Grand Theft Auto has always run a second game beyond the boundaries of your controller, a scavenger hunt set in motion by a huge community of secret hunters determined to crack open the series and solve the meta mysteries within.

GTA is a lightning rod for urban legends and a magnet for myths, and hunters will stop at nothing to dig up the cryptids, creepypastas, and cut content that simply must be hidden somewhere in the vastness of each title.

What are the most famous rumors throughout the series’ history? Did any of them turn out to be true? And what does the future hold for sleuths and speculators in the age of leaks and datamining? These are GTA’s strangest myths.

Part 1: Dodos and Darkels

Grand Theft Auto 3 launched after a last-minute, three-week delay out of sensitivity to the September 11th attacks. Not much was actually changed: only about 1% of the game by Rockstar’s own estimate, little things like police car livery and pedestrian barks.

But in the cauldron of conspiracism that was the early 2000s, we wondered what else we weren’t supposed to see. The gray city cast in hazy headlights felt lonely and liminal, with cars that spawned out of nowhere and a feeling that something clandestine was just around the corner.

Consider the Dodo, a Cessna with clipped wings that barely achieves liftoff. It’s not a massive leap to presume that the aircraft was grounded as part of the 9/11 cuts, or that it was originally part of a mission where it smashed into Donald Love’s towering HQ. Why else would Rockstar model a plane and implement flying controls just to hobble it?

But the Dodo was never intended to fly. A purported design document calls for a “wingless Cessna,” a compromise forced by the PS2’s data streaming pipeline. An airworthy Dodo would outrun the game’s ability to load itself.

There was no technical reason to cut Darkel. The lost character’s existence is well-supported. IGN’s early previews noted a prophet who “says weird things and asks you to do weird things,” and he appears in the design document as a creepy personification of the Rampage missions.

Why the omission? One theory is that his missions were too violent and taboo even for Rockstar. Think El Burro’s Ice Cream Truck mission but worse. Working for an anarcho-terrorist was a non-starter after 9/11, but Darkel was actually axed well before the attacks.

Not every character works out, especially when a floating skull icon could do their job with a lot less yappin’. Only fragments remain of Darkel in GTA 3: a name in the credits, an unused texture, and a circle of vagrants who haunt a Harwood tunnel.

The last of his followers, perhaps. Sometimes they have molotovs. No one knows exactly what they are up to, not even your friend’s uncle who works at Sony.

Schoolyards and study halls were the source of knowledge in the days before CCU numbers and open betas. The gaming press served enthusiasts who traded secrets in magazine letter pages and the message boards of hot new websites.

Mags would offer morsels of dirt in return, confirming and debunking rumors and sometimes creating them out of whole cloth, but monthly magazines could only move so fast.

The conversation was heading online, and gamers got there early. By 2001 the internet had grown into a massive incubator for myths and legends. For GTA fans, things were about to get hairy.

Part 2: Bigfoot

Liberty City, as realized in GTA 3, is a tiny place. It’s only about 3 square miles by most measurements, and the O.G. Vice City isn’t much bigger.

2004’s San Andreas is nearly five times the size of LC, an entire state with three whole cities and vast swaths of forest, desert, and farmland between them. There’s more room to explore and get lost in, with plenty of empty space for imagination to fill the gaps.

GTA: San Andreas pushes the aging game engine to its limit, producing lots of little moments of unreality in a game designed to simulate modern(ish) life. Ghost cars roll across the street with no one inside. A photographer flings himself off a cliff. Planes fall from the sky and scorch CJ’s face. All of these glitches in the Matrix can be explained by quirks of the code, but where’s the fun in that?

The anomalies and eerie draw distance fog give the lo-fi world a sense of simulacrum. There’s a haunting unknowability to San Andreas. Step off the beaten path and you’ll end up lost in the woods like a fairy tale. Here there must be monsters.

Rockstar excels at cheeky commentary on all things Americana, and it’s not a huge leap to presume that they must have included the country’s favorite cryptid somewhere in the San Andreas wilds. Some call him Sasquatch, the Skunk Ape, or Harry. Most know him as Bigfoot, the missing link of the Pacific Northwest. You’ve probably seen his beef jerky ads.

Bigfoot’s existence in San Andreas was surmised with staggering speed. Within days of San Andreas dropping, yarns were being spun online about mysterious UFOs and phone booths in the desert and a mythical creature roaming the countryside. But the “San Andreas Bigfoot Hunt” wouldn’t really pick up steam until the game came out a second time.

The “Hot Coffee” controversy, in which a scrapped sex minigame was discovered hidden on the disc, resulted in San Andreas being pulled from shelves and re-released without the offending material. There was definitive proof on the national news that Rockstar buried secrets within the game. Anything was possible now, even Bigfoot.

The pursuit of Bigfoot in San Andreas by the blossoming online myth-hunting community mirrors much of the real world search for the elusive beast. There are innocent mistakes, where fleeting glimpses of the mundane are misremembered as hulking monsters. A random pedestrian who mistakenly spawns in the woods can scare us enough to conjure a terrifying ape man in our minds. A creepy growl heard in the Back O’ Beyond woods after hours of searching could be the monster, even if it’s actually just C.J.'s stomach rumbling.

