The Story Behind A Massive GTA 4 Leak 18 Years After Launch

Over the weekend, the Grand Theft Auto fan community was given an incredible gift. No, it wasn’t an early release of GTA 6. Instead, someone found an Xbox 360 dev kit that was used by GTA developer Rockstar North. The contents of that console included an early beta build of GTA IV and loads of cut content and unused assets. The dev kit and its beta files represent one of the biggest GTA IV leaks ever, providing fans with a firsthand look at all sorts of stuff never before seen or only spotted in early screenshots.

You might expect something like this to come from some super shady operation. Nope! This dev kit was just sitting in the trunk of a car, waiting to be bought by anyone curious enough to take a look. That someone ended up being Jan, whom I spoke to over Discord about the dev kit and how he got his hands on it.

A simple little boot sale

“I go to car boot sales quite often, partly to get stuff to resell and partly to get stuff for my personal collection,” Jan told Kotaku. “When doing my rounds, I saw what I immediately recognised as a Phat Xbox 360, with what I first thought looked like a ‘tumour’ sticking out of it, later turning out to be the Sidecar.” This is the extra piece of tech attached to the Xbox 360’s dev kit units.

Jan didn’t immediately recognize it as an Xbox dev kit, though, and assumed it was just some weirdly modded console. However, once he picked it up and examined it, he noticed a Rockstar North sticker on it. Jan lives in Edinburgh, the Scottish city that GTA developer Rockstar North calls home.

“I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but I knew it was something good, so I asked the guy [how much], and he said five pounds. I asked if he had change, gave him a tenner.”

According to Jan, the person who sold him the GTA IV dev kit unit was someone who is there “relatively often” selling old electronics. Jan assumes he is finding this stuff in scrapyards or ewaste dumps, but when he asked the seller for more info, he wouldn’t say much. After prying a bit more, the seller said he had a friend in another city who “supplies him with this stuff.” There was a language barrier, which made it tricky to get more details, but Google Translate helped finish the deal.

Jan says he wandered around the flea market for a bit longer, but was too excited to stay and went home to look at what he had bought. A quick look at the serial number confirmed he had a Rockstar North dev kit. He had no idea what to expect, and definitely didn’t think he was about to discover a pre-release, early build of GTA IV as well as a long list of cut content, including remnants of an unfinished zombies mode.

Trying to sell the GTA IV dev kit

©Jan / Kotaku

Ironically, Jan told Kotaku that he’s not the biggest Rockstar fan. He played some GTA V as a kid at a friend’s house, but has yet to get around to playing it as an adult. He has been following news of GTA 6 and says he’s been near the Rockstar North office in Edinburgh “many times.” Since discovering the holy grail of GTA IV leaked content, Jan says he’s gotten “a bit more” into GTA and Rockstar.

Now that the dev kit has been uploaded online and has been shared and downloaded by many, many people, Jan is contemplating selling the unit. He has apparently  received a one-thousand-pound offer from someone. He previously tried to list it on eBay with an $800 Buy Now price, but when it got snatched up “very quickly,” he asked the buyer if he could auction it instead, and they agreed. Jan relisted it for a few days, but eBay has taken it down. It could be due to the fact that the dev kit contains a program called “Dolphin.xex.” This is a simple OG Xbox software demo used by devs to help get their games running on the hardware, but someone might have assumed it was the widely popular Wii emulator, also known as Dolphin. So to avoid any more “risky” attention, he’s steering clear of eBay and is only accepting private offers.

When I asked if he was surprised to have found GTA IV‘s beta build on this random dev kit he found at a flea market, Jan said he was just surprised he was even lucky enough to have found it.  “I was surprised that I got it at all, not as much at what ended up being on it – at that point, I had no idea what to expect.” Turns out he’s provided a treasure trove of GTA IV beta content and unused assets that the community will spend the next few weeks scavenging through and that will forever give us a better picture of the game’s development process.