A VGTimes deep dive into the GTA 5 source leak: what is actually in there

On 18 September, 192 gigabytes of GTA 5 source code went public — the files stolen from Rockstar in 2022. Inside them sits a second city: Miami.

The files come from a GTA 5 development branch stolen in the 2022 hack, which also brought the first GTA 6 videos to light. Parts of the archive have been examined publicly since 2023, but the full archive was released only now. It contains levels, bug tracker records, scene audio, and code from different stages of development — from the original game to GTA Online updates.

One of VGTimes’ main findings is an early level depicting Miami. The real city inspired the fictional Vice City, the setting of GTA: Vice City and a location in the upcoming GTA 6. In the level, the Ocean Drive hotels bear their real names and appear in nearly the same order as on the actual street. The city has collision geometry and traffic routes: you could walk and drive through it. We have not found this level in any released Rockstar game.

Elsewhere in the archive are traces of another city, Liberty City, along with a canceled 47-mission campaign whose scenes had been shot and a cut heist with recorded dialogue. There is also code for an update that shipped 3 months after the theft. VGTimes examines what remained in planning and what Rockstar had built, recorded, and tested. No GTA 6 game material turned up in the part of the archive we checked — only references to a neighboring branch and development tools shared between projects.

The level is called env_test — "environment test". The name is misleading. Test levels usually look like grey boxes on an empty plane. This one holds 140,229 placed objects, and they add up to a city.

Ocean Drive offers the clearest evidence that the level depicts Miami. Nine objects are named after real hotels and businesses on the street: the Majestic, the Avalon, the Park Central, the Beacon, Johnny Rockets, the Colony, the Starlite, the Leslie, and the Cavalier. The names are shortened in the files — colonyhotel, starlitehotel, and so on — but each object points to a real South Beach address.

VGTimes compared the positions of 9 objects in the level with real addresses on Ocean Drive. Four appear in the same order as they do on the street: the Beacon at 720, Johnny Rockets at 728, the Colony at 736, and the Starlite at 750. The gaps between them in the level — 24, 14, and 21 meters — match the widths of the real buildings. There are a few changes: Park Central appears after the Majestic, while the Leslie and the Cavalier have switched places. Overall, 7 of the 9 follow the real street’s order.

A temporary texture provides another clue. Its name, temp_ih_starliteproportions, refers to the Starlite’s proportions — the sort of guide an artist would use to work out a building’s shape.

The buildings vary in detail. The Colony is still a rough shell with a recess and 2 wings: 3,500 triangles and 3 materials. The Leslie has balconies, windows, a staircase, and a rooftop terrace with a pergola: 10,000 triangles and 25 materials. They were developed building by building.

Other parts of Miami are recognizable too. The business district sits beside the Miami River, with an elevated rail line. The port is on Dodge Island, where it is in real life. The level also includes Fisher Island, Virginia Key, and Key Biscayne, plus stilt houses in the bay resembling Stiltsville.

The marine park on Virginia Key is laid out in separate areas. Its objects include pools for dolphins and an orca, a sea lion dome, a shark channel, a coral aquarium, and a crocodile enclosure. Viewing decks, walkways, railings, and signs give those areas more detail. Together, they trace the layout of a real park.

Some buildings can be identified by their appearance. A tower made of 7 sections matches Jade Ocean in Sunny Isles Beach: it has the same curved, sail-like roof, central ridge, balcony bands, and dark glass. A round arena with 3 retractable roof panels resembles Marlins Park.

At least some buildings were modeled close to their real size. Jade Ocean measures 67 by 79 meters at its base and 162 meters to the roof; the real tower is 166 meters tall. The distances between districts, however, were compressed.

The city had its own street furniture as well. VGTimes counted 1,612 names in the prop archives, 114 of which did not turn up in the retail GTA 5 files we checked. They include bus shelters, fire hydrants, utility cabinets, streetlights, benches, and bike racks — a collection of objects for furnishing city streets.

The ground beneath the city uses images of a real map. On 10 terrain textures, VGTimes found parts of a mapping service’s interface alongside the imagery. One shows a white menu with “Show labels” checked. Another has a yellow pin marked “Hospital” over a rooftop. Street names — “SW 264th St,” “Bauer Dr,” “Waldin Dr” and “SW 280th St” — appear on the mainland textures. They belong to Redland, a rural area of Miami-Dade County. Over the water, the words “Atlantic Ocean” appear in grey italics.

These details suggest that screenshots of a map, with its labels still visible, were used as a temporary ground texture. The files show what ended up on the terrain. They do not show how the images were captured or why the labels were left on.

Export timestamps reveal two stages of work. Between May 19 and June 4, 2014, the team laid out rough blocks named after areas including Dodge Island, Fisher Island, Virginia Key and Key Biscayne. From November 25, 2014, to May 13, 2015, buildings were added over that layout. Of the 1,741 early blocks, 1,177 lie within 120 metres of later buildings. Around 20 larger blocks have later counterparts in the same places, with dimensions matching to within 5%.

The later city followed the layout established about six months earlier.

The level could have been scenery made for an internal presentation. Collision geometry offers a way to judge how much work went beyond its appearance: without it, a character or vehicle would pass through the buildings.

VGTimes counted 6,849 collision files containing 50,100,244 polygons. They cover every district, not just the roads. Together with the level’s transport routes, they show a city built for walking and driving through.

Other parts remained less developed. Traffic routes run along the streets, but VGTimes found no pedestrian activity points or population table made specifically for this level. Its 179 population groups come from Los Santos. That does not mean the streets would have been empty: the engine can populate them without custom activity points. It means the files do not show what pedestrians would have done specifically in this city.

