Rockstar has suffered a security breach for the second straight year. While the previous hack revealed the future of the franchise, the newest breach hints that a long-rumored GTA 5 port never made it into active development.
Many fans have been hoping for Grand Theft Auto 5, and possibly GTA Online, to arrive on the Nintendo Switch for a long time now. The fact that L.A. Noire and Red Dead Redemption were released on the console gave players even more hope that the fifth installment of the GTA franchise would eventually make its way to the handheld device. However, Rockstar may never have planned for the game to be released on the Switch.
An analysis of the leaked source code for GTA 5 reveals that a Switch port was never in active development at Rockstar. According to Reddit user RafaelSwi, there are only two references to the Nintendo Switch in the GTA 5 source code. The user also shared that the source code also mentions NX64, which is a codename for the Switch before its release.
The user’s analysis of the code suggests that Rockstar may have initially thought of bringing the game to the Nintendo handheld. However, Grand Theft Auto 5 was never even close to running on the Switch which utilizes the ARM system-on-chip architecture of the Nvidia Tegra X1.
Further inspection of the code hints that the references were tied to utility functions and objects. This indicates that any serious development of a Switch port never happened.
RafaelSwi speculates that Rockstar may have planned to have a Switch version of GTA 5 but abandoned it later on when Nintendo announced that the handheld would be using the 64-bit ARM architecture. The assumption explains why there are more mentions of the NX64 codename rather than the Switch within the source code. The possibility that the theory is based on an old version of the game codes appears to be slim as the game files included in the leaks were from the second half of 2021.
To be fair, Rockstar recently released the Switch port for Red Dead Redemption, the only game using the RAGE engine on the handheld, which might have lent more weight to the rumors. However, RafaelSwi believes that it would have been a waste of time to try to run GTA 5 on the console before the engine was ported to the Switch. The user concludes that there is no indication that Rockstar ever actively developed a Switch version of GTA 5. At least, not before 2022, the earliest.
There is still a possibility that Rockstar would be working on a Switch port for Grand Theft Auto 5 given that there have been rumors that a successor to the Nintendo handheld would be released in 2024. Unfortunately, given the studio’s track record, it may take a while before the game makes it to the handheld device.
Fingers crossed, we’ll see Rockstar confirm ports of Grand Theft Auto 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, and GTA V on the Switch’s successor soon.
