Saints Row Is Coming To PC After 20 Years Thanks To Modders

Nine Minutes Of Saints Row PC Port Shown Off By Talented Modder Published Aug 12, 2026, 7:22 AM EDT James Lucas is an Executive Editor at TheGamer who has worked in professional journalism since 2018. A Newcastle University graduate with a degree in Journalism, Media, and Culture, they have written hundreds of guides, news stories, and original reports, with bylines in IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, sourcing interviews with studio heads, legendary industry figures, prominent actors, and more. An expert on FPS games, Soulslikes, RPGs, and survival horror, James has intimate knowledge of a wide variety of titles, providing in-depth coverage and exclusive profiles. Some of the games they have extensively covered include: Half-Life 3, Counter-Strike, Elden Ring, and Fallout. They pride themselves on their consistently thorough research, leveraging nearly a decade of industry experience. You can reach them at James.t@thegamer.com The original Saints Row is an Xbox 360 exclusive, but not intentionally. It began development on the PS2, and Volition confirmed in 2007 that a PS3 port was in the works, only for it to be canceled when Saints Row 2 was announced. There was even a beta build of a Wii port. So, it's only fitting that modders are finally working to bring the original game to PC after all these years. Cue Reddit user Itismrwonderful, who has been documenting their progress on 'OpenRow' for the last few months. They shared nine minutes of gameplay footage to the r/SaintsRow subreddit this week, showcasing the intro scene where Julius saves the boss from a shootout between the Vice Kings, Los Carnales, and Westside Rollerz. The lighting is a little flat and there are some janky visual bugs, not to mention the abysmal framerate, but considering this is a solo project just four months into development, it's incredibly impressive how much they've achieved already. "The build has progressed under the hood, a lot of the mechanics are being introduced now and getting it to work correctly," Wonderful explained. "Lighting is still being worked on, texture issues, I need to render the effects correctly (rng ring stuff for the effects and pedestrians). By seeing this build, I spent the last 2 days just coding and not building anything, I can't quite nail a release date yet." Saints Row On PC Means Mods, Console Commands, And More Porting the first Saints Row to PC comes with a few perks. Most notably, Wonderful has teased that there will be over 900 console commands, multiplayer servers, and dev tools that will allow the community to make their own missions, mod packs, and texture packs. "Everything in the game will be adjustable," they said. "Console commands/dev tools etc will be available for anyone." Wonderful expects to begin beta testing "really soon," though there's still a lot of work to do before the port has complete parity with the original Xbox 360 version — after all, they're reverse engineering from retail. "This project is an open source reimplementation of Saint's Row using my game engine BEEF (I was thinking having my logo as a smiling cow but I can't due to that smiling beaver gas station)," they said. "The source code will be posted after stable release when everything is trucking along, people can contribute, browse around, fork it and create your own experience, explore, experiment with different ideas." In the meantime, their Reddit account is a treasure trove of game development insights, and it's fascinating to see the progress between getting gameplay to work just 25 days ago to nine minutes of the intro. Sure, it's a little broken, but rebuilding Saints Row on PC is no easy feat, and a project like this is breathing new life into the underrated gem that started the series in 2006. Systems Released September 1, 2006 ESRB 18+ Developer(s) Deep Silver Publisher(s) Deep Silver, THQ Engine havok Genre(s) Open-World, Action-Adventure, Shooter, Racing