With GTA 6 still half a year away, we took it as a chance to look back at the past of the king of crime games, heading all the way back to 2008. GTA 4, which was released on April 29th 2008, became the fastest-selling entertainment product ever at the time earning it a Guinness World Record. It made $310 million in the first 24 hours and around $500 million after a week, with it being praised for its gritty atmosphere, deep and morally gray story and advanced physics for the time. The protagonist is Nico Bellic, an ex-soldier from eastern Europe who moved to the US in search of the american dream only to be forced into crime to pay off his debts. Note we have not yet used the word zombie.
A British man by the name of Jan Matant claims to have just picked up an unfinished DevKit version of GTA IV from November 2007 for just $6 at a garage sale in Edinburgh, the same city where Rockstar North who made the game is located. He then posted around 130 GB of original files that never made it into the final game.
The leaked models range from old clothing designs, dozens of unreleased songs for the radio, removed weapons and cutscenes. To put all this in context, a prototype zombies mode was designed before even Red Dead Redemption 1’s Undead Nightmare DLC, which may mean that the idea for zombies in a Rockstar game made it to San Diego from this cut mode as they worked on it with Rockstar North.
The old code even has a ferry boat that was in the original trailer – see the trailer at 00:13 below – we’ve watched it 10 times and can’t see any zombies.
The main models found so far for the zombies mode include unique loot pickups, zombie reskins of NPC models, mangled police bodies, and a bloody hospital gurney. Another zombies connection in GTA IV is the existence of a poster in the subway for a game called Z Resurrection which is thought to have meant to have been a zombie minigame.
When the technical director for Rockstar north at the time, Obbe Vermeij was asked by Kotaku about the existence of this mode he said ”I don’t remember anything about zombies in 4. Artists were always trying to put zombies in things. Not something that got very far”. As well as ”It was probably an experiment that didn’t work out. There were a lot of those”.
This suggests that it was quite a small or perhaps even an unplanned project spearheaded by only a few artists and devs instead of a key part of development. This may have been why it was scrapped with there being a time crunch near the release of the game requiring these people to work on more important projects.This seems even more likely as it is also part of the reason behind why the ferry transport system was cut from the game.
In spite of the fact that the zombie mode never reached even close to finished it is of significant interest for superfans, and along with the other new details makes for an interesting look into the development process of this famous game. Hopefully, the mode will be modded into the game so we can see what it will be like to play. All eyes on NexusMods. In the meantime, here’s the PCGamesN guide to the best GTA mods and the latest on the GTA 6 release date.
