I’ve been obsessed by in-game mysteries since Mario 64. I’ve played games since elementary school and the NES, and surely those games had their own, more fruitful, mysteries. However, Mario 64 came out at exactly the right time: when the part of my brain that had long been tickled by aliens, and cryptozoology, and “the unexplained”, could finally latch on to a tangible mystery, whose investigation I could personally participate in.

The N64 was the first console for which I turned to the internet for tips and tricks, rather than the magazine, Tips & Tricks, and so I was immediately exposed to a ton of totally made-up bullshit. Chief among Mario 64’s greatest secrets was how to unlock a playable Luigi. I had scoured many an AngelFire page replete with horrible Photoshops of Mario in paintbrushed-green overalls, and directions that were often so complex as to be impossible (lest you actually complete them and discover they were incorrect!) Fortunately for me, the communal effort to unlock this hidden knowledge and reveal the architect’s secrets was more compelling than the secrets themselves. How much different could Luigi actually be? Who cares, I want to see what happens along the way!

This is typical of the utter bullshit I bought into as a kid.

This fascination with in-game mysteries has stayed with me to this day, though I have long since ceased to participate in the hunt. Games have gotten many orders of magnitude larger, and the mysteries they may hold have grown more complex. I just don’t have the time, really. I have, however, followed these hunts, and of all that I have known, there has been no more fascinating, complex, deeply-hidden mystery than the Chiliad Mystery in GTAV.

 

The Mystery

It starts on Mount Chiliad, the largest, tallest mountain in the game. Chiliad is a national landmark, and attracts a good deal of tourist foot traffic to its peak, which offers a spectacular view of San Andreas in all directions. Driving to the top is an arduous task, and so there is a cable car lift from the foot of the mountain to the top, which lands at a large platform. Beneath this platform, there is a crudely-written message: “COME BACK WHEN YOUR STORY IS COMPLETE”.

"Come Back When Your Story Is Complete" Message. From reddit.com/r/chiliadmystery

Not far from the platform is a small structure, in which there is what appears to be a freight elevator, which does not open. adjacent to the elevator is a cryptic map, which appears to depict Mount Chiliad in silhouette. From the mountain’s peak, there is drawn a network of paths, like a flow chart, all leading down into the mountain, and at the bottom of the ‘map’ are three glyphs: a small UFO, an egg with a crack, and, most importantly, a stick figure with a jetpack. And at the top? A larger, glowing UFO. The mountain itself is surrounded by incoming thunderbolts.

Franklin stands before the elevator and the Chiliad Mystery map.
Franklin stands before the elevator and the Chiliad Mystery map.

This message and this map kicked off what has turned into a five-year hunt for the Chiliad Mystery, which has long been assumed to end with the player getting a jetpack. A jetpack is pretty cool I guess, but that is not what attracted me to this mystery. What attracted me, and what seems to have attracted most to this mystery, is the density of it all. It appears to have been woven into so many aspects of the game as to make it an intrinsic part of GTAV’s world. Throughout GTAV, there are subtle, similar allusions to conspiracies and doomsday events that have kept hunters pushing forward. It’s a testament to Rockstar’s dedication that these allusions are so numerous, as this is a fucking huge game, and Rockstar’s dedication indirectly implies to many that the mystery CAN’T be bullshit. Why would they spend so much time alluding to it if it was?

 

The Clues

When the player beats the game, it becomes possible to view UFOs in three specific locations in San Andreas. A classic flying-saucer UFO with FIB markings (GTA’s FBI) appears over the hippy camp, the in-game simulacrum of California’s own oddity, Salvation Mountain, but it cannot be interacted with.

The Hippie Camp UFO

 

Above Fort Zancudo – San Andreas’ military base – a UFO appears which looks like a military prototype vehicle. It, too, can’t be interacted with, though it will zap you if you get too close. Notably, it bears a message on its exterior, near the cockpit: “SEGREGATE AND REARRANGE”.

 

Lastly, under very specific conditions – 3AM on a rainy night – a UFO will appear directly in front of the peak of Mount Chiliad. It, too, features FIB markings, and it, too, cannot be interacted with.

