You never know what you will find at a garage sale. That first-generation iPhone or iPod someone stored in their attic could be worth thousands. Or maybe you’ll find a golden nugget of gaming history hidden in the most unassuming of locations, like a console with an unreleased beta build of one of the biggest video games of all time.
At the tail end of March, GTAForums user MapleEllie posted a link to an archived beta build of “Grand Theft Auto IV” on the “Grand Theft Auto IV Beta Hunt” thread. The data was full of non-finalized character and item models, different radio stations, and unfinished game modes. Initially, the data was hosted on the Internet Archive, but it has since been removed. Lucky for us, nothing on the internet is ever truly deleted, and others on the forum cataloged the choicest takeaways.
You’re probably wondering who we should thank for this treasure trove of information. The answer is GTAForums user janmatant. According to the thread, they found the information stored on an old Xbox 360 “console” they purchased at a car boot sale (the UK equivalent of a flea market). While the console looks like an OG white Xbox 360, it has a Rockstar North Ltd. sticker on top and is labeled “Xbox 360 XDK.” The console runs on Xshell, which indicates it was a dev kit. This device and the information stored on it could be worth a fortune, but janmatant bought it for £5. While janmatant plans on selling the dev kit, we have a plea for the next owner: Please keep the console as is and don’t mod it into an emulator or anything.
Thrifted Xbox 360 dev kit offers insight into the game development process
According to MapleEllie, janmatant’s original archive contained 118 GB of data. Links to the archive itself are dead, but sites like Tom’s Hardware have already been poring through its contents for eager users who missed it.
Tom’s Hardware reports that the dev kit contains a beta build full of assets that never made the final cut, the most surprising of which would be zombies. The files contain several hospital beds that reference zombies, as well as zombie models and animations that were early in development. The dev kit also stored data on moving ferries, weapons such as a revolver, and countless unused animations.
Curious fans reached out to Obbe Vermeij, a former technical director at Rockstar, who revealed that ferries were cut late in development due to collision issues. As for the zombies, he said they were likely added to the files by unnamed artists who “were always trying to put zombies in things,” but noted that none of the attempts ever got far.
While the links to the archive may be lost, plenty of users on the Grand Theft Auto IV Beta Hunt thread are still on the lookout for more lost builds and any other relevant information they can find. Perhaps in a few years, when another lucky person comes across something like the infamous V-shaped PlayStation 5 dev kit, they’ll get lucky and find beta builds for “Grand Theft Auto V” and “Grand Theft Auto VI.”