The level also has nighttime lighting: 4,764 lights in 26 files. They form lines along the roads, identifying them as streetlights rather than illuminated windows. A reliable count for each district is not possible because the rectangular district boundaries overlap heavily.

There is also a modular set of apartment interiors. VGTimes counted 2,445 placed pieces: 1,498 pieces for apartment rooms, 475 sections of service corridors, 209 sections of residential corridors, 189 doors, 54 elevator doors, 18 directional signs and 2 objects outside those groups. The pieces range from half a metre to 5 metres across and include walls, bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, hallways, living rooms and storage areas. Filler panels let them fit different spaces. Some are placed as high as 163 metres, among the upper floors of towers.

GTA 5 also uses interiors as scenery visible through windows. These pieces, however, are arranged as rooms rather than flat backdrops. Their placement alone cannot tell us whether players would have been able to enter them.

The question asks itself: is this the same work that later became the sixth game, or just a similar city?

We had to compare against somebody else's list. We have no list of our own for the locations in the published GTA 6 footage, so we took twenty real Miami landmarks identified in the sixth game's material from the interactive map by Miami New Times. That list is not ours, not complete, and assembled from whatever enthusiasts managed to spot — the absence of something from it proves nothing.

On the left, what that list identifies. On the right, what stands in the early level.

Ocean Drive is the same street, and the two lists share no buildings. The sixth game's material shows numbers 101, 940, 1144 and 1430. The early level has 640, 660, 700, 720, 728, 736, 750, plus 1244 and 1320. Southern blocks against northern ones.

The Venetian Causeway is the same place. We have forty-two pieces of the San Marino causeway, a toll booth and bridges; GTA 6 has Venetian Isle and 1000 Venetian Way.

The Keys and the bridge are the same. Eighty-eight road segments across the islands and a three-part bridge, identified in the sixth game as the Seven Mile Bridge.

Wynwood is the same kind of district: an abandoned warehouse, shops and three separate graffiti textures.

Brickell and Biscayne Boulevard are marked out, but we found no buildings by name. The files list construction sites, parking lots and water. We did not compare building silhouettes, so some could be present under other names — as with Jade Ocean, which we identified by its shape.

And one and the same building stands on Collins Avenue — Jade Ocean again.

Three more places have no mention in any GTA 6 breakdown we checked: the marine park on Virginia Key with its attraction-by-attraction layout, Stiltsville, and a private island with a golf course. Whether they are in the sixth game itself is not something this list can settle.

We compared object names, not silhouettes. A search across all 30,880 names in the level for two dozen Miami place names returns zero: the districts in this level are named by two-letter codes, not by locality. Jade Ocean was identified by silhouette precisely for that reason — you will not find it by name. So every "nothing by name" line here reads as "nothing found by name, silhouettes not compared".

What is recognised is the same real Jade Ocean tower, not the same game object. There is nothing to compare the geometry against: we have no models from the sixth game, only published material. So the identity of the file remains unproven.

What can be said honestly: no GTA 6 map turned up in the part of the archive we checked, and the comparison finds the same real place — the same city, the same street, the same bridge and one and the same real building. Whether the two developments are connected is not established by this data. Matching real-world geography proves only that both were depicting Miami.

Miami was not the only city Rockstar set up for GTA 5. There was Liberty City too.

The level data itself did not make it into the archive — the gta5 branch leaked, and Liberty lived in its own, gta5_liberty. But traces of the project are all over the toolchain, and they say more than a pile of models would.

The project had a row in the GTA 5 add-on registry — "GTA5: LibertyV DLC" is exactly what it was called in the developers' dropdown. It had its own branch in version control, and its own build made from it. It had its own material standard in the texture pipeline: an artist picked a document type called "GTA V Liberty City" from the list, alongside "Vegetation" and "Character Skin".

And there was a whole group of buttons in the developer menu — "GTA5 NG Liberty": get tools, get build, run on PS4, on Xbox One, on PC. In the surviving revision of that file the entire group is commented out, so the buttons do not show. Whether it ever worked cannot be told from a single file with no edit history; all you can see is that somebody wrote it out in detail and left it switched off.

The engine could load additional maps, too. GTA 5’s audio code says they could be delivered through DLC and load their data in the same way as the main map. That fits the “GTA5: LibertyV DLC” entry in the add-on registry: Liberty City was planned as a separate map for an expansion.

The loudest evidence is audio. The game archives hold 24 audio settings files belonging to the Liberty add-on that we did not find in the retail game: 469 names, of which 163 are ambient zones named after districts, roads and other areas of Liberty City. Algonquin with Downtown, Middle Park, Star Junction, Purgatory, Little Italy and Westminster. Alderney with its docks and three industrial areas. Dukes with Bohan, Steinway and Meadows Park. Nine overpasses and thirty-three roads get zones of their own.

From those zones we reconstructed which district of Liberty City sat where.

Alongside them are coastline descriptions — polylines along the waterline. The outline of Liberty City has already been reconstructed and published from those by the modder TJGM, who also said first that the map is noticeably bigger than GTA 4's. VGTimes rechecked that against its own copy and counted more precisely.

There are ninety-three coastline records holding 1,798 points. The shore runs 9.5 by 10.2 kilometres, and together with the audio zones the occupied area comes to 10.3 by 11.9 kilometres. For comparison, the capture area of the GTA 5 map is 9.2 by 12.5 kilometres. By this trace, in other words, the Liberty region is comparable to the whole of the fifth game's map.

