GTA IV Prototype Hype Gets Reality Check from Ex Rockstar Dev

The Grand Theft Auto IV development build that surfaced from a £5 car boot sale and was subsequently DMCA'd from the Internet Archive caused quite a stir after Grand Theft Auto fans discovered unused characters, early versions of Liberty City, cut missions, and a zombie mode. It led many to believe that Rockstar could've added so much more to GTA 4 but chose not to, for one reason or another.

Then Obbe Vermeij, the former Rockstar North technical director who worked on Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and GTA IV, responded on X with a message that amounted to a polite bucket of cold water.

There really isn't a lot of cut content in GTA 4. Just some experiments that were abandoned at various stages or that we didn't have time for to finish. The development of IV was much more 'planned out' than the trilogy before it.

For context: the PS2-era trilogy was made under what Vermeij has previously described in our interviews as a more freewheeling process. Developers had significant creative latitude. Ideas were tried, built out to varying degrees of completion, and then evaluated. Many of those ideas did not survive. The result was a development history littered with abandoned experiments, half-finished systems, and content cut for time, technical limitations, or changes in creative direction, which is also what made those games feel alive in a way that competitors could not replicate. The scale-down philosophy that a former audio designer described in his KiwiTalkz interview, build everything and then decide what stays, was operating in a particularly aggressive form during the PS2 era.

GTA IV was different. It was Rockstar's first HD-era game, built on the exponentially more difficult in-house RAGE engine for hardware (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360). The cost of building a feature on HD hardware was higher, and the time required to create assets at HD fidelity was longer with higher stakes. In response, Rockstar apparently tightened its planning process. "More planned out" means the studio decided earlier what was going on in the game and committed to those decisions with less of the experimental overflow that characterized the PS2 titles.

This does not mean GTA IV had zero cut content. The zombie mode references that dataminers found in the dev build, the "Z: Resurrection" entry that The Cutting Room Floor has documented, is almost certainly an example, but there just isn't as much as most expected.

If GTA IV represented a shift toward more planned development compared to the PS2 trilogy, and if Red Dead Redemption 2 continued that trend with an even more structured and ambitious production process, where does Grand Theft Auto 6 fall on that spectrum?

Rockstar has worked on the game for roughly seven years across multiple studios with a budget that may approach $3 billion, on a scale that requires ridiculously meticulous planning. You do not coordinate work across Rockstar North, Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar India, and half a dozen other studios without a structured pipeline. If the trajectory from the PS2 era through GTA IV and RDR2 holds, we could see cut content become less about abandoned features and more about refined versions of systems built to a higher standard than needed, then scaled back. The modders and dataminers will still find things after launch. They always do, just maybe not the same as the junkyard of abandoned ideas of the PS2-era titles.

But, of course, we can't say for certain if this is the case. Grand Theft Auto V had its fair share of cut content, including the infamous Mount Chiliad mystery and the Agent Trevor DLC.

We'll find out soon enough come November 19 when GTA 6 comes out.