Someone bought an old Xbox 360 in a car boot sale and found an early GTA IV prototype hidden inside it

A man who spotted a battered-looking Xbox 360 at a car boot sale for just £5 (around $6.70) ended up finding a super-rare early GTA IV devkit inside. 

Grand Theft Auto IV was released in 2008 and became the fastest-selling video game of all time. 

It’s also among the best-selling video games ever, with Rockstar selling more than 25 million copies by 2013. 

Almost two decades later, GTA IV remains an icon, and one lucky guy from Scotland recently got his hands on a real piece of gaming history. 

The old Xbox 360 was hiding a very cool secret

Posting on the GTA Forum, a user called janmatant revealed that he had been doing a spot of bargain hunting when he came across a white Xbox 360 and noticed its unusual shape.

He decided to take a closer look, and he wasn’t disappointed.

“I saw that it was a phat 360 straight away with a thing on top, that I thought initially was some sort of weird mod,” he told Supercar Blondie.

“When I saw the Rockstar sticker, though, I knew it was something special.” 

So he snapped up the old console for just £5, and then spied the serial number, which read: Xbox 360 XDK, all but confirming he really had got something interesting on his hands. 

After getting the Xbox 360 home, he discovered a huge number of files that make up an early devkit, and revealed never-before-seen assets from GTA IV. 

The files have since ended up online, where fans have carefully combed through the mountains of data to pick out some very interesting finds, including cut radio stations, unreleased weapons, beta character models and NPCs, and what appeared to be a scrapped zombie mode or minigame. 

There were also some earlier versions of cutscenes hidden in the files. 

Surprisingly, janmatant isn’t a GTA VI fan and admitted that he’s never played the game, but said he’s been left impressed by what people have managed to unearth from the devkit. 

“I love how much stuff people have found in files that were previously unseen or regarded as an urban legend or cut content,” he told us. 

Here’s what he decided to do with the super-rare console

As you might have guessed, it wasn’t long before people began to reach out janmatant to see if he was willing to part with the super-rare console. 

He also revealed that several people had been in touch asking for a copy of the files, which he refused, and to see if he would be happy to sell just the ‘sidecar’, the little device on top. 

But in the end, he decided to sell the whole thing as it was. 

“I’ve now sold the console to a collector, and it’s no longer in my possession,” he told us.

Rockstar has a reputation for being protective when it comes to intellectual property, and this is something janmatant admitted he was ‘quite worried about,’ but he said he hadn’t heard anything from the company personally. 

Although an online archive of the files has since been removed from the internet.

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