The city itself occupies only the southern third: all 163 zones fall in the lower part of the outline. North of it is a large landmass with long islands and a distinctive hooked cape at the top. The coastline names back that up: the north and south-east of the state, Long Island, the Jersey Shore and Provincetown. The hook at the top is shaped like Cape Cod, and the real Provincetown sits on its tip.

This is a trace in audio data, not a map. What was actually built in the northern part — or whether anything was — cannot be determined from these files.

Liberty City was not a private venture, either. The task registry holds an internal list of planned multiplayer add-ons — fourteen rows. Shipped and unshipped are mixed together in it.

Shipped: Beach Bum, the Business Pack, the Hipster Pack, the Christmas updates, apartments, the sports pack, lowriders. And right beside them, in the same list and with equally live ticket numbers, are rows for the Liberty City map, the Cops'n'Crooks mode and a pack of gambling, espionage and underwater.

All three were set up as multiplayer add-ons, in one list with the ones that reached players. The list by itself says nothing about how far each of them got: it records plans, not stages. What it does show is that Liberty City was not somebody's pet idea but a line item in the general plan.

That last row — gambling, espionage, underwater — echoes what was being prepared for single player, where there is also a casino, a spy storyline and an underwater base. The same material may have been tried in both places, but that is a guess from matching themes, not an established link: the files do not identify the multiplayer pack with the single-player add-on.

A registry in the archive lists several planned add-ons, but the surviving material for each varies widely.

There is a registry belonging to Rockstar's own toolchain, the one the entire build pipeline uses. Its header says as much: data about downloadable GTA 5 add-ons, used across all our tools. It contains five single-player packs: Agent Trevor, an assassination pack, a relationship pack, and two more named with internal words — Manhunt and Norman.

Five is the count in this particular registry. The list of cancelled single-player add-ons known publicly from the 2023 source leak is wider, with eight entries; and beyond the single-player ones there were multiplayer packs too. So the numbers here differ because they describe different sets.

The interesting part is how differently these packs survived. What is left of a pack can be anything: a row in a registry, an audio inventory, or an entire campaign with code.

Of the Manhunt pack, nothing turned up but the name. It appears nowhere else in the tree we looked through, and the word "manhunt" does not occur once in the 2010–2012 bug tracker records. The pack was entered in a directory, and the trail stops there.

Of the relationship pack, an audio inventory survives, and it is a surprise. The file holds forty names, and all forty are about one thing: a stand-up comedy set. Walking on, walking off, five numbers in a row, the lull between them. And among them — a reaction to the player heckling from the audience, separately in single player and in multiplayer. Plus a separate reaction to a spectator walking out.

Publicly, only the name of this pack was known, and Kotaku suggested at the time that it would be about dating or marriage. It turns out to have been a comedy club where you could heckle the comedian.

In GTA 4, players could visit Split Sides and watch comedians perform. We found no sign that this feature carried over to GTA 5. The club’s name does not appear in any of the 1,598 subtitle files we checked, and neither do the comedians’ names. The only relevant line is a placeholder about visiting a comedy club. The building and an unused interior survive, along with a system for reacting to heckling from the audience. We found no audio for those reactions.

Of the assassination pack, 188 audio names survive — and the pack's shape can be reconstructed from them. Contracts came in by payphone: the ring is recorded in three versions, "before the scene", "during the scene" and "distant". And one of the killings happened inside a cable car — the inventory holds shattered glass, an RPG shot, a collapse and hits on the machine room.

The cable car mission itself was written about back in April 2015, but described differently: a killing inside a house, with the player dressed as a cable car worker. That it happened in the car itself is visible for the first time in this audio inventory. And next to it sits an unused engine command, GET_NEAREST_CABLE_CAR — "find the nearest cable car" — which until now looked like a curiosity in a list.

Of the army pack, 105 names survive. Two vehicles — an army truck and an armoured personnel carrier, with engine revs, exhaust, start and stop, and the APC with a horn of its own. No recordings for them turned up in the build or in the retail audio corpus, only the definitions. And everything else in the inventory is musical horns: the notes of a whole octave, plus a rest and notes below it. The horn you play a tune on was an idea back then.

And separately, Cops'n'Crooks, the GTA 4 multiplayer mode that was being rebuilt for the fifth game. Its survival is of a different order: of 725 records in the task registry, 89 are tagged with this mode, and the bug tracker holds 844 distinct defects mentioning it, from June 2011 to July 2012. The monthly curve shows a peak: January 2012 had eighteen, February forty-four, March ninety, April three hundred and seventeen, May a hundred and fifty-five. This is not a stub. These are months of testing.

The mode and its abilities were already analysed publicly from the 2023 source leak, on GTAForums and in GTA Wiki. Ours here is the tracker count and one correction: the mode has six roles, not eight as was written in 2023. Cops get Officer, Tactical and Tech; crooks get Soldier, Enforcer and Hacker. The script tree gives exactly six.

We found only a few clear traces of the zombie storyline. The playthrough lists hold three missions — an opener, a second and a finale — and a generator for such a list. It went no further than a stub: the sources carry 1,868 build conditions for Agent Trevor and 1,726 for the Norman pack, and none at all turned up for zombies. The shared code was apparently never touched for this variant.

There are three zombie-related markers in the files: the Norman pack in the registry, a flag of its own in the code, and a branch of its own in the playthrough lists. They may be the same thing under different names at different stages, and they may not — we found no direct link between them. So the correct phrasing is "a zombie line taken as far as three stubs", not "another cancelled add-on".

