How Modders Brought This GTA 6 Prototype Into GTA 5

Massive 200GB Rockstar Leak Makes GTA 6 Map Playable Inside GTA 5 Published Sep 19, 2026, 11:56 AM EDT James Lucas is an Executive Editor at TheGamer who has worked in professional journalism since 2018. A Newcastle University graduate with a degree in Journalism, Media, and Culture, they have written hundreds of guides, news stories, and original reports, with bylines in IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, sourcing interviews with studio heads, legendary industry figures, prominent actors, and more. An expert on FPS games, Soulslikes, RPGs, and survival horror, James has intimate knowledge of a wide variety of titles, providing in-depth coverage and exclusive profiles. Some of the games they have extensively covered include: Half-Life 3, Counter-Strike, Elden Ring, and Fallout. They pride themselves on their consistently thorough research, leveraging nearly a decade of industry experience. You can reach them at James.t@thegamer.com Sign in to your TheGamer account Modders are using a rough 2015 prototype of the GTA 6 map, found in the massive 200GB leak, to explore an early version of Vice City within Grand Theft Auto 5. We won't be embedding the leaked files here, but X user Synaptic has shared a handful of clips of them exploring Leonida, posting shots of the beach, skyline, water park, satellite maps, inner city, highways, and more. They've also put together some pretty interesting comparison videos, featuring footage from the Netflix extended look alongside the same areas from the 2015 prototype. This Is What GTA 6 Looked Like In 2015 This is all possible because modders have been able to extract and import early map data from the archive and run it within GTA 5, much as Teapot presumably did in 2022. Obviously, this is very early GTA 6 we're looking at, so don't expect anything resembling the game Rockstar has been showing off recently. Foliage is largely absent, textures are extremely basic, and much of the map is represented by flat, almost Google Maps-style layouts. The deeper you dig into the clips, the more obvious it becomes just how bare-bones this version of Leonida is. Alongside the rudimentary highways and coastlines, dataminers have found floating text tags marking early concept areas. Still, it's a pretty fascinating look at GTA 6 before Rockstar had really started turning Vice City into the ridiculously detailed world we've seen in more recent footage. Synaptic has also documented plenty of other interesting details from the 200GB leak. Obviously, all of this needs to be taken with a heap of salt given how old the data is, but they've found references to a town in Mount Kalaga, NASA parodies, including a rocket launch area, a shipwreck treasure museum, and even scrapped maps based on South America. With the 2022 breach now fully public, the community can poke around an early version of Vice City two months before GTA 6 launches. It obviously isn't 1:1 with the final build, and an enormous amount has changed in the 11 years since, but seeing where Leonida started compared to what Rockstar is showing us now is fascinating. GTA 6 has been in the oven for a long time. Systems Released November 19, 2026 ESRB Rating Pending - Likely Mature 17+ Developer(s) Rockstar Games Publisher(s) Rockstar Games Engine Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) Genre(s) Action, Adventure