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 has nothing to do with Grand Theft Auto 6. It's a whole second city that Rockstar built for Grand Theft Auto 5 and never shipped.

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

A file called dlcliberty_game.dat151.rel

It's called dlcliberty_game.dat151.rel.

A .rel file in Grand Theft Auto 5 is audio data. It isn't music or speech, though. It's the file that tells the game which zone you're standing in and what that zone should sound like. There's no geometry in it, no textures, no roads and no buildings. Open it looking for a map and you won't find one.

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.

A coastline, and nothing inside it

The dataminer who's done most of this in public, TJGM, has been careful about what it is. Users haven't managed to access the map, he says, but they've been able to visualise what its outline looks like based on location data that plays shoreline audio.

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

Four boroughs and a lot of extra land

The outline shows Liberty City's four parody boroughs across three islands, connected to three large landmasses, with terrain-testing data in the same files. It's a lot bigger 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.

So it was never going to be a straight port. GTA 4's Liberty City is three islands and a slice of New Jersey. This is that, plus land that's never existed in any Grand Theft Auto.

An audio zone isn't a road

That's the limit on all of it.

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

Rockstar used to make expansions this big

At the time, a second city was a normal thing for Rockstar to try. 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 one would be sold as a full game today.

Grand Theft Auto 5 clearly had a plan of its own. In the same archive there's 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 handle 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 don't explain themselves, and what follows is our inference. There's no document behind it.

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

Here's what's on the record. Grand Theft Auto 5 came out in September 2013, and Grand Theft Auto Online launched a fortnight later. In the thirteen years since, from a game that's 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.

You sell a second city once. You can sell a car in an online mode forever.

Rockstar shut down a fan-made Liberty City in 2025

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 and thousands of new animations and dynamic events added.

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

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

The two aren't connected. Twenty months separate them, and there's no evidence the mod was shut down to protect a plan. Rockstar shuts down mods that recreate its games, because that's what Rockstar does. It's 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 didn't work there.

Does this mean Liberty City is coming to GTA 6?

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

The files point the other way. The file's 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 belongs to GTA 5.

The only thing Rockstar 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's a sentence about where a character's from, and there's no map in it.

Until 19 November, the most anyone can say is that a second city exists in a leak and nowhere else. What's left of it isn't a map. It's a border, made of waves.