▶ Play the live demo

🕹️ Curious where it started? Play the original zero-shot version — the first single-shot build, before any of the community feature requests below.

A from-scratch, browser-based GTA-style 3D open-world vertical slice — built in TypeScript + Three.js in a single session, because a Reddit thread dared a new model to.

No, it is not Grand Theft Auto VII. It's a procedural neon city you can drive around at night, hop out of the car, and wander on foot. The name is the joke.

Works on desktop (keyboard) and mobile (on-screen touch controls).

GTA 7 — driving through the procedural night city

Features

  • Procedural night city — a seeded grid of streets and hundreds of lit-window towers; same seed always rebuilds the same skyline.
  • Lit streets — a streetlight on every corner casting warm pools of light, plus working twin headlights on the car you're driving.
  • Arcade driving with powerslides — a velocity-vector handling model with tyre grip; yank the handbrake mid-corner and the back end steps out into a drift.
  • Carjack anything — walk up to any car — your spawn ride, ambient traffic, or one of the cars parked along the curbs — and get in.
  • Physical cars — solid buildings and momentum-based car-on-car impacts: ram traffic and it gets shoved off course.
  • Traffic that brakes for you… mostly — stand in the road and oncoming cars slow and stop; dart out from inside their stopping distance and they can't help it. Get hit and you lose health; run out and it's WASTED, then you respawn.
  • Run people over — flatten a pedestrian at speed and they burst into a shower of little cubes; your tally shows on the HUD. (Ambient traffic is lethal too, but only your kills count.)
  • Ambient life — traffic looping the avenues and pedestrians milling the streets.
  • Wanted level & police chase — run people over and your heat climbs into a ★–★★★★★ wanted rating; every star puts another cop car on your tail (flashing lights and all). They use steering-behavior AI — they lead/intercept you, fan out instead of stacking up, and veer around buildings. Getting WASTED clears it.
  • Pedestrians react — get close on foot and they panic: trembling and bolting away from you.
  • Synthesized sound — an engine note with a faked automatic gearbox (revs climb, then drop on each upshift), tyre screech when you drift, a crunch when you gib someone, and door blips getting in/out — all generated in-browser, no audio files.
  • Car radio — 7 stations of original music streamed from a CDN (never bundled); tune with [ / ]. Each car remembers its own (initially random) station, drops you in mid-broadcast, and keeps playing after you get out — fading with distance as you walk away. The next song is prefetched while the current one plays.
  • Plays on mobile — keyboard on desktop, an on-screen analog joystick + action buttons on touch devices (auto-detected), with quality scaled down for phone GPUs.
  • HUD + live minimap — speedometer, health, mode indicator, and a top-down radar of the city and traffic.
  • Backed by tests — the simulation core (vehicle physics, city generation, collision, RNG) is pure and unit-tested; headless-Chromium tests prove the scene renders and that driving, carjacking, and collisions actually work.

Powersliding on the handbrake A streetlight casting a pool of light over the road The WASTED screen after being run over Touch controls on a mobile device Running a pedestrian over — they explode into blocks A police chase with a wanted level

Play it

npm install
npm run dev      # then open the printed localhost URL

Controls

Action Keys
Drive / move W A S D or arrow keys
Handbrake (powerslide) Space
Enter / exit nearest vehicle F
Sprint (on foot) Shift
Reset car R
Radio station (prev / next) [ / ]

On a touch device the same actions map to an on-screen joystick (steer + throttle / move) and buttons (enter-exit · handbrake · sprint · reset).

Develop

npm test          # unit tests for the pure simulation core (Vitest)
npm run build     # typecheck + production build
npm run smoke     # build + headless-Chromium render check
npm run test:e2e  # render check + gameplay interaction test (collision, carjacking, shoving)

The browser tests need Chromium once: npx playwright install chromium.

See CLAUDE.md for architecture — the short version: gameplay logic is kept pure and Three.js-free so it's testable in node, and everything that touches three lives in a separate rendering layer.

Tech

Three.js · TypeScript · Vite · Vitest · Playwright (smoke test)

Requested by the internet

This whole thing is a community-driven dare, built live from requests. Credit where it's due:

  • The original dare — u/Mr_Versatile, "Let's check Opus 4.8 — how good is it?"
  • Streetlights, parked cars, headlights, powerslides, faster cars, health + WASTED, traffic that brakes for you, smoother framerate, no-pinch-zoom, slow-bump-vs-fast-gib, this demo link — u/daemon-electricity
  • Mobile / touch support — u/Specialist_Juce879
  • Being able to run pedestrians over — u/Syrus_101 ("I couldn't run over anyone. Unacceptable.")
  • Pedestrians exploding into tiny block parts — u/jrobertson50
  • Reverse-steering sanity check — u/Marathon2021 (verified: it's realistic rear-steer, now locked by a test)
  • Radio stations — u/aweh_sassy
  • Police chasing you — u/c0desurfer ("Didn't even implement police chasing me. Boring 😄")
  • Sound effects, smarter police, radio shuffle — u/daemon-electricity
  • Pedestrians fleeing in fear on foot — u/This-Shape2193
  • Punching pedestrians into pixels on foot — u/Fit-Dot-414

🎵 All radio music is by Daemon Electricity — SoundCloud, and also on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer, Tidal, and most platforms. The tracks stream from a GitHub Release rather than being bundled into the site.

Got a request? It probably came from the thread.

License

MIT — have fun with it.