Before players finally explore the state of Leonida a year from now, there may be a good reason to make a pitstop in Liberty City. A rumor suggests that a port of 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV is in the works and could be released as early as the end of this year.
The rumor is credited to a tipster named Tez2, a user deep in the trenches of GTA Forums known for leaking information related to the secretive developer. The rumor has since been amplified by other Rockstar Games’ sleuths on social media, lending a bit of believability. Tez2 also added that the upcoming rerelease is the reason Rockstar had the very impressive Liberty City Preservation Project mod for GTA 5 removed from the internet within weeks of its official release.
Rockstar itself has given zero reason to believe it’s working on a re-release, especially since doubling down on hitting its May 2026 release target for Grand Theft Auto VI earlier this month. However, this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve heard there’s internal interest in a re-release of its 360/PS3 era classic. In 2022, Kotaku reported that Rockstar was looking to make a GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption remaster in the style of the GTA: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition, but scrapped those plans after the latter’s disastrous launch.
While those plans were allegedly scrapped, Rockstar has since released a more straightforward Red Dead Redemption port on PC, Switch, and PlayStation 4 in the last year, finally making it playable on modern consoles outside of the Xbox ecosystem. GTA IV is similarly unplayable on the majority of today’s hardware. The game was released on PlayStation 3 and is one of several games from that generation lost to time on Sony machines. And though Xbox Series consoles can play the game still with improved framerates, it’s been well documented that the improvements have inadvertently made the game’s final mission extremely difficult to complete.
Even if Rockstar is putting all of its resources into pushing GTA VI across the finish line, a straight-up port of the game that kicked off the current GTA trilogy would make a lot of sense. After all, GTA 5 has been re-released multiple times, including on current generation consoles. A refresher on the events that started all of this would be handy, even for those who played the now 17-year-old game the first time around.
Grand Theft Auto IV follows the immigrant story of Niko Bellic, a Serbian veteran who’s looking to start a new life in the land of opportunity. While he hopes to make an honest living in Liberty City, his cousin’s ties to the criminal underworld begin a steady descent into crime, and eventually, revenge. The game had two expansions: the biker-themed tragedy Lost And Damned, and the glitzy lighthearted romp The Ballad Of Gay Tony.
GTA VI is set (presumably) 18 years after GTA IV, but the two are still connected. For one, Rockstar has already confirmed on its website that GTA VI protagonist Lucia Caminos originally hails from one of Liberty City’s five boroughs. It wouldn’t be all that surprising to find out that she’s related or at least acquainted with one of the main rogues Niko meets along the way. Giving players an easy way to revisit Liberty City once more would be a surefire way to satisfy fans ahead of the most anticipated game of 2026.
If the Grand Theft Auto IV remaster winds up being real, it wouldn’t be the only Rockstar Games classic being revisited. Remedy Entertainment is currently developing a total remake of Max Payne and Max Payne 2 with Rockstar publishing the project. The games are making “great progress and remains in full production,” the Finnish developer announced during an earning call last month.