 

These UFOs have driven much of the speculation around the Chiliad Mystery, particularly the Chiliad UFO. It appears over Chiliad just as a UFO appears over Chiliad in the map. Additionally, the Zancudo UFO’s message, “SEGREGATE AND REARRANGE”, suggests that there is an anagram to solve. Where is this anagram? Does it tie into the mystery somehow? And what of the elevator at Fort Zancudo, which descends into the earth, but cannot be used? Additionally, the hippie camp features a ton of graffiti depicting aliens (typically having sex, bravo Rockstar) and scattered on many surfaces are symbols, like glyphs, scrawled in long strings. Is this an alien language? How does one decode it? Can it be decoded at all? Does the hippy camp itself hold secrets related to the mystery? And what’s up with the FIB symbols on the UFOs? We see men in black outside of the massive satellites in Sandy Shores, and guarding a standalone building in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by outward-facing security cameras. What’s going on here?

FIB Agents and Scientists in Sandy Shores. Found on http://gta-myths.wikia.com
FIB Agents and Scientists in Sandy Shores.

Additionally, the two cults in the game, the Altruists and the Epsilonists, suggest that they each hold the keys to the truth about the fate of San Andreas and its populous, which can be unlocked by achieving their goals (as is true of any cult, of course). The Altruists offer side missions in which you can pick up specific hitch hikers and drive them to the camp for sacrifice. Can you give them the people they need in some specific order to unlock a secret outcome which relates to the mystery? As for the Epsilonists, they specifically to refer aliens in their religion, which (as with most of GTA’s attempts at parody) is a weak, unfunny send-up of Scientology. There is a long, serpentine quest line for the Epsilonists which is incredibly obtuse and strange, especially relative to the rest of the game.  Could it have something to do with the mystery?

Lastly, there are numerous references to a doomsday event in radio conversation, street conversation, and depicted in photos and environmental text throughout the game. Specifically, there are references to an asteroid, and a flood. These references are vague, and it’s entirely possible most players never even noticed them. Given the stark imagery in the Chiliad map, is it possible these, too, relate to the mystery? And hey – what’s with the unmentioned, unused underwater hatch at the bottom of the ocean?

Underwater Hatch, lighted from the inside.

Outside of the story content, hunters have found anomalies in GTAV’s sound and lighting design which have raised still more questions. The sacrificial cave beneath the Altruist camp makes a strange humming noise. The underground tunnel found beneath Mount Chiliad has a mysterious door which can’t be used. A mineshaft in the hills makes strange sounds. Whispers can be heard is certain places. In a recent update, developers added two specific designs of spiderwebs that bear a resemblance to friezes in some mural designs; these have been placed very sparingly throughout the game. Why?

 

Gate at Observatory in GTAV, depicting spider webs
A gate at the observatory which hunters believe depict similar spider webs.

 

One of the mysterious spider webs in GTAV.
One of the mysterious spider webs.

 

The Space Docker – a vehicle given as a reward for completing The Truth’s side quests to retrieve UFO parts – has a special horn sound. Can it be used to activate something? In specific circumstances, strange lights are projected down onto the roof of the structure in which Fort Zancudo’s underground elevator is located. Does a UFO have something to do with this elevator?

Lights above elevator at Zancudo. Found on http://gtavjetpack.blogspot.com
Lights above the elevator at Fort Zancudo.

 The Details

It’s important at this point to recognize how many of these questions are rooted in wild, unfounded, wishful speculation. I, personally, don’t buy that all of this stuff is intentional, nor do I believe that much of it is related to the Chiliad Mystery (which I do believe existed at one point – I’ll get to this in a sec). For example, “SEGREGATE AND REARRANGE”? An anagram of “segregate” is “easter egg”. Most of the things people believe tie into the larger Chiliad Mystery are, like this, probably just an easter egg unto themselves.

This is to Rockstar’s credit, in a way. I think Rockstar has, if nothing else, a phenomenal sense for detail. The amount of work that goes into individualizing the sounds, lights, and textures throughout this game are just unparalleled. Each playable character even has their own lens flare when they look at the sun.

The lens flare of the sun for each playable character in GTAV
The way the characters each perceive the sun is different.

