Well, I hate to lie (or do I?), but Grand Theft Auto Rome isn’t actually in the works.
Still, with a some (lots of) imagination, before long we might all be causing a little morally reprehensible havoc in ancient Rome.

Oh, wait, there weren't cars in ancient Rome.: I may have been lying about the videogame. Still, it could be fun. (photo by Argenberg)

For the last ten years, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Los Angeles, along with computer scientists and architects from Italy, have been working on a project to digitally reconstruct ancient Rome, circa A.D. 320.

Rome, at this time, would have been the cultural hub of the western world, and had reached a population of around one million.

Employing the same techniques used to simulate modern cities, these scientists and artists have been working to recreate Rome street by street, temple to temple, in “Rome1.0.”

As someone who has worked at archaeological sites, I find the prospect of having a complete, scaled-down, and fully explorable model of something that would otherwise just exist in excavation logs and site reports is pretty neat. The imagination always adds perspective, but it would be awfully cool to be able to travel through an ancient site just as some one could have 1700 years ago.

Rome Reborn will continue map the ancient city, and there are plans to follow its progression from the late Bronze Age, to its fall in the 6th century A.D,

Rome1.0
A little more explanation