The "Compressed" 684MB Version of Grand Theft Auto 4 Isn't a Miracle, It's a Massacre

The same modder who made headlines last week for squeezing Grand Theft Auto V down to 2.5GB has turned their attention to its predecessor, and the results are somehow even more drastic. This time, Grand Theft Auto IV went from its roughly 20GB install size down to just 684 megabytes. For context, that's smaller than most smartphone photos taken in 2026. As for how intact the game remained, well... we'll get to that.

It's smaller than a single high-resolution texture file in most modern games. It's the kind of file size that makes you wonder whether you're downloading a game or a malware-filled PDF. The process, however, tells a different story than the number suggests. To hit that 684MB target, the modder had to compress textures, strip out all missions, remove the radio stations, gut the cutscenes, and delete roughly 90 percent of Liberty City.

If you've ever wandered through Broker, Algonquin, and Alderney in the original game, imagining those boroughs mostly gone gives you an idea of how little is actually left, which is where the conversation takes an interesting turn. At a certain point, "compression" stops being the right word. When 90 percent of the map is missing, the missions are gone, and there's no radio playing while you drive through the handful of remaining streets, what you have isn't really a compressed version of GTA IV but a tech demo wearing GTA IV's gutted skin.

That's not to take anything away from the modder's technical skill. What OptiJogos has been doing with both GTA V and GTA IV is genuinely impressive from a reverse-engineering standpoint, but the framing matters. "Modder compresses GTA IV to 684MB" implies the same game in a smaller package. The reality is closer to "modder creates a barely functional sliver of GTA IV that fits on a floppy disk if floppy disks were still a thing," and you can't expect anyone wanting to play through Niko Bellic and his immigrant story walking away happy given how little of the actual game is left.

Where this experiment does carry real weight, though, is in what it says about game file sizes in general and what it could mean for Grand Theft Auto 6 specifically.

As we covered last week, the GTA V compression experiment highlighted how much data in modern games sits unused by most players at any given time. The full GTA V install includes every mission, every radio station, every texture at maximum quality, every interior, every cutscene, and every Grand Theft Auto Online asset, all loaded onto your drive whether you need them or not. The 2.5GB mod proved that you can strip almost all of it out, and the core sandbox still technically functions.

The GTA IV experiment reinforces that same point, just with an older, smaller game. Now consider GTA 6, which is being built on RAGE 9, will feature a map set across the fictional state of Leonida, and is expected to be one of the largest and most detailed open-world games ever made. Nobody outside of Rockstar knows what the install size will be, but it's reasonable to expect it will be significant. If GTA V sits at around 120GB in its current state, GTA 6 could push well past that.

This matters more than usual right now because storage is only getting more expensive. As we've reported, a global memory chip shortage driven by AI data center demand has pushed DRAM and NAND prices up by 80 to 90 percent in Q1 2026 compared to Q4 2025. The Steam Deck has gone out of stock partly because of this same shortage. Every gigabyte on your SSD is now meaningfully more expensive than it was a year ago.

Rockstar could, in theory, take a page from this modding experiment and offer players more control over what gets installed. Selective downloads, where you choose between story mode and GTA Online assets, or where high-resolution texture packs are optional rather than mandatory, would go a long way. It's something other studios have already implemented, so it's not like Rockstar will break new ground by offering.

Of course, Rockstar has never done that before. They have always shipped the entire game as a single, if massive, install. Will they change this for GTA 6? We'll never know what Rockstar has planned, but we're certainly hoping they'll consider a modular approach, for the sake of all our storage devices and wallets.

There's a massive gap between what a modder can do by gutting 90 percent of a game and what a professional studio can do with proper optimization tools, proprietary compression algorithms, and years of development time. Rockstar's engineers are among the best in the industry, and GTA V already uses streaming technology that loads and unloads assets dynamically as players move through the world. GTA 6 will almost certainly push that further.

The question isn't whether Rockstar can make a smaller game. They can't, and nobody expects them to. The question is whether they'll give players the option to install only what they need, rather than forcing everyone to dedicate a quarter of their console's storage to a single title.

For now, the 684MB GTA IV mod is a fun that pushes Rockstar's 2008 classic to its absolute breaking point. It's not a version of Liberty City anyone would actually want to spend time in, but it's a reminder that there's a lot of room between "the full game" and "nothing at all," and that Rockstar, with all the resources at their disposal, could probably find a smarter middle ground if they wanted to.