Something surprising has happened to one of the biggest video game franchises in the world, and gamers and the press alike didn’t quite notice it.

The Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, a compilation of Grand Theft Auto III (2001), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), has still not released on the Epic Games Store.

As reported by Exputer, Rockstar originally confirmed that Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition would be published on the store this January 2023. Rockstar pulled the game from Steam in the fallout of its poor release. The game has now been relisted on Steam, available to purchase. It returned on Steam on January 19, 2023. We ourselves reported on the claim that the game would be coming to Epic Games Store in the same week, but as we now know, nothing came out of it.

When Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition initially released, it received such an overwhelmingly negative reaction that it was pulled from Steam, with a promise that it would be fixed before coming back. The issues with the game were fundamental to the nature of the port itself.

As many gamers who played the game confirmed, Rockstar did not actually go back to use the assets for these games from the PlayStation 2. Instead, Grove Street Games was given the code from the original mobile ports. These were individually released in 2011 and 2013. While they were technical achievements for the time and technology of the time, they also reduced the quality of the PlayStation 2 assets themselves.

Grove Street Games used some automated technology to then upscale these assets. It would have been prohibitively expensive and time consuming for them to individually render each of these assets up to modern graphics quality by hand. However, the end result still needed a lot of work, and in fact would end up needing to be corrected by hand anyway. For example, the game’s many street and road signs would simply have wrong or glitched wording on them. Faces and bodies would also glitch across the three games. While I won’t speculate too much how much Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition’s issues were from Grove Street’s inexperience, or Rockstar not giving them enough resources to get it right, the end result was still the same poor product that faced universal rejection.

Today, the version of the game that exists on Steam still has a lot of issues. It meets a certain minimum of no longer having too many glitches, in road signs, or people’s bodies or faces. Still, the quality of the port remains to leave a lot to be desired.

Rockstar does not seem to be interested in sincerely investing to get this game back up to shape, to set up a redemption narrative in the same way that No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 had. Sadly, if things don’t change they will have only left behind a poor representation of their legacy.

It’s a baffling and frustrating situation, when you consider that even the most obscure and unloved games on Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, such as Fight For Life, would get the premier remaster treatment. Fight For Life was literally unplayable when it released for the Atari Jaguar. Digital Eclipse took the effort to fix this 20+ year code and make the game playable to the public for the first time.

Rockstar doesn’t think the Grand Theft Auto games that made their studio deserve the same treatment that Fight For Life received, from a small studio that definitely didn’t have as much money. It’s a crying shame, and it’s strange to think that Rockstar’s fans will now take more efforts than Rockstar themselves to play the games in the best way that they can do so.