To look on these details as intentional parts of a larger mystery is, in my opinion, to conflate extremely careful environmental design with game design. Developers tend to make interactive objects more detailed; they make the faces of player characters more lifelike; they reuse environmental dialogue and sound effects as a reality of the costs of game development. I think Rockstar just puts more money and work into every little thing in their games than the hunters expect (save for the writing, but that’s another essay entirely). These are games with many-years-long development cycles, spanning international studios and intense, often vicious labor practices are employed in order to accomplish this level of detail.  These are games that are very much the product of these budgets, timeframes, and developmental rigor.  Ultimately, hunters are looking at GTAV as having been developed like any other game, by any other studio. In a Rockstar game, sometimes a weird sound is just a neat touch, not a mystery.

However, I do believe Rockstar is largely responsible for the lengths to which these hunters have gone in pursuing this mystery. It’s plain as day that there is a larger mystery here. The game makes a specific request of its players: COME BACK WHEN YOUR STORY IS COMPLETE.  It is coupled with a cryptic map, visible from the start of the game, taunting the player with the secrets to which it leads.

Now, if there was no map, then the message itself is already solved: when you complete the game, you can come back to the peak of Mount Chiliad and see one of the three UFOs. But in the context of the map, which is still unsolved, and the many allusions to aliens and conspiracies throughout the game, it makes sense that players have been desperately seeking to connect every loose thread they can find. Unfortunately, over four years have now passed, and the investigation has stagnated. Many have lost hope. Is the Chiliad Mystery even in the game?

Some believed it would be too brazen, too cruel of Rockstar to put all this shit in the game, and for none of it to lead anywhere. It MUST be in here somewhere. Sunk cost fallacy, I guess. Others thought it would be single-player DLC, for which you’d need to meet base-game requirements before you’d be able to access it. Since Rockstar came forward recently and announced that, yes, they had been developing single-player DLC at one point, but had shifted focus to GTA Online, those who believe this would be completed one day were hit with a sinking feeling. They wouldn’t really move this stuff to GTA Online…would they?

The DLC

And so we arrive at the week of December 12th: the release date of The Doomsday Heist, GTA Online’s newest DLC. Mount Chiliad houses a massive secret, which will save San Andreas from a doomsday event, and it’s up to the player to get in there and get to work. In the trailer for the DLC, players are shown strapped to jetpacks, soaring through the skies. We are introduced to a supercomputer AI called Clifford – a name found in GTAV’s source code as far back as 2015, alongside references to the jetpack.  These were found long ago by “codewalkers”, hunters who have been data-mining the source code of GTAV. Yes, there has been a conspiracy, and yes, Rockstar moved it all into GTA Online, and no, none of the hunting has mattered at all.

GTAV’s Chiliad Mystery is, to my knowledge, the longest, most intense, most complex and well-reasoned in-game hunt for a mystery in a AAA game. While other games have allusions to mysteries that were removed from the game prior to release (the bird that can carry the Wanderer to potential new lands in Shadow of the Colossus comes to mind, as does the Ice Key “Stop n Swop” mystery from Banjo-Kazooie), I don’t know of any where the fruits of the hunters’ labor were actually redirected in a way that wholly nullified the hunt in the first place after the game’s release. It was both fascinating and increasingly sad to watch the hunt dry up as it became more and more obvious to the hunters what was going to happen to the Chiliad Mystery. There are still players who insist that the hunt is still on; they are in denial that Rockstar would have embedded clues that don’t lead to anything. For some, the communal effort of the hunt itself is as much a game as whatever GTAV was actually designed to offer.

 

 

For me, I’m saddened by this result. I didn’t actually want a jetpack in GTAV. I don’t even play the game, and haven’t in years. I just wanted to see a conspiracy revealed, a riddle solved. I wanted to see what was beneath Zancudo, and what the shaft of the elevator in Chiliad looked like. I wanted to meet the aliens, know the government’s secrets. I will see that stuff, I guess, if I play the DLC (I’m considering it), but that it wasn’t earned in the way that I had envisioned robs the experience of its intimacy.

In my eyes, solving a mystery in a game is to commune privately with a developer. They whisper a secret in your ear as you enter these forbidden spaces they designed just for you, the intrepid, ever-curious explorer. Now, I’m just another tourist, standing in line to see the prescribed view.