Agent Trevor — working name Clifford, T-SPY in internal documents. Its mission names, order and the "Trevor in liquid nitrogen" finale spread across the internet within days of the leak: DTF published a detailed list, and PC Gamer covered the cancelled Liberty City and Agent Trevor. No point retelling it. What is more interesting is that this was not a scattering of jobs but a full campaign. The add-on had a save block of its own, with everything the main game has: story progress, respawn points, properties, shops, calls and messages, finances, mail, purchasable vehicles.

The game generated a playthrough order file with 58 positions: 47 distinct missions plus a repeatable jetpack job slotted between them eleven times. The order reads as a coherent dramatic sequence rather than a job list. The casino heist sits in the middle, not at the end. After it comes the line with the jetpack, drones and satellites. And it all ends with three missions in a row marked Space.

How finished it was shows in the internal task registry. Across 53 T-SPY records, four bug counters hold 93, 159, 712 and 6 — 970 in total. What those categories mean cannot be reconstructed from the file, and calling the sum "open bugs" would be a stretch. But the bare fact that bugs were being filed in the hundreds says something simple: these missions were not an idea on paper. They were being run and tested.

What the campaign was about. Trevor starts working for an intelligence agency and takes on missions against several groups. Based on his opponents, we can loosely call these the Russian, Korean and Arab storylines. They are parts of one campaign, not separate expansions.

The Russian line starts on a plane: Trevor flies with forged documents, then steals a spy car, destroys convoys, flies a drone, hunts for a mountain base, is captured and escapes. The Korean line is about underwater bases — several of them, scattered across the map, not one. There is a rescue of the president from Air Force One down in the ocean. There is a satellite line: shoot them down and reach three crash sites by jetpack. An Arab line and an assassination line run in parallel. The casino heist sits in the middle. And it all ends with three "space" missions in a row.

One mission involving the Korean underwater base was selected for a demo. The build contains a separate menu with fourteen missions picked for presentation, including this one. The files do not show whether anyone ever saw the demo. The campaign has forty-seven missions in all; the menu tells us nothing about how far along the others were.

The jetpack was not a promise, either. Its code sits in the engine itself and is known from 2014 updates — so the repeatable jetpack job, slotted into the playthrough eleven times, leaned on a working movement system rather than a line in a plan.

How far the cutscenes got. There is a separate file listing, for each cutscene, what and who is in frame — characters, props, vehicles. It shows that the scenes were not merely conceived but written out down to the props:

And the most telling detail. The camera data preserves the dates the scenes were shot: 1, 10, 11, 17 and 19 December 2014. In the task registry those same missions are logged at zero readiness. What that zero meant cannot be reconstructed from the files — but the scenes for those jobs had already been shot and dated.

The final mission of the Russian storyline is still listed in the playthrough file, but its entry has been commented out, so the sequence skips it. The files do not show why.

A separate test level contains locations resembling settings described in the mission materials. Their links to specific missions have to be assessed individually.

The level is called concept_test, weighs a hundred megabytes and sits in two archives. Inside are 411 drawings, and 406 of them are placed by coordinates — this is not a parts shed but scenes set out in position.

What is in them: the underwater base, 147 pieces, with a minefield, a pipeline and a mast running up to the surface. The CIA base, 96 pieces, containing a server hall 383 metres long and a radar station where the entrance should be. A space station, 26 pieces, with a globe of the Earth beside it. Plus 66 pieces of multiplayer apartments in two classes, and stilt houses in seven variants.

And a luxury hotel suite with Paris outside the window.

That one is worth a paragraph of its own. On 23 September IGN ran a headline saying the cancelled add-on might have taken GTA out of America for the first time in fifteen years — to Europe. What is actually in the files: two cylindrical backdrops wrapped around the room, covered with a photographic panorama of the city, and the Eiffel Tower is plainly legible on them. It is a flat picture — a view through a window, not a place you can walk out into.

And the texture is called paris_backdrop_TEMP. The TEMP marker in this level means a placeholder — the Miami hotels in the early level are labelled the same way, and there it means "blank awaiting replacement". So Paris may simply be a stand-in for "some foreign city".

And VGTimes found the words "Paris" and "Eiffel" nowhere else in the leak's script layer — not in a mission, not in a debug menu, not in the bug tracker. The add-on's storylines are named after where they happen: Russian, Arab, Korean, CIA, casino, jetpack and space. No European one turned up.

So the add-on's overseas component is one suite with a picture in the window. Handsome, but not a trip to Paris.

What ties the level to Agent Trevor is the names. The Korean underwater base, the CIA line and space, all from the add-on's playthrough order, map onto the underwater base, the CIA server hall and the space station here. The match is dense, but no direct reference from one to the other turned up in the files: this is an inference from names, not a record.

Plenty of this has already gone round the internet: pictures of the underwater base and the space station appeared within a day or two of the leak, and PC Gamer covered them, while IGN covered the Paris suite, as noted above. VGTimes adds the level's own name, the drawing count, the object inventory and how the whole thing is laid out. No breakdown of the entire level turned up in the publications we checked, and it shows the main point: this was not assembled as a map. It was assembled as a showcase. Almost everything is set out in rows on a plane around the origin, and the frame itself is named accordingly — "showcase, row one". There are two exceptions, the underwater base and the space station: they are moved to positions of their own, away from the rows. The rest is arranged the way you arrange a presentation for colleagues rather than a level a player walks into: here is the server hall, here is the suite, here are the apartments — look what this could be.

The whole level has forty-nine textures. That is the blockout stage: the volumes exist, the finish does not. The exact assembly date cannot be named, but there is an upper bound: by export stamps it is no later than 25 November 2014, which makes it older than the Miami city, which was worked on for another six months after that.

