Grand Theftendo

Grand Theftendo in debug mode showing Bitch'n Dog Food and Liberty Pharmaceuticals
Grand Theftendo in debug mode showing the Hospital

Grand Theftendo was a homebrew Grand Theft Auto game that was being developed by Brian Provinciano for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was developed in 2002, and was due to be released in Fall of 2005. It was never released, and instead it was replaced with a brand new game, Retro City Rampage. Grand Theftendo was originally going to be a toned-down version of Grand Theft Auto III. Only Portland was in the game. The only known emulator it would have worked with is FCE Ultra.

Provinviano described Grand Theftendo as

"a port of Grand Theft Auto III for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is Grand Theft Auto III running on an 8 bit, 256x240 resolution, 2 bit colour x 2 bit palette, 1.79 Mhz system, written entirely in 6502 Assembly Language! It includes the entire Portland city!"

A mission called "Mario's Girl" is started
Grand Theftendo's Ammu-Nation shown in a debug mode screenshot

Information

  • Money will be represented by dollar signs, not bills
  • Missions will be drastically different due to the limitations of the NES
  • There will be no radio
  • The game will played from a top-down perspective
  • Portland is the only city included

The city is 7168x4672 pixels in size. With the pedestrians being 8x12 pixels in size, it's relatively huge. The whole city can be walked or driven though without any load times. It is the largest of it's kind on the NES (much larger and more detailed than Metroid). It is about 30x24 screens in size (248 visible pixels wide, 192 high).

Provinciano used graph paper to draw what the city would look like in game, and measured, scaled and adjusted it to fit in 8x8 tiles he had chosen to design in. He said this was incredible helpful, and moreover, "when making an NES game, every tile counts, so the graphics must be designed properly to prevent memory waste. As well, if tiles aren't aligned, they can not be properly coloured with the palette, and collision detection would get sloppy."

Because the NES has memory constraints and very limited power, there will not be any map or mission editors released. The missions are hard-coded in 6502 ASM, rather than as stand alone scripts.

External links

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