Grand Theft Auto IV came out back in April of 2008, almost 18 years ago and over the weekend, a user on the GTA Forums released a backup of a hard drive from a developer's console.
The devkit, which is an Xbox 360, contained a previously unseen beta build of the game from November 2007 (build 78) which featured many unseen and early assets that the community is currently combing through to see what could have been in the final game. The devkit, considering it is over 18 years old, is in decent shape! You will notice the different shape of the console vs a standard retail Xbox 360.
Image of the devkit console via janmatant.
The console was apparently purchased for a whopping $5 in Edinburgh Scotland and runs Xbox's developer operating system, Xshell. The contents of the drive were dumped and posted onto the Internet Archive for anyone to download.
Big Discoveries
We had originally seen ferries inside of trailers and inside of pre-rendered cutscenes but otherwise, are not usable in the game.
On the weapons side, . ThanksLividkilla66!
there were always small references to a Revolver in GTA4's files, but now we've got the full picture!
We also see completely differences with the released radio stations, as MGgames100 covers:
Quote From MGgames100 Radio Broker:
The Electric Soft Parade - If That's The Case, Then I Don't Know
VHS Or Beta - Burn It Down
Black Strobe - Blood Shot Eyes
Union Of Knives - Infant Eyes
Preistress - Run Home
Prophet Omega - Criminal
Goose - Low Mode
Vladivostok FM:
Ruslana - Ми будемо перші
Bratia Grim - Baraban
Leningrad - Huyamba
LRR:
The Who - Bargin
IF99 (Includes intros from DJ!):
Tony Allen - Progress
George Duke - Reach For It
Massive B (early mix, seems that the songs use different takes, but im not 100%):
Tony Matterhorn - March Out
Collie Buddz - Come Around
Richie Spice - Youth Dem Cold + Chezidek - Dem A Fight We + Choppa Chop - Lovely Day (part of Truth & Rights Riddim)
Electro-Choc:
The Prodigy - Girls
Dubfire - RibCage
Anne Clark - Our Darkness
Fusion FM (Includes intros from DJ!):
Donald Byrd - Night Whistler
Dexter Wensel - Life On Mars
Donny Hathaway - Valdez In The Country
Roy Ayers - Midnight After Dark
Lee Ritenour - "Countdown (Captain Fingers)
The Classics:
Run DMC - Sucker MCs
San Juan:
Ilegales - Me Tienes
Calle 13- Pa'l Norte
Grupomania - Linda Eh
Daddy Yanke - Who's Your Daddy?
Elvis Crespo - La Foto Se Me Borro
The Vibe:
Al. B. Sure - Nite And Day
Eugene Wilde - Gotta Get You Home Tonight
Brian McKnight - Used to Be My Girl
The Beat:
Jim Jones - Get out Ya Car
Radio Broker - Placeholders from Fusion Fm.
Vladivostok - Only 4 intros, all used in the final.
LRR - Its pretty much the same as the final, only difference is The Who song, no DJ intro for it tho.
IF99 - DJ Intros for the cut songs.
Beat - Unfinished, only has 7 songs, all of them recorded for the game. Stick'm is an instrumental, and there is an unreleased track by an unknown rapper. IDs are the same as the final, but are separate, which is cool. Rest are placeholders from Fusion FM.
Tuff Gong - Same as final.
Journey - The robo-voice is male, but other than that it seems to be pretty much unchanged.
Massive B - No Bobby at all. Call Pon Dem, Raise It Up and Badder Den Dem have different lyrics that mentions Russian Mafia.
Electro-Choc - No Francis.
Fusion - DJ Intros for the cut songs.
LCHC - Same as final.
JNR - Same as final.
The Classics - Just two place holder songs (Sucker MCs and MC Lyte) repeated over and over.
San Juan - No DJ intros, the rest is the same as the final (with the exception of the songs themselves ofc).
the Vibe - DJ Intros for the cut songs.
We also get some unseen models and textures of beta cell phones.
And.. Zombies? Yeah, there are references to Zombies via a bunch of models and some hospital beds (zomb_hos_bed_2), possibly a minigame that was cut.
Unfortunately, not all the files dumped from the hard drive are there. Critical files that are required to run the game on the console were not found so although it might be possible for the community to eventually find a way to get the game to run, right now it isn't possible and we don't see the full picture; The files in the "movies" folder, the "common" folder, and the xbox360.rpf file no longer exist in the devkit. That doesn't mean people haven't been importing models into a modded PC version of the game to see them though. Thanksnkjellman!
Or maybe you want to see a deleted scene ?
It is a super cool find though and this gives us great insight into the development of GTA IV. Grand Theft Auto fans needed something to do to pass the time until the GTA VI release later this year, and I guess we've found it. For the record, these are only a few of the finds from the dump, you really want to go browse the thread which is receiving many updates as everyone is finding more cool stuff.
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