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GTA V's conspiracy theorists wind down their Mount Chiliad investigation
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Grand Theft Auto V, we checked in with the Chiliad Mystery subreddit for an update on their ongoing investigation.
Grand Theft Auto V turns five this year. It's sold over 90m copies and has made over $6b, making it the most lucrative entertainment product of all time. The game is going strong on the strength of its sprawling single-player mode and its multiplayer mode – GTA Online – which continues to evolve with every newly released DLC.
There's an overwhelming number of in-game tasks that one can perform. There are side hustles to work, BASE jumps to jump, tennis matches to play, and triathlons to swim, bike and run. You get lost, make a mess and explore. And should your exploration take you to the peak of San Andreas's Mount Chiliad? Peek inside the lift station and you'll find a mural on the wall with a tree-like pattern of lines, symbols, and glyphs.
This mural can be found inside GTA V's Mount Chiliad lift station
© Rockstar Games
Look at the bottom of this mural, and there are crude drawings of what appears to be (from left to right) a UFO, a cracking egg, and a man launching himself with a jetpack. Players speculated: Could these be references to hidden in-game items? Could players find additional clues that would lead to them?
"Playing the game as it was intended was fun enough, with a great world and typical GTA-style missions and characters," says longtime /r/ChiliadMystery moderator Giantsquidd. "But when I heard about "the shack" [lift station] and then the glyphs on the side of the mountain and the "come back when your story is complete" message, I got sucked in big time. I thought it was awesome that despite all the lore they made for this game and continued from the previous titles, there was also this extra hidden level."
Thus began a search that's kept fans occupied for years. They began by poring over minute details of the game's visible world. And the more technically knowledgeable players began data-mining under the game's hood. They looked for new code in each patch or update. They tried to replicate the conditions that would trigger hidden missions or characters.
Adjusted to real-life proportions, the GTA V map is approximately 100 square miles [160 sq km] big. The backend of the game, where the code lies, is more intimidating. Even for the most dedicated online detective, that is an extensive amount of ground to cover – too much for a single person. Online collaboration, however, permits a thoroughness that would otherwise be impossible.
"When we're having a good day, [/r/ChiliadMystery] is a very intellectually focused subreddit," says moderator WarBob. "It's quite fun to feel like you're at the head of a police investigation or that you're playing Sherlock Holmes and having those a-ha! moments. And of course, it's very satisfying when you feel like you've contributed to the investigation, legitimately, in some form or another."
Over the course of five years, the investigators who congregate on forums like /r/ChiliadMystery and GTAForums have made several incredible finds. After achieving 100 percent completion, for example, there's a holographic UFO that hovers over Mount Chiliad at 3am on stormy nights. There's another UFO that hovers over Fort Zancudo. And there's a third UFO that hovers over the hippy camp. Other found Easter eggs include an alien trapped in ice and the ghost of Jolene Cranley. In 2015, r/Chiliadmystery user rkRusty discovered a golden peyote that turns your character into Bigfoot. In 2016, this became part of a larger mystery where players, spearheaded by code-reading group Code Walkers, hunted down a Teen Wolf lookalike. In 2017, data miners Game File Gurus successfully triggered an alien crash site mission.
"While the mountain plays a focus, we slowly realised that the mountain and the mural were not necessarily the only things we should be looking at," says WarBob. "There were potential sub-mysteries that may or may not be connected to the greater overarching mystery. So we expanded our subreddit's goals to solving whatever hidden content the game had to offer, in the hope that someday, we'd fully understand the mural at the end of the road."
The internet hive mind was crucial, if not essential, to finding secret content, especially when Rockstar hid their clues in the data underneath the game, where the average player would never find them. It's a next-level, meta relationship between game developer and player, to acknowledge that, "Yes, we know you're tearing apart the game on Reddit," and, "Yes, we encourage that level of scrutiny and transparency."
This is a larger entertainment trend of the past five years, where the product is the hook and entry point for the online post-game analysis. Consider how AMC's The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad are subject to thousands of hours of scrutiny, analysis, memes and post-show wrap-ups – an entire ecosystem of fandom. More currently, HBO's Westworld, were it not for its online community, would border on impenetrable. And the Chiliad Mystery hunters are quite reminiscent of Westworld's Man in Black; not satisfied with the game as presented, players are trying to break out to the "Valley Beyond," where the real secrets lie.
"The game is so large and detailed that people get lost in the subtle intricacies," says /r/ChiliadMystery moderator Bluntsarebest. "Details that wouldn’t normally warrant a second glance are considered clues or hints from Rockstar, outlining an enormous puzzle for the players to solve. In a lot of ways, the quest for still-hidden easter eggs in GTA V mirrors man’s desire for meaning in his life. The people that are still hunting aren’t satisfied with the 'mainstream' theories, and are compelled to comb the shores, looking for a bigger or better answers to what the 'Chiliad Mystery' has always been."
In a scenario like this, where fans are consumed by the mystery, the quickest, most expedient way to kill that buzz is by revealing the solution. And when Rockstar debuted its GTA: Online Doomsday Heist DLC trailer last year, there was a jetpack as a playable item. The jetpack – the theorised reward for solving the Chiliad mystery – was now available to any GTA: Online player with $3m in-game dollars to blow.
Many entertainment properties are founded upon narrative dead-ends that are there to entice the audience but never be solved. The most famous example is Twin Peaks, a TV show that, on its face, was a murder mystery about who killed Laura Palmer. But creator David Lynch never intended to reveal the killer; he meant the mystery as a framing narrative. It was only after studio pressure that he revealed the killer in Season 2.
And the show, deprived of its central mystery, never recovered. For many GTA conspiracy theorists, the jetpack is the game's "Laura Palmer reveal." It adds clarity where ambiguity would have been preferred. And players have speculated, with good reason, that if there was a concrete solution to the Chiliad mural, it may have been in single-player DLC that was never released. Over the past several years, GTA V has become a victim of its own success; its online multiplayer was so profitable that the developers' priorities shifted away from creating individual experiences and towards creating social, open-world ones.
"I'm forever hopeful that we'll find something that's been staring us in the face since launch and that it'll all tie together nicely," says WarBob. "But I'm largely an observer and moderator now, only stepping in to either do my job or to contribute my thoughts on a theory when it has some form of logical fallacy."
"Leads are few and far between nowadays," says Bluntsarebest. "Most people believe everything has been found and the mural was solved a few days after the game came out. Some remain confident Rockstar hid the most elusive treasure imaginable. For me, it’s hard to say."
The community has slowed down from its heyday, and barring another major find, it will likely continue this trajectory. But many of its users have made peace with this. And given the chance to do it all over again, they would.
"In the last year, it's become apparent that Rockstar had decided to focus on their online cash cow and have forgotten about single player entirely, and that's pretty upsetting," says Giantsquidd. "But for what it's worth, even if it was all a wild goose chase that we collectively dreamed up, I've had more fun playing GTA V and trying to solve the mystery than I have playing any other game."
"Over the years people have come and gone but the ones that have stuck around have been largely consistent for better or for worse," says WarBob. "And it's the 'better' of those people that consistently remind me why I got involved in the first place. Regardless of what I feel about Rockstar's involvement (or lack-thereof), it's been worth it for what I got out of it."
