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Meet GTA V’s conspiracy hunters
The truth is out there, as are spaceships, bigfoot and maybe a jetpack.
GTA’s biggest, rockiest secret
© Rockstar
After descending from the peak of Mount Everest in 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary told the waiting press that “it is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” Then, under his breath and over the sound of rapturous applause, he whispered to his sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, “That was rubbish. You said there would be a spaceship. We’re never doing this again.”
Grand Theft Auto V has the peculiar accolade of having the most interesting mountain in gaming. That’s because Mount Chiliad is more than just a big rock jutting out the top of San Andreas: Mount Chiliad is – and has been since all the way back to GTA: San Andreas – a mystery, squirrelled away under a surface layer of shootouts, car chases, and firing rocket launchers into traffic. And for some engrossed gamers, the entire object of the game.
It all started with a map.
Even as the game was released in September 2013, enterprising fans of the series were suspicious that something was, literally and figuratively, up. San Andreas’ Chiliad was the subject of many myths and hoaxes, with players claiming to have spotted everything from bigfoot to Slenderman roaming its rocky trails. These turned out to be hoaxes, but still the lure of the mountain called to them.
Then, at the summit they found the map. The map which would lead to a still ongoing, three-year investigation to discover the secrets of the mountain – an investigation that has unearthed spaceships, secret doors, and, ahem, ‘edibles’ that transform people into animals. Not to mention the year long endeavour to blow up a dam in the game, which may not be possible. Who are these people? What are they hoping to find? And will they ever stop?
“[They’re] tough to define I suppose,” says WarBob, one of the moderators at the /r/ChiliadMystery subreddit, the online water cooler for the game’s most hardcore players and tin foil hat wearers alike. “Due to the nature of Grand Theft Auto V, both being one of the most popular video game series and also a game that's widely available on multiple platforms, we pretty much get people from all walks of life. Young people, older people, angry people, intelligent people, serious hunters, stoners and even real-life conspiracy theorists.”
But what does it mean?!
© Rockstar
WarBob is in charge of policing a community of disparate detectives who are constantly throwing up new clues, theories and wild-eyed speculations. These are his people, he their shimmering digital shepherd. Unsurprisingly, they’re an eclectic mix.
“There are people that just want to be a piece of the proverbial pie as it were, and as such will literally throw anything at the wall that seems even remotely suspicious, or connect things together randomly in the hopes of being taken seriously as a part of the community,” he says, of the personality types he’s observed on the sub during his tenure. “Then there are the other kinds of users that find the act of approaching each thing with a strict scientific methodology and the hobby of investigation addicting and fascinating.”
The community works, broadly, in two ways. On the one hand, there are the players who clamber over the mountain like ant-detectives on a massive ant nest, looking for clues on and around Chiliad and then returning to the sub to ask, “Does this mean anything?” The second set – and there is obvious overlap – are the players who tear into the game’s innards on PC, looking for incriminating assets like textures, item descriptions and so on that might suggest something more going on than just hiking and dirt bike stunts.
But in a nod to San Andreas’ most persistent mythological creature (in both senses of the word), the biggest find so far – according to WarBob – was bigfoot.
“The bigfoot hunt was when we discovered that after getting all of the hidden peyotes (and thus unlocking bigfoot as a playable peyote character), that when you made him make noise, a growl would occur in the distance,” he says. “If you followed that growl for a pretty damn long time you'd find destroyed cars, dead bodies of animals and people, and it eventually ended up in a big one on one fight between bigfoot and the Teen Wolf parody from GTA: Online in the plane graveyard.”
Wait. Back up. Hidden peyotes?
“The peyotes are 28 hallucinogenic plants located around Los Santos that let you play as birds and animals when eaten,” says redditor rkRusty, like that’s a perfectly normal English sentence. rkRusty not only discovered the peyotes in the first place, but his discovery sits at the top of the all-time most popular posts on /r/ChiliadMystery sub, making him a sort of gun-toting, carjacking Shackleton.
“After Rockstar introduced an achievement alluding to an additional peyote, with the help of the Chiliad Mystery Reddit community I discovered a secret plant that allowed players to play as bigfoot, as well as the first in a series of cryptic messages left by Rockstar devs in the game code that pointed towards a further ’beast vs. bigfoot’ easter egg. I think people appreciate our discovery because it gave us something definitive to say we found, worked through and solved, and has helped dispel belief about the community being a group of jetpack crackpots.” (While the bigfoot discovery does not prove the jetpack’s existence, it does show that Rockstar is prepared to go to elaborate lengths to mess with players, so it might at least suggest the group are on the right tracks still).
