Former Rockstar Games Dev Says Original ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ DLC Plans Scrapped In Favor Of ‘GTA Online’
Back in 2023, a datamine of information revealed the existence of Grand Theft Auto V DLCs.
Though the content of these packs was never detailed, the names of the DLC packs – Agent Trevor, Zombie Apocalypse, and Alien Invasion – provided hints as to what players could expect to find inside.
But now, thanks to former Rockstar Games Senior Camera Artist and Virtual Cinematographer Joseph Rubino, we now know a little but more about the GTA future that could have been.
Rubino provided this insight during a recent interview with the SanInPlay YouTube channel.
“I was one of the main editors, camera artist, and doing a lot of the second unit on-stage stuff,” he recalled of his role on the game. “[Then] we split our teams into two, so I stayed on GTA Online and then this DLC, which [Trevor actor] Steven Ogg was a very important part of, and then some of the team overlapped and went to Red Dead Redemption 2 early on.”
According to Rubino, the Trevor DLC was approximately halfway complete when it was canceled. It’s pretty wild it went dead that far into development.
So what happened? Unsurprisingly, GTA Online happened – and more specifically its significant financial success.
“What happened was when GTA Online came out, it was so much of a cash cow and people were loving it so much that it was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would out-compete that,” Rubino said. “I think looking back now I would say that you could probably do both, but that was a business decision that they made.”
Speaking to his frustrations over the decisions, Rubino recalled, “That was a lot of reason for me being a little sour at that time, because I was like ‘yo, what the f–k guys, this s–t’s awesome, let’s keep going, let’s finish this s–t!”
Some DLC Material Reused in GTA Online
Despite its cancellation, Rubino noted that elements of the scrapped DLC were later incorporated into GTA Online, asserting, “A lot of that stuff did end up making it, I believe, into later iterations of GTA Online, I think, so it’s not like they wasted it. It was really, really good.”
Notably, this is not the first time such insight has been provided into GTAV‘s scrapped DLC plans.
In an April interview with The Loadout, the aforementioned Ogg revealed that in the storyline for the character’s eponymous DLC pack, “Trevor was going to be undercover, he was working with the feds.”
“We did shoot some of that stuff with ‘James Bond Trevor,’ where he’s still kind of a f–k up, but he’s doing his best,” said Ogg. “Then it just disappeared and they never did it, they never followed up on it.”
Sadly, while GTA Online has been an objective success for Rockstar’s wallets, the more information fans receive about the scrapped DLC, the more they’re left to ponder what it would have been like to carjack an alien spaceship or mow down zombies with a police cruiser.
And who knows? Maybe they’ll get to when the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI drops in Fall 2025.
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