Xbox 360 Devkit Bought for £5 Contains Massive 118GB GTA IV Beta Build

Someone in the UK picked up an Xbox 360 Rockstar North devkit for £5 and found something extraordinary sitting on it: a 118GB GTA IV beta build dating back to November 2007, five months before the game officially launched on April 29, 2008.

The build is described as 95% intact and potentially restorable, which is the detail that has the GTA community genuinely losing its mind. Builds this old and this complete don't surface often. GTA IV's development history has long been picked over through scattered pre-release screenshots, interview scraps, and stray game files, so landing a near-complete snapshot from inside Rockstar North's own hardware is a different category of find entirely.

What's reportedly inside makes it more interesting still. The build contains a zombies minigame that never made it to the final game, a trove of beta models, and cut songs that were stripped from the shipped version. GTA IV players will remember the in-game references to a zombie title called Z Resurrection, advertised across Liberty City's subway stations; there has long been speculation that a playable minigame around it was built and then dropped. If the devkit's contents back that up, it would settle a debate that's been running in beta preservation circles for years.

The precedent here matters. In February 2018, a devkit carrying a beta build of GTA V surfaced and yielded a substantial list of cut radio tracks that never made it to any release version of the game. The GTA IV devkit represents an even earlier window into development, from a title that shipped with notably different content than what Rockstar had shown in its pre-release campaign.

The owner bought the machine for £5, which is the kind of number that makes preservation enthusiasts want to tear their hair out thinking about how many similar pieces of hardware have been quietly wiped, discarded, or sold for parts over the years. The plan now is to sell the devkit for over £800, a price that reflects the fanbase's appetite for authenticated, source-level material rather than reconstructed mods. Whether whoever buys it chooses to share the build publicly or sits on it will determine how much of those 118GB ever reaches the wider community.