The add-on was cancelled. Three years later the Doomsday Heist came out in GTA Online — and some of the themes from the cancelled blockout show up in it.

We compared the names and purposes of objects, not the geometry of models: we have no way to say the multiplayer pack contains the same models. So everything below is a match of themes and naming conventions, not a proven transfer. There are a lot of matches, though, and they come as a set.

The CIA server hall from the blockout is a 383-metre room with rows of racks: in the files they are called ct_02_cia_server, and in the Doomsday Heist xm_base_cia_server. It goes on pair by pair: a boardroom with rows of desks, a mountain base palette without the location itself, a silo, an orbital cannon. Every item from the blockout finds a namesake in the multiplayer add-on.

And Agent 14 himself, the Doomsday character who owns the Facility, already appears in the cancelled add-on: three missions of the assassination line are called T-SPY Agent 14.

The underwater base, on the other hand, could not be found in the retail files. We searched both by the blockout names and by the general marker that tags the whole Doomsday Heist: the satellites and weapons of the Korean line turn up, the base under those names did not. It may well be there under some other name: we did not go through every possible one.

Alongside the cities and the add-ons, the archive holds fourteen utility levels. That sounds dull, but they are exactly what shows what Rockstar actually tried — not conceived, but tested in the engine.

The finds here come in three different kinds, and they are not equal in weight. Placed rigs are things that really were tested in the engine. A prop library merely sits nearby. And engine code shows what was written — but no calls to those pieces turned up in the scripts we looked through.

The main proving ground is a set of rigs made of 297 placed pieces. They show capabilities we have not seen in shipped GTA 5.

Free climbing. A rock face with holds, a corner, a ledge, blocks for hand-over-hand moves, overhangs — and walls at strictly fixed sizes: 50 by 50, 50 by 500, 100 by 50, 100 by 500, 200 by 50, 200 by 500. That is how you probe a ceiling: how high a character can climb and how wide a ledge he needs. We have not seen free climbing in the shipped game — the character only pulls himself up onto ledges marked in advance.

A ski slope — runs and turns as separate pieces.

And stairs for a horse. This is the best thing in the level. There is an ordinary set of steps — 25 by 25, 25 by 28, 25 by 50, 30 by 30 centimetres. And there is exactly the same set again, but with "horse" in the name of every step, plus a separate turning platform. Somebody built a dedicated rig of differently-sized steps for a horse and tested which ones it would take. The same level's scripts contain a separate test script for it.

Plus paintball, a jump ramp, a rumble strip, cobblestones, dunes, ground planes four and seven kilometres across for draw-distance checks — and a set of biomes: swamp, coast, forest, green hills, dry hills with desert, mountains.

And the prop archives of that same proving ground hold an entire library that did not turn up in the game. 472 models sharing a desert prefix in their names, and not one of them appeared in the licensed copy of GTA 5 that VGTimes checked against.

The names say what it is. An eastern bazaar: stalls with spices, fruit and grain, eighteen kinds of awning, carts, rugs, jugs, coffee pots, scales, washing lines, a butcher's stall, a barber, a "halal" sign, a snake charmer and Bedouin tents. And the military half of the same set: sandbags, army tents and cots, radios, watchtowers, barbed wire, an anti-aircraft gun, surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank mines with minefield signs, bunker doors — and the wreck of a T-34 tank, broken out into turret, road wheel and fuel tank.

Beside the desert layer sits a second one, alpine, and it joins up with the ski rig from the same level. There are background characters for both sets. That desert-plus-Alps combination is what keeps the library's origin an open question: what game or mode it was assembled for cannot be determined from the files.

No placement of these 472 pieces turned up in any level map — and neither did the descriptions that would register a model as a game object. So this is a model library lying nearby, not an assembled scene and not a tested capability.

And the third kind is engine code itself. The engine contains four hundred and two unused command registrations with non-empty bodies longer than eight lines — no calls to them turned up in the scripts we looked through. Some have been worked out by reading the code, but the code does not show whether they work in the game — nor whether the engine calls them by some other route.

"Unused" does not mean "cut from GTA 5", either. Rockstar's engine is shared, and part of the code is inherited from earlier games — a train with a station schedule, for instance, is more likely a GTA 4 legacy, where the subway worked exactly that way.

What is genuinely curious in there: hanging a person on a meat hook, with a physical link between body and hook and rotation limits on three axes. A full set for a forklift with pallets: raise the forks, lower them, lock them, attach a pallet, detach it. Fuel consumption for vehicles, with a burn rate and a cutoff for ground trails — petrol is not consumed in GTA 5. Dirtying a character, applying a scar, inflicting a knife wound in a specified body zone. Handcuffs and bound ankles.

And that same nearest-cable-car command, the one explained by the cut killing. It is propped up from both sides at once: by the pack's audio inventory and by its own existence in the code.

A separate level is a physics and animation ground, and it holds 244 vehicles. Forty-three of those names did not turn up in the part of the retail archives we checked.

The comparison was by name, and names do not establish whether models are identical: that needs a comparison of geometry. And the list is partly old: at least eleven of those forty-three names are already listed on the GTA Wiki page "Beta Vehicles in Grand Theft Auto V".

And three of the forty-three are not cut content at all but renames: "aurion" became the Asterope, "monster" the Liberator, "sabre" the Sabre Turbo. The cars shipped; the internal name changed.

The archive contains material from The Sharmoota Job, a heist cut from GTA 5, including recorded dialogue. It gives us a closer look at how the mission was meant to play out.

