The poor Nintendo Switch owners who have been waiting for almost four years for the most famous title in Grand Theft Auto to release on this platform – GTA V – are in for a heartbreak, according to a recent leak. The analysis of the full GTA V source code that was leaked earlier this month, along with a bunch of Rockstar files, revealed that this title was never going to be released for Nintendo Switch.
GTA V was never in the pipeline for Nintendo Switch
This is devastating news, but who was to know any better? Some of Rockstar’s best-selling titles, like L.A. Noire and Red Dead Redemption, have already been introduced on the Nintendo Switch. It was a public consensus that Grand Theft Auto V would follow suit, given that it is Rockstar’s most popular title of all time. Plus, rumors about this were circulating since GTA V was released in September 2013, long back before Nintendo Switch ever came out in March 2017. But now, all this does is add salt to injury.
Reddit is where the bombshell exploded. Reddit user RafaelSwi scanned the entire Grand Theft Auto V source code and could not pinpoint more than two references to Nintendo Switch.
Well, Rockstar makes use of the codename ‘NX64’ for this console, but even so, there were only a couple of references to it in the code. This suggests a rather sad reality – Rockstar Games had once planned to develop GTA V for Nintendo’s hybrid console, but had given up on this project at some point. The references themselves are only there for utility functions. No real pointers exist to say that Grand Theft Auto V came even close to running on the ARM system-on-chip architecture of the Nvidia Tegra X1 packed in a Nintendo Switch.
Reddit user RafaelSwi theorized initially, the adaptation of Grand Theft Auto 5 was very much a possibility. However, when the world heard that the Wii U successor would be run on the 64-bit ARM architecture, Rockstar Games regretfully scraped these plans. Now, these comments do make sense of the many obvious ‘discrepancies’ in the source code, like why the codename ‘NX64’ is much more common than the actual name of the console. One more corroborating fact is the source code in question is fairly recent. The huge leak that happened this year revealed files that are dated from the second half of 2021.
Let’s turn our attention from Grand Theft Auto V to another huge name for Rockstar Games – Red Dead Redemption. This title was released in August 2023 for Nintendo Switch and to date, it holds the title of being the only RAGE engine game that runs on this platform. RafaelSwi’s statement on this is that it would have been “a waste of time” to pay attention to getting GTA V to the Switch before that engine itself was ported to the console, which is logical. Therefore, concludes RafaelSwi, GTA V was never even in active development for this hybrid console.
That was a lot of bad news for Nintendo Switch owners so to lighten the mood, we would like to say that it is rumored that the successor of the Switch console is to be launched in 2024, and Rockstar Games might release GTA V (or its successor) for it. It certainly is not like one of the biggest names in the video game industry to ignore one of the best-selling consoles, that too for the second most purchased title in the world. If not GTA V, then GTA 6 would be in the pipeline for release on Switch 2.
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