An Xbox 360 dev kit containing a beta build of Grand Theft Auto IV was recently discovered and purchased for a few bucks. The contents of the kit have since been uploaded online, revealing cut and unfinished content including new weapons, beta cutscenes, unused vehicles, and even our first look at what seems to have been an in-development zombies mode.
Over the weekend, GTA Forums user janmatant was at a “boot sale” in Edinburgh, Scotland, the same city where Rockstar North is located, and allegedly bought an Xbox 360 dev kit for five pounds. The Xbox 360 dev kit features a sticker on the top indicating it was used at Rockstar North, and screenshots show it includes over 120GB of content, including what appears to be a 2007 beta build of GTA IV, as well as many unfinished or cut assets for the open-world game. The entire dev kit has since been uploaded to the Internet Archive.
There’s a lot to see from this leaked build of GTA IV, and it will take the community some time to comb through every scrap of data buried on this dev kit. But perhaps the most exciting find is the discovery of assets that point to an unfinished zombies mode. This mode would have featured specific pickups, and users exploring the build have also found mangled police bodies and a bloody hospital gurney connected to the mode.
Kotaku has contacted Rockstar Games.
People have also started to get beta assets working on PC. Some have already modded cut weapons, like an early version of the AK-47 and a silenced pistol, into GTA IV. There’s also been a lot of progress on getting GTA IV‘s beta cutscenes running, too.
If you’re a big fan of GTA IV or just love getting to see what a big game looked like before it launched, this dev kit discovery is very exciting. You can tell that the people in the GTA Forums’ GTA IV beta content thread are happy. That thread was started over a decade ago, and activity in it had slowed down as people had mostly documented everything that was out there. Now they have over 100GB of new early GTA IV content to search through and are pretty stoked about it.
