GTA 5 Source Code Reveals Treasure Trove Of Cancelled DLC And Games Like Bully 2
Remember that big Rockstar hack last year? The stuff that made headlines at the time was predictably the material related to GTA VI. Rockstar's next entry in its giga-hit franchise hadn't even been officially confirmed at that time, so the hype was unreal. Well, the hackers got a whole lot more than just GTA VI in that hack, it turns out. Yesterday, on Christmas Day, leakers released a 4GB package that included the entire source code for GTA V among other Rockstar internal materials.
The 4GB package doesn't include any assets, like models, textures, animations, audio files, or anything like that. It simply includes the game's source code, but that's most exciting part because reverse-engineering a compiled executable back into its original source code form is a ludicrously-difficult task, and while heroic efforts have yielded fruit in the case of some older games (notably Super Mario 64, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Jak & Daxter, and Perfect Dark), doing the same for a modern PC game would be a nightmarish task.
Besides the game source itself, the package also apparently included piles of pieces hinting at canceled plans for both additional games as well as add-on packages for GTA V that never materialized. While GTA IV got two large DLCs that added lots of story content starring new characters, GTA V never got a single extra piece of single-player content. Apparently, Rockstar may have been at one point considering up to eight different offline add-ons for GTA V, enumerated in the screenshot below:
Above: A script listing hypothetical GTA V DLCs. Top: a functioning dev build of GTA V built from the source.
Apparently this file was just a configuration placeholder and may have been entirely hypothetical, but that hasn't stopped GTA fans from extrapolating the existence of various GTA V expansions from it. Some folks think that some of these expansions got turned into GTA Online content, like the Agent Trevor pack which supposedly became the Doomsday Heist expansion for GTA Online. Many people have also suspected that the apparently-scrapped plans for a "LibertyV DLC" may be the reason that Take-Two went ham with takedown requests on mods that import GTA IV's Liberty City into GTA V.
The engine source also seems to include references to or pieces of various other canceled games, including the mysterious "Agent" title that was purportedly set in the 1970s, a fifth Midnight Club game, as well as, of course, Bully 2. For those unfamiliar, Bully was a PlayStation 2 release that took the chaotic, murderous action of Grand Theft Auto and scaled it down in both size and age, featuring a schoolboy in boarding school who must contend not only with teachers and class but also with bullies, girls, and potentially, a part-time job. It was a modest hit for Rockstar but maintains a fervent cult following.
Rockstar never officially announced a sequel to Bully, but various factors pointed to a sequel being in development as late as 2013. However, a former Rockstar employee admitted in 2019 that development on the sequel had actually stopped in 2009 after more than a year of work. The concept art image above actually dates to a leak back in 2017; there doesn't appear to be any new media available in the GTA V leaks. However, fragments in the source talking about Bully 2 do seem to confirm that the sequel would have used Rockstar's then-nascent RAGE engine, deployed in nearly every game Rockstar has released since Bully.
The 4GB package released yesterday may in fact only be part of a much larger 200GB package that includes all of the assets for GTA V in their original, pre-baked form. We're not sure exactly what the value of this would be given that (as we discussed above) the assets for the game can be ripped from the final release—the already-released source code is the really interesting part—but we'll see what happens if this supposed "full" version materializes.
