Grand Theft Auto 5 Is Now Playable On Game Boy... Kind Of

Sure, you might be able to play the latest Grand Theft Auto on PC and a whopping three generations of PlayStation and Xbox consoles, but what if you want the power to explore the mean streets of Los Santos in the palm of your hands? While Grand Theft Auto V might not be coming to Switch anytime soon, German physicist Sebastian Staacks has managed to port it over to the next best thing: the original Game Boy.

As first reported by GamesRadar, Staacks has managed to make Grand Theft Auto V run on the 1989 handheld console using a Wi-Fi cartridge and a pretty time consuming process--the details of which he explains on his blog. In short, however, Staacks discovered a way to render the game on his PlayStation then stream it to his Game Boy via Wi-Fi. So, while the Game Boy isn't technically running the game, the physicist says he's still effectively found a way to play it on the retro console.

Sure, finding a way to stream a video game from one console to another might not seem all that impressive by today's standards, but considering the Game Boy's limitations, Staack's work is actually quite an achievement. For starters, not only was it a matter of figuring out how to stream Grand Theft Auto V to the Game Boy, Staacks also had to remap images from the game and piece them together as packages of pixels in order to get the HD title to function on the Game Boy's 160x144 resolution screen.

Ultimately, the workaround Staacks created allows him to stream any video from a PC to his Game Boy at 20fps. And while this might not be the ideal way to play your favorite next-gen games, it certainly is an impressive one.