Much of the “evidence” for the real Bigfoot comes from shaky footage and blurry snapshots, and the same can be said for the San Andreas creature. In the pre-OBS age, when capturing video required dedicated hardware, sightings were shared as poorly-compressed files filmed straight from a smeary CRT. These vague images lack clarity but ooze spooky vibes, and the fuzziness plays a major role in maintaining an aura of forbidden mystery.

Rockstar itself addressed the rumor with co-founder Terry Donovan declaring in no uncertain terms that “there is no Bigfoot, just like in real life.” A doctored version of his quote spread through the community with quite the opposite effect thanks to the apocryphal addendum of “there is something in the woods.”

Bigfoot brings out a lot of fakers. Just ask the countless con artists throughout the decades who spent their hard-earned time on wooden footprints and fictional taxidermy. Even the most famous Bigfoot evidence of all, the Patterson-Gimlin film, was recently, nigh-definitively exposed as a hoax. The GTA myth hunter scene was equally rife with opportunists who shamelessly forged evidence for their pet theories, doubly so when the PC version of San Andreas arrived with the ability to mod in a Bigfoot, snap some screenshots, and stir the pot.

Speaking of the PC version, couldn’t a simple exploration of the data put the myth to bed once and for all? In theory, if Bigfoot existed in the files, modders would surely find remnants ala Darkel, but no one has ever produced an authentic model or texture. True believers aren’t moved by this lack of evidence.

Maybe he was on the original discs and was scrubbed after the Hot Coffee controversy, or removed in a later port. Patches provide the plausible deniability that’s essential for every enduring myth.

Rockstar was clearly aware of and amused by the Bigfoot craze. In 2010, Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare DLC directly confronts us with several Sasquatches, and killing one earns the achievement “Six Years in the Making,” reflecting the amount of time since the release of San Andreas.

The arrival of GTA 5 in 2013 heralded an entirely new crop of rumors for fans to obsess over, but the devs didn’t forget their first love. In the game, Franklin can meet a hunter who has been obsessively chasing Bigfoot for “eight years,” roughly corresponding to the gap between San Andreas and V. His quarry turns out to be a man in a costume, but later updates would allow the player to embody the actual monster as part of an extra convoluted golden peyote quest that seems straight out of schoolyard gossip.

The chase itself had become part of GTA lore, and the community it created would soon move on to a new monster.

Part 3: Ratman

The Sasquatch is a mostly rural, West Coast phenomenon, and doesn’t really suit the HD streets of Niko Bellic’s Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 4. A “Bigfoot of Bohan” allegedly haunts Welham Park, but GTA 4’s farcical take on the five boroughs deserved a cryptid that called it home. Enter Ratman.

New York is filled with critters. Pigeons, squirrels, the odd Eurasian eagle-owl. It’s not uncommon to take your garbage out and see an opossum’s eyes glowing back at you. But it’s the common brown rat that’s the city’s spirit animal, resilient, resourceful, and huge.

Living in NYC means dealing with the odd rodent jump-scare: a glimpse of movement out of the corner of your eye, a feeding frenzy around a discarded pizza box. Urban legends abound of giant rats lurking in the city’s sprawling tunnel system, mutant hybrids that walk and talk and scold their adopted children for inspiring Ninja Rap. Something’s got to be down there.

Like its real-world counterpart, GTA 4’s subway is impressively complex. Even though Niko can easily phone a cab and skip the trip, Rockstar implemented a true-to-life LTA transit system with four distinct lines and 26 stops. It’s fairly nonsensical by railfan standards, but there were plenty of places to hide.

The first Ratman forum threads were created within weeks of GTA 4’s release and met with skepticism at first, but the clues kept coming. Suspicious orange puddles appeared throughout the subway system. Players reported hearing odd squeaks when exploring the tunnels, with multiple posters claiming they heard a voice shout “I am the Ratman!”

These rumors were quickly dismissed, since cryptids don’t tend to introduce themselves. They do, however, excel at posing for blurry, inconclusive photo evidence. Before consoles slapped a Share button on every controller, myth hunters had to document their sightings the hard way. Our impressions of Ratman were filtered through Unregistered HyperCam 2 and the Moto RAZR’s VGA photo sensor. The results were so murky you didn’t need to Photoshop them, though plenty doubtless did.

The ambiguous imagery kept Ratman’s mystique intact and allowed us to speculate on his true nature. Is the orange liquid the blood or bile of a monstrous bipedal creature who feasts on the city’s unhoused population? Or could the Ratman simply be a ragged, disturbed human ala Darkel?

We would never find the answers, as Ratman was never conclusively found inside GTA 4 or any of its data. Still, the quest continued, even when it seemed like Rockstar was directly mocking it. An in-game article on the Liberty Tree website reports on urban myths causing widespread disturbances “in the minds of insane residents,” naming sasquatches, secret cities, and other infamous GTA mysteries. It wasn’t hard to get the impression that the developers were teasing us, but the community took it in stride and showed no signs of slowing down.