An ancient, work-in-progress version of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV has reportedly been discovered on an Xbox 360 development kit at a car boot sale, somewhere up Edinburgh way. Dating back to November 2007, about six months before the open world game’s launch, it’s said to contain a cut model for a Liberty City river ferry that once featured in a trailer.

While we only have the buyer’s word that the development hardware – “a phat white Xbox 360 XDK with a Rockstar North label on it” – is legit, former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij has, at least, verified that GTA 4 was once supposed to have a ferry, though he doesn’t have much to share about the presence of materials for what appears to be a canned GTA 4 zombie minigame. Cor!

“The ferries were cut late on,” Vermeij writes on Xitter, responding to a tweet about the find. “They were supposed to be moving back and forth kinda like a train. We figured there would be too many issues with it. Mostly the collision and AI of peds and vehicles sitting on top of another vehicle. We ditched them even though they were in the trailer.”

Were you among the people who lamented the absence of ferries from GTA 4, back in the noughties? I hope this is the catharsis you’ve been looking for. I hope you can sleep easy now at night.

If the XDK is the real McCoy, I imagine there will be other chunky discoveries in short order. The build has been uploaded to the Internet Archive, and people on the GTA forums are even now combing through it. The buyer, meanwhile, is trying to sell the XDK for a princely sum, having bought it for a fiver.

So far, GTA forum users have unearthed a few unused radio DJ lines, different models and model names for certain characters, beta versions of weapons, and what appear to be assets for a cancelled zombie minigame. Another Xitter user has asked Vermeij to comment on the zombie stuff. His response: “I don’t remember anything about zombies in 4. Artists were always trying to put zombies in things. Not something that got very far.”

Rockstar have dabbled with walking cadavers in their time, and zombies are an evergreen videogame motif, so it would be no huge surprise to find them in a beta version of GTA 4. Back in November 2023, Vermeij himself revealed that the developers once planned to make a zombie island survival game based on GTA: Vice City code, but found the premise too depressing.

The lesson here is: I should go to more car boot sales. Or at least, car boot sales within driving distance of Rockstar North. Thanks to Gamesradar and RockstarIntel for passing this on.

Again assuming this is the genuine McCruther, R* company lawyers won’t take kindly to the circulation of a geriatric GTA 4 build – that Internet Archive page may not be around for long. Rockstar North and parent company Take-Two Interactive have bigger fish to fry. They’re in the middle of a courtroom fight with ousted GTA 6 staff who claim they were laid off for forming a union.