As GTA Trilogy PC is pulled, dataminers discover it contains missing music and ‘holy grail’ dev notes

The PC version of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition reportedly contains music that’s no longer licensed, as well as uncompiled code with developer comments.

That’s according to a datamine of the newly-released collection’s game files, and could be the reason why Rockstar seemingly pulled the game from its online store on Thursday.

PC players who purchased The Trilogy were also left unable to play it for more than 15 hours since its release day due to the Rockstar launcher going down for “maintenance”. It’s not clear if this is related to the discovered game files.

According to one Twitter user who claims to have datamined The Trilogy’s files, all the music that was removed from San Andreas due to expired licences is actually still present and that the game simply chooses not to play it.

More GTA Trilogy on VGC:

GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition music list | GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition missing music | GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition gameplay footage | GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition Switch screenshots | 2022 games

“So the audio format of choice for the Definitive Editions is OGG-VORBIS,” they tweeted. “More interesting however, San Andreas contains all the cut music. It’s just disabled by script.”

The user claims to have looked into Vice City’s files and discovered that while some of its missing music, including Michael Jackson tracks, are not present in the game’s files, other tracks are present but disabled.

“The stations have been split up at key points to allow tracks to be dropped in or out denoted by track number,” they explained. “For example, ALL of Flash FM is here except for Track 03, Billie Jean. (yes even Running With the Night).”

Perhaps more crucially, GTA investigator Vadim M allegedly discovered that the game’s code contains an uncompiled version of the main.scm file, which contains all the game scripts in GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas.

Vadim M describes the uncompiled version as the “holy grail” for fans interested in the inner workings behind the games, because it includes cut and missing content, as well as notes from Rockstar North staff from that era.

The user shared examples of the developer notes in several tweets:

The addition of this uncompiled code was likely not intended to be included, as Rockstar is famously secretive about the development of its games.

It may also be one of the reasons why the Rockstar Games Launcher is still down at the time of writing, more than 15 hours after Rockstar tweeted that it was down for maintenance.

Further reading

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GTA Trilogy PC players have been locked out for over 12 hours

Due to Rockstar Launcher downtime, players who bought the game are still unable to play it

PC players have been unable to play the game since the Launcher went down, meaning everyone who bought the PC version of The Definitive Edition has been locked out of their new purchase until Rockstar brings the Launcher back.

Rockstar also suffered some issues with the PlayStation release of the game on its release day, although ironically it was the complete opposite problem.

Players who had pre-ordered the game were gaining access to it much earlier than they were supposed to, forcing Rockstar to pull the game from the PlayStation Store until it was ready to officially launch.