Rockstar built a second city for GTA 5, then deleted it. It was found in a sound file.

The biggest thing in the 192 GB archive is not about Grand Theft Auto 6 at all. It is a whole second city that Rockstar built for Grand Theft Auto 5 and never shipped.

Nobody has played it. Nobody has loaded it. What exists is an outline, and the outline came out of a file that was never meant to describe a map.

The file

It is called dlcliberty_game.dat151.rel.

A .rel file in Grand Theft Auto 5 is audio data. Not music, not speech. It is the file that tells the game which zone you are standing in and what that zone is supposed to sound like. It contains no geometry, no textures, no roads and no buildings. Open it looking for a map and there is nothing there.

But one of the things a zone can be tagged as is shoreline. Waves.

So somebody took every zone in that file marked as shoreline and plotted where they were. A coastline drew itself.

What was actually recovered

The dataminer who has done most of this publicly, TJGM, has been careful about what it is: users have not managed to access the map, he says, but they have been able to visualise what its outline looks like based on location data that plays shoreline audio.

Nobody recovered a city. Nobody recovered a single building. What was recovered was the sound of the sea, and then the land it was breaking against, worked out backwards.

What the outline shows

Liberty City's four parody boroughs, across three islands, connected to three large landmasses, alongside terrain-testing data in the same files. It is substantially larger than the Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 4, and the reporting puts it somewhere in the same league as GTA 5's own map.

Which tells you it was never a port. GTA 4's Liberty City is three islands and a slice of New Jersey. This is that, plus land that has never existed in any Grand Theft Auto.

The limit on all of it

An audio zone is not a road.

It tells you where a designer expected water to sound like water. It does not tell you there were streets, or buildings, or interiors, or that a single line of dialogue was ever written. The honest description of what has been recovered is a border. Everything inside that border is unknown, and anybody showing you a filled-in map of it is drawing.

Why a second city was a normal thing to attempt

Because at the time, it is what Rockstar did. Grand Theft Auto 4 shipped with two expansions, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, each with its own protagonist, story, vehicles and ending. Either would be sold as a full game today.

Grand Theft Auto 5 clearly had a plan of its own. In the same archive is a cancelled single-player expansion called Agent Trevor, with a mission list, a spaceship, space suits and a large underground complex beneath a mansion.

And the engine could take it. GTA 5 already ships with North Yankton, an entire separate snowbound map you visit twice in the story and never again.

Why none of it happened

Nothing in these files says why anything was cancelled. Files do not explain themselves, and what follows is inference rather than a document.

Updated 29 September: on the Agent Trevor expansion specifically, that is no longer the position. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, the developer who ran the project and Trevor's voice actor have all now spoken about why it stopped. What they said.

What is documented is this. Grand Theft Auto 5 came out in September 2013. Grand Theft Auto Online launched a fortnight later. In the thirteen years since, from a game that has now sold more than 230 million copies, there have been exactly zero single-player expansions. Take-Two's own accounts describe the majority of its revenue as recurrent consumer spending.

A second city is something you sell once. A car in an online mode is something you sell forever.

The part nobody is connecting

In December 2024 a team of modders released the Liberty City Preservation Project: six years of work putting GTA 4's Liberty City inside GTA 5, with the visuals brought up, thousands of new animations and dynamic events added.

On 16 January 2025, about two weeks after it got attention, it was gone. Their statement: due to the unexpected attention the project received, and after speaking with Rockstar Games, they had decided to take it down. The team have since been at pains to say it was not a DMCA, describing it as a friendly takedown mutually agreed by all parties.

Now put the dates together. January 2025: Rockstar asks a fan team to stop building Liberty City inside GTA 5. September 2026: Rockstar's own files show Rockstar building Liberty City inside GTA 5, and stopping.

Those are not connected. Twenty months separate them and there is no evidence the mod was shut down to protect a plan; Rockstar shuts down mods that recreate its games because that is what Rockstar does. It is still the strangest fact in the story. For about six weeks in the winter of 2024, the only working Liberty City inside Grand Theft Auto 5 was the one built by people who did not work there.

Does this mean Liberty City is coming to GTA 6?

TJGM raised it himself and said plainly there is no evidence for it.

What the files say is the opposite. The file is named for GTA 5's downloadable content, it uses GTA 5's audio format, and it sits beside GTA 5's cancelled expansion. Every piece of it is a GTA 5 artefact.

The only thing Rockstar itself has written down connecting Liberty City to Grand Theft Auto 6 is in Lucia's biography, where it says her family came from there. That is a sentence about where a character is from. It is not a map.

Until 19 November, the honest position is that a second city exists in a leak and in nothing else. What is left of it is not a map. It is a border, made of waves.