Vice City's reimagined remastering isn't real, but it should be

In video gaming, wishful thinking and fan works blow through the air every day like dandelion spores. Sometimes, though, something lands on your eyelash like this, a pitch-perfect envisioning of a remastered Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Just watch and enjoy.

I was about 10 years old in the middle-1980s period that Vice City sought to capture. I had a Commodore 64 and a tape drive, too. About a 20 years later I was living in the basement of a log cabin, pretending to research a book about a baseball player, when the I saw the Grand Theft Auto Double Pack, which had launched in 2003 for Xbox, on a shelf in the Morganton, N.C. Walmart.

I think about the election we have coming on Tuesday, and I remember how I was so upset at the world on the first Wednesday of November 2004 that I decided I would just give in to what everyone thought of me: unemployed, male, single, white, angry. Fine. Why not. I'll play Grand Theft Auto, too. I loved every minute.

Do you remember your first GTA unique stunt jump? I remember mine, down in Washington Beach. I landed a Banshee on an apartment building as "She Sells Sanctuary" blared over the in-game radio. I phoned my brother.

"Holy shit, you can not believe what I just did," I said.

"It's fucking three in the morning, asshole," he said.

"Tell him not to fucking call us before 10 a.m." said my sister-in-law.

Fortunately, there is YouTube sharing on today's consoles. And Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is playable on PlayStation 4, for $14.99.

And maybe some day we'll get a remaster, and if so I hope it looks like this. But in the end, we can't have the time back. Not 1986 and not 2004.