GTA 5 has suffered a new leak that suggests Rockstar Games had ambitious, city-sized DLC plans for the game.
Reports emerging online today indicate a near 200GB version of the GTA 5 source code initially leaked in 2023 has now been made public, and interested parties are analyzing it as we speak. The highlight here is what looks like a Liberty City DLC for GTA 5 that obviously never saw the light of day (GTA Online’s enormous success steered Rockstar away from story DLC towards multiplayer focused updates).
According to X / Twitter user TJGM, the Liberty City DLC found in the files has been extrapolated and visualized to show just how much bigger this version of the city is compared to the one found in GTA 4. “Here’s a look at the expanded Liberty City layout,” they tweeted. “This outline of the map is drawn based on where shorelines are, the lines indicate zones that play shoreline audio.”
There is speculation online that this Liberty City DLC may have been held back for GTA 6, but there is no evidence to suggest that is Rockstar’s plan.
More has emerged from this leak: Agent Trevor DLC mission names; cut vehicles, cut dialogue, cut cutscenes, and more on GTA 5. There also appears to be very early GTA 6 work in the files.
On Agent Trevor, GTA fans have known for some time that Rockstar worked on a single-player DLC for GTA 5 that would have seen Trevor assume the role of a secret agent. In 2024, actor Steven Ogg said Rockstar originally planned to make a story expansion focused on his character, Trevor, with it thought to have fallen by the wayside as the developer focused on the cash cow that was GTA Online.
Ogg was joined by Michael actor Ned Luke and Franklin actor Shawn Fonteno in a Questions and Answers session with Streamily, and the trio shed light on what they claimed was scrapped downloadable content for GTA 5 that starred Trevor as a Federal Investigation Bureau agent.
“Originally they were gonna do continuing stories of Michael, Franklin, and Trevor,” Luke said, and Ogg expanded on his version. “We also had that really cool s**t of — and I forget if it was DLC, I have no idea — but where Trevor was gonna be undercover, he works for the FEDs,” Ogg said. “And we did shoot some of that stuff with James Bond Trevor. He’s still kind of a f**k up but he’s doing his best. And we shot some stuff and then it just disappeared and they never followed up on it.”
Also in 2024, Joe Robino, who was a senior camera artist and virtual cinematographer working at Rockstar’s New York office from 2010 to 2016, spoke to the SanInPlay YouTube channel about why the GTA 5 story DLC was canceled.
“A lot of the team went to do Red Dead Redemption 2 right away and I took on this other project that was a standalone DLC for GTA that never came out and it was kick ass,” Robino revealed.
“That was my thing. I was one of the main editors, camera artists, and on-stage stuff. We split our teams into two. I stayed on GTA Online and then this DLC, which Steven Ogg [the actor who played Trevor Philips] was a very important part of.
“And then some of the team overlapped and went to RDR2 early on, and then we just kind of did this [flipped motion], because when that game got shelved, we spent so much money… a lot of that stuff though did end up making it I believe into later iterations of GTA Online, I think. So it’s not like they wasted it.
“It was really really good. But when GTA Online came out it was so much of a cash cow and people were loving it so much that it was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would outcompete that. I think looking back now you could probably do both. But that was a business decision they made. I was a little upset about that.
“That actually was a lot of the reason for me being a little sour at that time. Because I was like yo, WTF guys? This s**t’s awesome. Let’s keep going. Let’s finish this s**t.”
Fans have had snippets of information about GTA 5’s fabled story DLC over the years. GTA dataminers have also discovered a reference to Trevor with a jetpack, which suggests story mode DLC was repurposed into GTA Online, as Robino said. In 2018, Rockstar finally unveiled GTA Online’s Doomsday Heist missions alongside the Thruster jetpack.
Last year, speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast, Rockstar Games co-founder and former lead writer Dan Houser addressed the DLC for the first time, insisting that if the developer had continued with it, it wouldn’t have been able to make 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2.
“The internet knows we made a DLC… single-player DLC for GTA 5 that never came out,” Houser said.
“It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent. It was cute. It never quite came together, and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned. But I think if that had come out, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to make Red Dead 2. So, there are always compromises.”
What approach will Rockstar take with GTA 6? Will it go back to story DLC, or focus on whatever new version of GTA Online it has up its sleeve? Some think Rockstar will eventually add multiple cities, including Liberty City, to GTA 6, alongside GTA Online 2 or whatever the multiplayer mode ends up being called. For now, though, it’s a case of what might have been for GTA 5.
Last week, as part of the ongoing employment tribunal to determine the fate of the 31 GTA 6 developers Rockstar fired last year, the company revealed the extreme lengths it goes to in order to prevent security breaches.
Rockstar has suffered a string of high-profile leaks over the years, most recently the ‘CyberLeek’ incident which saw GTA 6 gameplay hit the internet ahead of the game’s Netflix special. Speaking at the tribunal, Rockstar said it’s under intense scrutiny as the developer of GTA.
“Guarding the secrets of the unique gameplay and design are akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coke protecting its formula,” Rockstar said, adding that it adopts “the security posture of a Wall Street bank.”
In April 2025, Rockstar dismissed an employee in Lincoln, UK, who it alleged disclosed confidential information about GTA 6 to a third party who then published the information to social media. Rockstar dismissed an employee in the U.S. in November 2023 and another in India in November 2025 for two separate acts of information leaking.
Rockstar pointed out the frequency of coffee shop trips by employees and pizza deliveries to the Rockstar offices have been monitored by fans, and traffic volumes by its workplaces were allegedly tracked in a bid to get an inside track on the GTA 6 release date.
Wesley Yin-Poole
Director, News
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
