I played GTA Vice City in a browser tab
A tweet listed dozens of well-known games that now run in a browser tab with no install. I tried Vice City, and it (somehow) ran.
An account called Radiant Optimizer (the people behind a PC control centre app) posted a tweet listing games you can now play in a browser tab, with nothing installed on your computer. The list includes Black Ops zombies maps, Skate 3, Halo CE, Modern Warfare 2, Half-Life, the Quake series, Diablo, The Simpsons: Hit & Run and a couple of GTA titles. In the replies, people say they are playing Warzone and Minecraft the same way.
I didn't quite believe it, so I opened the browser port of GTA Vice City and played it. It worked. No emulator, no local download, just a tab.
That is the part I find a bit insane. Running an old game used to mean hunting for an emulator, setting it up and hoping your machine cooperated. Now someone sends you a link and you're driving around Vice City a few seconds later.
The Vice City address has "wasm" in it, which points to WebAssembly, the technology that lets software built for desktops run inside a browser at a usable speed. WebAssembly has been around for years, but I had never seen it carry a whole open-world GTA game before.
I'm fairly sure AI is involved somewhere in building these ports. I haven't looked into how yet, so treat that as a hunch for now. It's the next thing I want to find out, and if I learn anything worth sharing I'll write it up here.
The tweet came with sensible caveats of its own. These are fan ports, not official releases. Some of them ask you to supply your own game files. And the advice at the end is the line I'd repeat to anyone clicking through the list: skip anything that asks you to download a launcher. A web page running in a tab is one thing. A program you install on your machine because a stranger's link told you to is another.
The tweet's author signed off with "School gaming is boutta be fire". Having just lost twenty minutes to Vice City at my desk, I can't really argue.