The heist itself has been known about for years. GTA Wiki has a page on it covering 3 approaches and the available crew, while audio from a tour of the mansion has been on YouTube since 2014–2015. Plans for horse riding are also old news: the shipped game retained a compiled jump animation network. The unpacked gait and reaction maps, however, could only be examined in the leak.

In a recorded but unreleased scene, Lester lays the plan out loud. A sheikh is obsessed with horses and wants a foal from his mare by a prize-winning stallion — Sharmoota, the horse that won the Ocean Sweepstakes at Liberty Memorial the year before. Borrow the stallion for a couple of days, stage a fake kidnapping, let him cover every mare in the stable and then simply hand him back; no great harm done, and the sheikh pays. Lester himself admits the idea is ridiculous.

Lester also says where to find Sharmoota: at a ranch near Vinewood Park Raceway, registered to a woman he calls Patricia Vasquez. The horse is in her stable. The ranch had previously been identified as La Fuente Blanca, Martin Madrazo’s property in the released game; Patricia is his wife. What VGTimes found in this recording is the surname Vasquez and the detail that the ranch was registered in her name in this version. The files do not show whether or how that idea was reworked for the released game.

The approach scenes are the same sort of thing: one crew member wants to walk in under cover of a party, complete with hired mimes; another wants to cut straight through the party and carry the safe out. The scene runs on the fact that the lady of the house did not order any clowns.

(The lines above are summarised rather than quoted. The recordings are in English, our transcripts of them are in Russian, and translating back would produce sentences nobody ever recorded.)

How far the work on the heist got. That is arguably more interesting than the plot.

The strongest evidence is the bug tracker. VGTimes counted ninety-three records, from October 2011 to July 2012. The heist has a cutscene line of its own, on a par with the lines of every heist that shipped.

Those records show a mission being played, not planned. Fully recorded dialogue for the setup stages. Motion capture — and complaints that characters freeze afterwards with their arms spread. A separate character model commissioned specifically for the heist's scenes. For the finale: a stable, a paddock, guards, ranch hands and a safe that gets stuck behind a sign. Horse riding inside the raid itself: one bug has Trevor stuck in the mounting pose "if the player tries to ride Sharmoota".

In the recon the crew enter the house posing as buyers, shown around by a realtor, and inspect "security features" — with short dedicated cutscenes for it. There is even a prompt button for playing the couple viewing the property. A separate bug report complains that it clashes with the phone button.

The heist's working name was "Nice House Heist", and its abbreviation survives in the later tracker records next to the new title. Its structure is as complete as the shipped ones: two setup missions, a planning board and three finale variants instead of the usual two. It could be started by all three protagonists.

In the delivery checklists — the ones the team used to mark what was on schedule — the heist's identifiers appear in the November set, and one survives into the December one. Then they vanish, and reappear in the June and July sets.

The most reliable of these is the March list: it names all five heist lines that reached the game, and no record of the cut one turned up in it. So the list is complete. The February one is no good for that conclusion: it is incomplete itself, and even the shipped jewellery line did not turn up in it.

And this is presence or absence in surviving sets, not a proven team decision to cancel the mission and bring it back: the file composition differs between folders, eleven in July against six in February.

And separately, the horse. Three animation network maps survive for it, and they are worked out in detail. All four gaits are written out individually: walk, trot, canter, gallop. There is rearing, a sharp stop from any gait with a choice of leading leg, backing up with turns, turning on the spot, slope blending. The jump is broken down per gait — take-off and landing separately for each, a fall from each, a crouched landing, jump scaling to fit an obstacle and a separate branch for hitting its head.

Spurs are a state machine of their own, with clips for each gait. And the network provides nodes for reacting to over-spurring — separate branches for being spurred too often. A nearby tracker record notes that riding too hard throws the rider.

All of this is animation node maps. They show that the mechanic was written out; whether riding worked in a playable build does not show in them.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has a similar mechanic, but the similarity does not establish that the work carried over: we found no link between the files.

What reached shipped GTA 5 out of all this is only the compiled jump network. The unpacked node names exist only in the leak.

The horse heist is not the only cut line. Here is the rest of what survived as audio.

Trevor's sixth rampage. The game has five — scenes where Trevor wrecks somewhere. The build has six audio banks. For the first five, the retail game has everything: cutscene files, animation sets. For the sixth, neither a cutscene file nor animations turned up in the retail corpus we looked through.

And in the build it exists, and not as a stub: eight versions, six minutes nine seconds of recorded speech in total.

The Solomon Richards line is the largest previously unexamined audio line, and VGTimes transcribed it in full. Nine banks, roughly 2,400 words that do not match the game, and it is an entire rewritten story branch.

Meeting Solomon starts word for word as it does in the game: he calls you in and complains that he used to have three secretaries and now has to make his own coffee. After that it diverges completely. The film in the build is called Subprime, not Meltdown. There is one problem actor, not two. And what Solomon asks of Michael is different: the production needs insurance money, Michael is now the producer of Subprime, and he is to go and produce an insurance payout.

So Michael became a producer, not an assistant, and the business was insurance fraud. Solomon, meanwhile, is afraid of being killed himself, and says so in the kind of language the finished game keeps for other scenes.

The resolution differs too. In the game it is one scene where Devin announces the plan. In the build the whole thing plays out as Solomon's line: the studio owner's family squabbles at the funeral, and the film's fate is decided around it.

Lester and the teenager. A recorded line where Lester plays online against a teenage opponent. It starts good-naturedly and turns, when the boy starts insulting him, into Lester doing what Lester does: reciting the address the kid lives at and recalling what his mother was convicted of last year.

