn’t the first time a developer has gotten a program that technically isn’t supposed to run on a browser to do exactly that. Last month, we reported on a modder getting NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 upscaling running directly on a web browser. This was, of course, all unofficial, as the upscaler only officially runs on NVIDIA’s NGX interface and Streamline DSK. Oh, and like the GTA V mod on the web browser, the modder also got it running on a browser on an entirely different OS, specifically MacOS.
(Source: Pixel Gamer 4K via X, Videocardz, Tom’s Hardware)
