GTA: Vice City code reveals cut mission where you starred in a movie

pcgamesn.com:

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s original game code contains traces of a mission that was cut from the final release, suggesting that Tommy Vercetti, played by the late, great Ray Liotta, would have found himself starring in an action movie set inside the Malibu Club.

YouTuber Vadim M, who has previously discovered cut beta missions in GTA 3, and hidden anti-piracy measures in Episodes from Liberty City, has taken a look inside the game code of the recent Vice City: Definitive Edition, and their findings are pretty surprising.

It seems Grove Street Games, the studio tasked with developing the definitive editions, failed to spot that the old Vice City game code contained numerous files flagged for internal use only. These present a few interesting nuggets. The special forces who ambush you in the Mall Shootout mission for Colonel Cortez, for example, are described in the game code as possessing “an outrageous French accent”. When coding how the countdown timer would work in the film studio mission where you distribute flyers from a plane, one Rockstar North staffer has written – in perfect Scottish vernacular – “doing wee timer thing ma blodger”.

Most intriguing, though, is a mission source file called “movie demo”. The code outlines a mission start and end point, but so far, what Vadim has been able to find is simply a cutscene, which shows Tommy leaving the police station in Ocean Beach, and being followed by two gangsters to the Malibu Club. There’s a lengthy shootout, and Tommy escapes in a Banshee being driven by a female companion. Their freedom is short-lived, however, as the car promptly crashes into some barrels and explodes, leaving them dead.

It all seems very unusual, but also within the hidden, internal files