Agatha and Bethany. Five recorded scenes under an "A versus B" marker: Mrs. A is Agatha Andrews, Mrs. B is Bethany of the Burton family. Neighbours, and one took the other's husband. On the wiki those letters are known as names — no content behind them has been published in anything we checked.

In the same place: Dale and Magenta, and Brucie Kibbutz — stories that survive publicly as names in lists, while the scenes themselves sit here.

A music video shoot. A scene that did not turn up in retail audio or subtitles: the director yelling at everyone at once about where the footage is going, his sound, and needing a different editor to cut it.

Trevor in a trailer. Five banks, and this branch did not turn up in the retail audio corpus: Trevor torments a resident, demands a drink and worse, and gets a flatly literal answer. The scene itself was posted as audio shortly after the leak; what is ours here is the transcript, not the scene.

And a short scene with Franklin, arriving at an acquaintance of Trevor's and being challenged to identify himself. He says he is a friend of Trevor's; the answer is that Trevor does not have friends, only people he has not killed yet.

The archive holds audio — and it shows how the script kept changing after recording had already started.

The working build has 5,671 audio banks. Strip the version markers from the names and group them, and you get 353 scenes with more than one surviving version — 1,095 records in total. 192 scenes have two versions, 80 have three, 26 have four, then a tail up to eleven, and one scene with fifteen.

Endings got the most work. All three of the game's finales have nine versions each; Deathwish has eleven. The GTA Online intro has eleven as well.

Bank names change between the working build and the shipped game, so a name missing from the retail list does not mean the audio is missing. Only content can be compared.

Which makes one worked example more interesting than the count. The second part of Michael's therapy session was recorded in four takes. The scene is the same from first line to last — but the text differs between takes, and next to it you can hear what finally made it into the game.

In an early take Michael says he keeps putting himself in situations where it is hard not to die. In the game he puts his ass in situations where not getting killed is a bit of a challenge. Coarser and funnier — exactly the edit you make when a line is written but does not land.

On Martin: an early take has a "fat washed-up athlete who never could get it into his head", the game has one who "can't get it into his head". Past tense became present: the trouble is not behind him, it is ongoing.

There was a line about being the only thing he is good at; it became the only thing he is happy and good at, and the added word now carries the whole sentence. And "I pay you to listen to my problems, right?" turned into "I pay you to listen to my problems." — from a plea into a rebuke, by dropping a single question mark.

And one line was cut entirely. In three takes the doctor opens the second part with a remark about quite a story. In the edited take it is gone — he starts straight on the next sentence. Those words did not turn up in the shipped game either: not in subtitles, not in cutscene audio, not in ambient speech.

We machine-transcribed the retail game's lines. A match under that method proves the phrase is in the game; an absence is weaker evidence, so for every negative we checked that the surrounding words transcribe normally.

The same goes for Devin Weston. The scene where he recruits Franklin is in the game, but the early take is entirely different. There Devin is on something, apologising for being wound up and not normally like this. He buys his girlfriend off with a black card. He complains that the criminal world has gone downhill — that back when he was merely a millionaire he knew real gangsters, and now they are all chasing book deals and reality shows. And he puts a number on his last divorce: 135 million, which he calls cheap at the price. Of all that, one line about a Darwinist survives in the game.

The Meltdown premiere. Eight banks of early takes of the red carpet scene, where the interviewer talks nonsense about a polar bear and recycling condoms, Michael waits for his wife, and she does not come. The scene shipped — but the text in the take is different.

The rewritten arrival of Trevor at Michael's. The scene is in the game, but the lines differ: Trevor needles Fabien and Jimmy, and drags out of a stammering Jimmy that Tracey has gone to an audition. Three insults from that version did not turn up in retail subtitles or audio — even though the word "audition" is said six times in the same scene.

An early Dreyfuss. The archive contains a different take of the ending to the Leonora Johnson mystery. Dreyfuss calls for security in the shipped game too; what changes is the timing. In this take, he first pleads with Franklin, saying he has given the best years of his life to the place. He calls for security only after Franklin refuses, rather than after the photograph.

And a cut piece of product placement in the mouth of a Fame or Shame judge. In the shipped episode the host promises even subtler product placement, and the spiritual judge delivers a parable. In the build, in two takes, something else is recorded in that slot: the judge is enjoying a branded triple cheeseburger with ten rashers of bacon.

That the judge advertises that diner has been known since 2014. What is new is the exact wording of the piece that never went to air.

And one audio bank is not a scene at all, and it shows the difference between a working build and a game better than anything else. It is a chunk of a recording session that landed in the file whole. You can hear the voice director's commands — quiet on set, rolling, go, cut, a bit more shock — and then four consecutive takes of one and the same Trevor line.

What ships is edited scenes. In the working build, lying next to them, are raw sessions with flubs, queries and directions.

So far, we’ve looked at work that was built and shelved, cancelled or rewritten. The archive also contains files for an update Rockstar was still preparing to release when the data was stolen.

In the file listing the feature switches there is a telling pair of lines. The flag for the July 2022 update, The Criminal Enterprises, which came out six weeks before the hack, is switched on unconditionally. The neighbouring switch, set up for the second update of 2022, is on only in the internal build. In the one that goes to players, it is off.

Behind that flag, by the VGTimes count, sit around 31,900 lines of code across 142 files. The count is approximate because our method cannot reliably identify the boundaries of nested conditional blocks in every case. The list of 142 files is more certain. But the order of magnitude speaks for itself — it is more than behind any other switch in the same file, including Cops'n'Crooks with its eleven thousand and change.