That ‘jetpack crackpots’ comment is indicative of how the rest of the GTA community sometimes sees the Chiliad investigation. It refers back to the map of the mountain, which appears to show either a rigid series of paths down – or even into – Mount Chiliad. While the spaceship(s) have been found, the other two symbols remain mysterious – though the one on the right is certainly jetpack-esque, and is possibly the mystery’s greatest unclaimed prize. Furthermore, 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, set in the same fictional state, did include a jetpack, buried at the bottom of secret alien research facility, Area 69. Unfortunately, the hit-and-miss nature of the community’s findings and the mad scrabbling for clues sometimes bring in the trolls.
“One of the problems we face is reputation for those outside of the community,” says WarBob. “They take one look at what we do from the outset and think we're all crazy. There's also plenty of crazy submissions in the sub that we've had over the years that confirm that bias if you're looking for it. As such some people just think it's a great laugh to sign up and waste our time. We pretty much pick up on the trolls instantly though. We're at the point now where a chunk of our regulars have gone through a ton of game files and have a pretty good understanding of what makes the game tick, so it's very easy to pick up on when someone is lying out of their teeth.”
Nevertheless, the hunt for the legendary jetpack – or the meaning of its rune – continues. And given how long it took the community to cotton onto the existence of the peyotes, it is not impossible that this holiest of holies continues to elude it.
“The peyote existed for a year before we found it, it was included with the launch of the PS4, Xbox One versions of the game,” says rkRusty. “I’d say we were pretty slow to catch on, even needing a prompt [from Rockstar] to get started.”
rkRusty is one of the more dedicated, scientific explorers as described by WarBob. While many players split their time, as you might expect, between detective work and the bread and butter of knocking over banks and fleeing from police helicopters, rkRusty’s focus is much more singular.
“I’ve put about 300 hours into the mystery, but most of it not in-game,” he says. “I haven’t touched multiplayer, and have put about 80 hours into the main campaign... [And] there’ve been hundreds of minor, incremental findings. Some alien runes that appear similar to a HUD, an ‘alien egg’ [the middle rune on the map] that doesn’t appear in-game... All of which imply something more than what is presented to us, yet every one has so far been a dead end.”
Despite the chippiness of some of those outside the community, the constant, glacial inching toward a resolution keeps those on the inside bound together – an agency of online PIs, bigfoot hunters and alien truthers.
“Nothing else has caught my intrigue quite like the Chiliad Mystery has,” says Redditor BluntsAreBest (possibly not his real name, which he declined to give). “I think the meta world that this conspiracy has caused is incredibly entertaining, if not totally insane. Grand Theft Auto has been my go-to game since I was a kid, so it’s more about being a part of a community with people who share my interests.”
Over the years there have been sub-groups that have tried to work together to solve it in a more methodical way...
“Overall, people mainly work solo, but that has a lot to do with the subjective nature of what the ‘Chiliad Mystery’ has turned into,” he continues. “People not only disagree on interpretations of the mural, but disagree on what belongs in the subreddit. You can see clashes like this on the subreddit daily. Over the years there have been sub-groups that have tried to work together to solve it in a more methodical way, but everybody hits the same wall. Some sub-groups even resemble cults: trying to preach the ‘truth’, that the answer to the Chiliad Mystery is actually Enlightenment.”
BluntsAreBest is responsible for the subreddit’s megathread – a meticulously assembled codex of all that the community has unearthed so far. It is an exhaustive list and an exhausting read of every discovery, theory, and unexplained possible clue thus far discovered: secret morse code messages, mysteriously appearing spider webs, suspicious government activity – it’s all there . Trying to take it in feels like standing in Russell Crowe’s garage in A Beautiful Mind while breathing in paint thinner.
But with so many of the mountain’s secrets uncovered, filed and documented, where does the community want this to end? At what point – if ever – will the mystery of Mount Chiliad be ‘solved’?
“For me, it all comes down to the Jetpack,” says BluntsAreBest. “I think most people would agree the symbol on the mural is a Jetpack. There have been lines of code found relating to the Jetpack. I would be satisfied with only two outcomes: the Jetpack, or a proper explanation of the mural from Rockstar. If I don't get either of those, I might just have to keep searching forever.”
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