New GTA 5 Leak Suggests Rockstar Had Ambitious, City-Sized DLC Plans That Were Ultimately Scrapped

A fresh leak of the GTA 5 source code is shedding new light on ambitious plans that Rockstar Games ultimately abandoned, revealing what appears to have been a city-sized Liberty City expansion for the game. Reports emerging online today indicate that a near 200GB version of the GTA 5 source code, initially leaked in 2023, has now been made public and is being analyzed by interested parties as we speak. The most striking discovery is what looks like an unfinished Liberty City DLC that never saw the light of day, with GTA Online’s enormous success steering Rockstar away from story-focused expansions toward multiplayer-driven updates.

According to X / Twitter user TJGM, the Liberty City DLC found in the files has been extrapolated and visualized to demonstrate just how much larger this version of the city is compared to the one featured in GTA 4. “Here’s a look at the expanded Liberty City layout,” they tweeted, explaining that the map outline was drawn based on shorelines. “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, though there is no evidence to suggest that is Rockstar’s plan.

A wealth of cut content surfaces

The leak has yielded far more than just the Liberty City expansion. Additional material recovered from the files includes Agent Trevor DLC mission names, along with a trove of cut vehicles, dialogue, and cutscenes on GTA 5. There also appears to be very early work related to GTA 6 buried within the source code.

On the subject of Agent Trevor, fans have known for some time that Rockstar worked on a single-player DLC for GTA 5 in which Trevor would assume the role of a secret agent. In 2024, actor Steven Ogg said that Rockstar originally planned to make a story expansion focused on his character, with it thought to have fallen by the wayside as the developer focused on the cash cow that was GTA Online.

“We also had that really cool st of — and I forget if it was DLC, I have no idea — but where Trevor was gonna be undercover, he works for the FEDs. And we did shoot some of that stuff with James Bond Trevor. He’s still kind of a fk up but he’s doing his best. And we shot some stuff and then it just disappeared and they never followed up on it.”

Steven Ogg, who played Trevor Philips in GTA 5

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.

Developers explain why the DLC was canceled

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.” Robino added that when the game got shelved, much of the work likely made its way into later iterations of GTA Online. “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.”

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.

The developer weighs in

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.”

Looking ahead

The question now is what approach Rockstar will 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.

The leak arrives as part of an ongoing employment tribunal to determine the fate of the 31 GTA 6 developers Rockstar fired last year, during which 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.