And the file names make it obvious what this is: an acid lab, a Juggalo hideout, a multi-storey garage, street dealers, login rewards, a Christmas 2022 scenario. These files relate to the Los Santos Drug Wars update cycle, which began on 13 December 2022. The multi-storey garage and street dealers were added later; the listed features can be checked in the game without the leak.

The latest date in the checked script headers is 10 August 2022, about a month before the hack. A file for the multi-storey garage carries a date from August 2021. Those headers do not establish when all the code in the surviving files was written.

Leaks often draw attention to things a studio never released. This archive also held code for an update that shipped 3 months after the theft, including interiors, in-game economy systems and a Christmas scenario.

The flag separates internal builds from player-facing ones, but "sitting behind a flag" does not mean "ready to ship". Between August and December the update was surely still being worked on: the switch shows a stage, not readiness.

The update's contents did leak before release without this archive. The find here is not the pack's composition but what stage it was at and what separated it from players.

The last thing visible in the archive is where the studio went next.

Rockstar uses a shared set of development tools across its projects. VGTimes found 311 files in the GTA 5 tree with references to other development branches. Ninety of them carry traces of the americas branch — the working name for the sixth game, which Bloomberg wrote about in 2022. Two hundred and twelve carry traces of rdr3, that is, Red Dead Redemption 2.

The remaining nine fell into neither column and had to be taken one by one. They work the other way round: their service path leads not outwards but into the fifth game's own tree — what points outwards is something else inside the file.

For the vehicle colour editor it is the path it writes its log to: that leads into a directory of the sixth game's branch. Two map tools — the ones that push performance measurements into a search index — have their default dataset there as well; the timestamp on both is 14 September 2022. So does the path to an automation definition inside one settings library. The shelved-changelist tool, by contrast, knows both branches at once: it carries a table of paths for americas and for rdr3 alike. An animation plugin holds two dozen and more paths into rdr3 branch sources. And the oldest file of the nine, from 2015, has a service path into a third branch entirely — wildwest — with rdr3 paths inside it; what that branch was cannot be determined from these files.

The table still has two columns, then. The nine are about something else: what points outwards in these files is not the service path but what they work on.

Across all 311 files, here is what turned up: performance measurement, viewing and controlling test consoles over the network, a debug panel, work with animation and dialogue transfer, a vehicle colour editor. Working tools — not game material and not game code.

The path inside a file says which branch it was set up under, not where the build physically ran. So the correct phrasing is "traces of the branch", not "built in the branch". And no GTA 6 game material turned up in the part of the archive we checked — only references and shared tools.

Not everything can be dated, either. Of the ninety files carrying the americas trace, sixty-one are executables, and only twenty-two of them have a header timestamp that can be treated as a real date: the rest are reproducible builds, and that field holds a slice of a hash rather than a date — which is where "files from 2049" come from.

Those twenty-two are what the chronology is built on: April 2019, a bridge to version control; June 2019, audio libraries; March 2020, PlayStation gamepad support; September 2020, a debug panel; November 2021, performance measurement.

The newest record is 15 September 2022: a test console manager and three of its libraries. Three days later, on 18 September 2022, the GTA 6 videos from the well-known 2022 leak hit the internet — the same leak this archive comes from.

In the part of this 192-gigabyte archive that we checked, we found no GTA 6 game material — only references to a neighbouring branch and tools shared between the projects. The archive instead shows how far different ideas got: from a name in a registry to filmed scenes and a mission that had been tested.

On the bottom rung, a name. Of the Manhunt pack, a row in a directory survives, and it appears nowhere else in the tree we looked through. Of the zombie line, three entries in a playthrough list — and no build conditions for it turned up in the code.

One rung up, things that exist but are placed nowhere. 472 models of an eastern bazaar and a military set with not a single placement: as game objects they are not set up. Four hundred and two engine command registrations with non-empty bodies longer than eight lines, with no calls to them in the scripts we looked through — and some of them are surely legacy from earlier games.

Higher still, things assembled and tested. Rigs with stairs for a horse. A test level where the CIA server hall and other objects are arranged in rows, while the underwater base and space station sit separately. A Miami with collision, traffic paths and night lighting. Cops'n'Crooks with eight hundred and forty-four defects in the tracker — months of testing.

And on the top rung, things that were already being shot. Agent Trevor has a save system of its own, a playthrough order of forty-seven missions, scenes written out down to the props, and shooting dates in December 2014. The cut heist has recorded dialogue, motion capture, a character model commissioned for it and three finale variants.

What made it into the finished game? Liberty City, Agent Trevor and the horse heist never came out. In the GTA 5 files we checked, we found no evidence that players could watch performances at the comedy club. The Dreyfuss, Devin and Solomon scenes did make it in, but they were rewritten. Some vehicles appeared under different names. The December update was still unreleased when the files were stolen; it arrived 3 months later.

Players see the finished version. From that alone, it is hard to tell which ideas Rockstar tried during development, how much work went into them or how close they came to release.

This archive cannot tell us everything Rockstar left out. It covers one development branch and only part of the studio’s work over those years.

The material spans more than a decade: bug tracker records date from 2010–2012, the Miami level from 2014–2015, and scripts run through August 2022. So the archive puts long-shelved projects alongside code for an update that shipped 3 months after the theft and tools containing paths to the next game’s development branch.

Which would you most like to play — Liberty City in GTA 5, Agent Trevor, the horse heist or Cops'n'Crooks? Tell us in the comments.