Yesterday, on GTAForums, user MGGames100 posted a message saying, "something big has dropped," only for MapleEllie to respond with a link to a 118 GB archive for a dev build of GTA IV that appeared out of nowhere. What has since followed is one of the biggest info dumps in the history of the "Grand Theft Auto IV Beta Hunt" collective, and it was all possible thanks to an unassuming Xbox 360 devkit.
The story starts with user "janmatant" who apparently went to a random car boot sale in Edinburgh and purchased an old Xbox 360 for just $5. From the pictures, we can tell it's a revised model based on the original "fat" design from 2005, but with an updated motherboard, likely from the Xbox 360 Arcade era. Anyhow, the important bit is the "Rockstart North Ltd." asset tag, which shows this console belonged to the company.
If that wasn't enough confirmation, the back of the console says, "Xbox 360 XDK," and it runs Xshell, an operating system that was only issued to developers. This devkit came with a 120 GB hard drive, which only contained one game — Grand Theft Auto IV. It's a pre-release version of GTA IV from November 2007, just a few months before the game's official launch. Hence, it includes a bunch of stuff that never made it into the final cut or was changed for official release.
One of the biggest discoveries were assets for the ferries that were shown in trailers (and appear in cutscenes) but are otherwise unusable in the game. You can't get on these ships since the game focuses on car and taxi travel on the basis of its grounded storytelling. Speaking of which, people found out that about half of the radio stations are completely different from the release version, featuring different songs.
The final version of GTA IV also omitted the revolver, and over the years modders have found leftover assets for it in the game, but it hasn't been seen in this version so far. There's a silenced pistol included in this build, along with some other unused weapons, lots of unfinished animations for them, and some audio placeholders. People have found beta NPCs and an early model for Michelle, too, which looks quite creepy.
Speaking of creepy, there was apparently a zombies mode cut from the game that's been the stuff of legends for years. There's no official confirmation on this, but the dev build sheds some light on the matter as it includes assets such as hospital beds referencing zombies. There are also early versions of zombie models in the files along with some animations.
There's a ton of other stuff to get through — it's a full build after all — but a playable version is not yet ready, though efforts are fully underway. This is a huge win for the preservationists in the GTA IV Beta Hunt community who've been looking for pre-release builds of the game for almost 12 years at this point. The thread in GTAForums was created in 2014, with the original creator still active as recently as last year.
Since its creation, only about 105 pages of messages had been sent in the thread, but over 14 new ones have spawned in just one day of this leak. People are talking on the forum as we speak, pointing out cool new findings every hour. Now, we have to keep in mind that this is an Xbox 360 version of the game, so it'll be more effort to get it working on PC despite such a feature-rich (and important) build.
As for the sacred Xbox 360 devkit that made all this possible, janmatant is trying to sell it for $800 on eBay, which seems criminally low for what this thing is. But you have to realize that the main selling point, the GTA IV build, has already been pulled and uploaded to the internet for free, so it's just novelty hardware at this point. It's still an important piece of game history, though, so we hope it goes to a loving home.
