Just when you thought you had seen it all in GTA V, a crack team of investigators have uncovered more.
There’s a team of users on GTA Forums who have been digging and digging, trying to track down as much cut content as they can. Looking for any remnants or clues, they’ve stumbled across the payload. Other cool hidden things from GTA V like bigfoot, or the secret in the middle of the ocean, but those things were intentional. These images were never meant to be seen.
A series of images were found in an old archived version of a digital art portfolio of an artist named Steven Walsh, who has worked on a handful of titles for Rockstar including Red Dead Redemption, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Vice City Stories, and of course Grand Theft Auto V.
Rockstar had requested that the photos be removed from the portfolio, which is basically the perfect way to ensure that something spreads like wildfire on the internet.
Almost everything that’s ever posted on the internet will be archived in one way or another, and that’s exactly how these determined sleuths were able to track down these images, which show us a side of GTA V that we haven’t seen before. There are a lot of other hidden moments in the GTA series, and there are still new things being discovered still to this day.
Despite Rockstar not wanting anybody to see these, they’re still an important piece of gaming history, and now the whole world can see them.
It’s rare to get a chance to see concept art like this that isn’t part of a collectible book or officially released, since we get to see the real, unpolished stuff, in all its raw glory. Try to pick out how many elements from the game you can recognize, and how many things weren’t included at all. These mockups give us an idea of the process behind designing the game, like “Clan Name Goes Here.”
Beyond menus and character screens, here’s some concept art of a logo for a restaurant.
Any glimpse behind the scenes at Rockstar is a welcome one, as they’re usually quite hush-hush with this sort of thing.
These images could have been part of a loading screen slide-show, which could have meant they were looking at going in a very different direction art-wise, originally.