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The 10 craziest Mount Chiliad Mysteries in GTA V
Get your tin foil hat ready. These are the jetpack hunters’ most insane theories and conspiracies.
'Come back here when your story is complete.' That's the message scrawled on the back of the viewing platform atop GTA V's mythical Mount Chiliad. The clue's in the mural and the mural is the clue, but what does it all mean? Is there a jetpack buried in there somewhere? With GTA V landing on PC on March 24, it likely won't be long before modders bash open the game's skull with their digital rocks to find out for sure. But that imminent array of answers hasn't stopped the Chiliad Mystery hunters continuing to drum up crackpot theory after crackpot theory.
Peruse the pages of GTAForums or reddit.com/r/chiliadmystery and you'll find all manner of wacky hypotheses. Some seem valid, some are far-fetched, and some are just downright insane. Here we'll dig out the 10 very weirdest, craziest Chiliad Mystery theories. Which side of the genius-lunacy divide do you think they fall on?
Find the Full Moon Party
The moon has a long legacy of being involved in Easter eggs in previous GTA games, but there's nothing in the series' history as complex, elaborate or as time consuming as what some of r/chiliadmystery's hunters have been projecting onto it. In GTA V the moon has a full monthly cycle, waxing and waning just like it does in real life. And with some of the hippie NPCs occasionally referring to a 'full moon party' in their idle chat, you can probably guess what some gamers have been spending their time trying to find.
But let's just break down the maths here: a minute in game time takes two Earth seconds, which makes a full in-game day 48-minutes long. Let's say you started checking the moon just after it was last full, you'd be waiting 24 real life hours to see it come back around. But then that only gives you around 20-minutes to find the mythical party before sunrise, and it could be anywhere in the expansive world map. And that's if it exists at all, which it probably doesn't. Fail during that window and you'll be waiting another full (real life) day's worth of play time to resume the hunt. And the scariest thing? People have actually been doing this.
The Karma theory
Karma Theory
© reddit.com/u/hakatox
Traversing San Andreas is not a serene, cerebral experience. Thanks to its denizens' lax attitudes towards self-preservation, and also to your own awful, crippling personality disorders, it's far easier to run amuck than it is to behave. Which is why the karma theory is such a barmy idea. So what is it? At the end of the single player campaign you're given a report from Michael's psychiatrist, detailing your behaviour and profiling your level of murderousness. And, spurred on by the message in the mural pictured above, some gamers think that this is this the key to it all.
The theory goes that if you can play through the whole campaign cleanly, without killing, harming or otherwise intimidating anyone you don't absolutely have to, while still gold-starring all the missions, the fabled jetpack will await you at the end. And this might make sense, if it weren't for the fact that doing all that is about as easy as trying to force a live octopus into a Tupperware box. And even less fun.
The Rocketeer
You'll have to stick with us on this one, as it requires some Hulk-like leaps in logic. So, there is a sign on the aircraft hanger in Sandy Shores bearing the logo of a company called 'Jack Sheepe'. But Jack Sheepe is also is the name of the lead actor in The Cockateer, a parody of 1991 movie The Rocketeer, which was about a guy who makes his own jetpack.
So far, so madly coincidental, but what's really got the hunters riled up is 'R-108', which is printed just below the logo. With 108 minutes being The Rocketeer's runtime, many GTA V conspiracists believe this to be absolute proof that the movie contains the secret to uncovering the mural's hidden treasures. But this poses several very glaring, very face-palmy questions, like: Why use such a madly obscure reference? Why bother bringing the parody movie into the mix? And why are some people allowed to go on the internet?
The men who stare at rocks
There's a lot of buzz about the Altruist camp. Many Chiliad Mystery moguls think it's got a special significance, and that completing the correct, ever more intricate set of actions within its fenced-in grounds will unlock the mountain's secrets. Our favourite thing about it, though? The notion that whoever first discovered that the shadow on one of its rocks resembles the mural's jetpack glyph must have spent a long time fruitlessly staring at other in-game boulders first. Just imagine examining all that textured brownness – do it for long enough and you'd see anything in anything. File this one under 'Religious epiphanies on a slice of toast.'
