Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s original game code contains traces of a mission that was cut from the final release, suggesting that Tommy Vercetti, played by the late, great Ray Liotta, would have found himself starring in an action movie set inside the Malibu Club.
YouTuber Vadim M, who has previously discovered cut beta missions in GTA 3, and hidden anti-piracy measures in Episodes from Liberty City, has taken a look inside the game code of the recent Vice City: Definitive Edition, and their findings are pretty surprising.
It seems Grove Street Games, the studio tasked with developing the definitive editions, failed to spot that the old Vice City game code contained numerous files flagged for internal use only. These present a few interesting nuggets. The special forces who ambush you in the Mall Shootout mission for Colonel Cortez, for example, are described in the game code as possessing “an outrageous French accent”. When coding how the countdown timer would work in the film studio mission where you distribute flyers from a plane, one Rockstar North staffer has written – in perfect Scottish vernacular – “doing wee timer thing ma blodger”.
Most intriguing, though, is a mission source file called “movie demo”. The code outlines a mission start and end point, but so far, what Vadim has been able to find is simply a cutscene, which shows Tommy leaving the police station in Ocean Beach, and being followed by two gangsters to the Malibu Club. There’s a lengthy shootout, and Tommy escapes in a Banshee being driven by a female companion. Their freedom is short-lived, however, as the car promptly crashes into some barrels and explodes, leaving them dead.
It all seems very unusual, but also within the hidden, internal files are some snippets of cut dialogue, one of which seems to offer a pretty convincing explanation.
Steve Scott, the movie producer played by Dennis Hopper, who serves as your contact for the film studio asset missions, telephones Tommy asking him to star in a car chase scene. Tommy agrees, and there is even a line in the developer’s notes saying “Steve tells player about stunt mission”.
We can infer, then, that there was once a mission in Vice City where you would have to perform stunts and a shootout for one of Steve Scott’s films, and the cutscene that remains in the game files would have perhaps played after the mission was complete, to let you watch the finished movie.
Strengthening this possibility, there is a mission in the 2006 Vice City spin off, Vice City Stories, where you travel to North Point Mall to act out an action sequence from a Dawn of the Dead-style zombie film – it’s possible that Rockstar cut the film-making idea from the original game, but decided to reuse it in the prequel.
Vadim offers some further, more-detailed proof, and it’s certainly worth checking out his channel if you want to know more about GTA cut content.