“We shot some stuff and then it just disappeared and [Rockstar] never did it, and they never followed up on it.”
Grand Theft Auto 5 first released in 2013 (coming to PC in 2015), and from the vantage point of 2024 we can see it was a live game in disguise. The singleplayer side of the game, which for the first time featured three protagonists players could switch between on-the-fly, acted as Trojan horse for Rockstar’s second swing at GTA Online, the multiplayer mode that would come to dominate the studio’s time and attention and generate unfathomable levels of cash.
This meant that some plans went by the wayside. Originally GTA 5 had post-launch plans that were more in-line with GTA 4, which received two excellent singleplayer expansions: The Lost and the Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Rockstar was planning three singleplayer expansions for GTA 5, each themed around one of the game’s protagonists, but after the launch itself re-focused on creating expansions for GTA Online (the studio first mentioned singleplayer DLC in 2013, but it would take until 2017 for its cancellation to be confirmed).
Thanks to dataminers, we know that the first expansion was named Agent Trevor, while the latter two had the working titles of “Zombie Apocalypse” and “Alien Invasion.” Trevor’s voice actor, Steve Ogg, recently appeared on a GTA livestream alongside Ned Luke (who played Michael) and Shawn Fonteno (Franklin) to shoot the breeze about their time working on the game (first spotted by the Loadout), and while doing so revealed that Rockstar had gone some way down the road before cancelling the expansion.