Related
Overlays, overlays, overlays
Grand Theft Auto V
© reddit.com/u/lauren_of_lore
This isn't so much one theory as an anthology, but it's a fantastic demonstration of the phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Humans love to find patterns. We're adapted to be good at it – it's what let our ancestors farm, allowing us to predict the seasons by the movements of the stars. But the downside of that amazing ability is that we have a nasty habit of finding correlation in coincidence.
Yes, the mural may fit almost perfectly over the game map in this orientation or that, but it doesn't really prove anything. The hundreds of photoshopped map overlays littering the web are about as conclusive as the rock in our garden that keeps tigers away, or the discovery that global average temperatures have risen at the same rate as the decline in good episodes of The Simpsons.
Do yoga
Do yoga. Do yoga atop Mount Gordo. Do it at Michael's house. Do it at night. Do it in the day. Do it while wearing the Epsilon robes. Do it in just your pants. Do it with all three single-player characters at once in different locations. Do write down your findings. Do discover nothing. Do argue with someone online about which yoga spot is the most significant. Do yoga again after having done a 100% clean karma run that took you four months to do. Do stop having fun. Do question your life choices. Just don't stop doing yoga.
Talent show
The game's three main characters each have a colour to represent them: Franklin is green, Michael is blue and Trevor red. And there is a place in-game where those three hues sit side-by-side – they're pointed at a weird little stage inside the Lost MC caravan park. Because these lights don't go out when you shoot the bulbs, and because the rug on the floor loosely resembles the eye iconography from the mural, the stage sent ripples through the hunter community for a short while last year.
Jetpack enthusiasts were, for a time, obsessed with painstakingly arranging the characters on the stage, fighting against the game's code to try and get them to just stand still already, to perform whatever jig they have hidden in them. But if you ask us, Rockstar is the real choreographer here; we're all dancing to their tune. And making complete fools of ourselves in the process.
Keep on honkin’
Real followers of the church of Chiliad will tell you that it's not worth doing anything until you've completed the game 100 percent. Why? Because doing so unlocks the Space Docker – a dune buggy with gaffa tape and lights on it, which many believe acts as a literal key to the mystery. And that's all to do with its green lights and six sci-fi horns. It's led scores of people to embark on mad honking quests, pointing the docker at UFOs, hippies, FIB agents and everything in between to try an illicit a reaction other than A) startled NPC animation, or B) abject nothingness, with little in the way of success.
Natural disasters
In an early interview before the game's release, Rockstar teased the possibility for 'natural disasters' taking place within the game world. While this was probably just a feature or story element that never made the final cut, it hasn't stopped hunters from drawing up theories around how to trigger something biblical enough to make the mountain spit out its jetpack.
While the above video mentions an asteroid attack, the recent consensus seems to be that an earthquake, sparked by upsetting the San Andreas fault, will crack Chiliad open like a giant polygonal egg. Which sounds incredibly cool, even if it does show a profound lack of understanding about how much time and effort AAA game developers on a tight deadline can afford to put into something that might never get found.
Lorem Ipsum
And finally, our favourite one: the most out-there theory around. The one that proves that we're clutching too tightly at our metaphorical straws. That we should all put down our controllers, take off the tin foil and urgently ingest some fresh air. In early February one avid hunter was laboriously exploring the game's last uncharted territory, its unused subway system. Then, a finding: they stumbled across a clue on a map and excitedly shared it with the world, a curious, garbled text that begins with the words 'Lorem ipsum'.
What is this strange alien language? It looks like Latin, but it isn't quite. Is it some mystery code? The final piece of the puzzle? The answer we've all been looking for? Err... Not really, no. It's just the stock Lorem Ipsum text that lazy designers and publishers around the world use to fill a bit of space. Embarrassing. Rockstar, if you're reading this, please kindly put us all out of our misery already and tell us either way if there's a jetpack in future to avoid these sort of situations.
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