Welcome to Stealing Cars, Kotaku’s semi-regular column dedicated to rounding up interesting stories and news about the Grand Theft Auto franchise and Rockstar Games. This time around, I chatted with one of the lead devs behind a cool new GTA mod mixing Manhunt and San Andreas into a new game. I also discovered a GTA 6 fan who counted over 10,000 trees in a single screenshot. And we have more stats from that Rockstar Games data breach that happened earlier this month. Y’know, the one that ended up leading to Take-Two’s stock price exploding.
New GTA San Andreas Mod Finally Gives Fans The Manhunt Crossover They’ve Wanted
The 3D Grand Theft Auto universe (which includes GTA Vice City and San Andreas) is technically set in the same world as Manhunt, Rockstar’s gritty, ultra-violent stealth-action series that has attracted a lot of controversy over the years. The biggest clue that the PS2-era GTA games exist alongside Manhunt are the repeated references to Carcer City, the terrible midwestern city where the original Manhunt takes place.
For a long, long time, fans have wanted these two franchises to come together. It’s never happened, though, outside of some cosmetics and references in GTA Online. But don’t worry: dedicated modders have stepped in to provide fans with GTA: Carcer City. This is an in-development mod for GTA: San Andreas on PC that fully converts the game into a totally new experience set in Carcer City and stuffed full of Manhunt vibes, sound effects, locations, and more. It’s an impressive creation, and earlier this month, the devs behind it released a demo for it. I played the demo and talked to one of the lead creators behind GTA: Carcer City about the demo, the mod, and more.
The modder I spoke to, who goes by Mattineu, said that the idea behind the mod was to provide the GTA community with its “dream” mod of a new game set in a fully explorable Carcer City. Many other modders have tried in the past, and some of these incomplete attempts have been included in GTA: Carcer City.
“All Levels from Manhunt are included in the mod, as without them, it wouldn’t be possible to faithfully expand Carcer City,” Mattineu told Kotaku. “I’d say less than 10 percent of the map is from Manhunt, 85 percent by us (Me, Deadpool, Miauz, 1GB, etc…), and the remaining percentage by older mods that we have permission to use.”
Mattineu told Kotaku that the mod’s version of Carcer City is directly inspired by two cities: Detroit and Cleveland. The modder says the team was aiming to create a “massive industrial city in ruins, far from its glory days [as] the Crown Jewel of the Rust Belt.”
And to be clear, GTA: Carcer City is dedicated to recreating Manhunt’s Carcer City and not the city of Cottonmouth seen in Manhunt 2. Mattineu tells me that the team is using some textures from that sequel, though, and that a version of Cottonmouth can be found in the larger GTA: San Andreas mod known as Stars and Stripes.
As for whether any characters from Manhunt will show up in GTA: Carcer City, Mattineu confirmed a few familiar faces will pop up, including the journalist Robin, who is actually in the game’s demo.
The plan is to see how players react to the demo and continue work on the full release. The modder told me that when GTA: Carcer City is finished and shipped, it will be about as big and long as Grand Theft Auto III. If you want to check out the mod now, you can download it here. You’ll need an unmodded version of GTA: San Andreas 1.0 on your PC. Then you just paste the mod’s files into the game folder in the right spot, and you’ll be playing Carcer City in no time.
I was able to get the mod up and running, and despite some technical issues, it’s an impressive fan creation. At times, it feels as good as something from the Rockstar of that era, complete with new loading screen artwork and original music, as well as weapons from Manhunt. The radio stations and DJs are particularly authentic and add to the moody, gritty atmosphere of Carcer City. As a fan of both Manhunt and GTA, I always wanted something like this from Rockstar Games. That never happened, but GTA: Carcer City is shaping up to be the next best thing, and I can’t wait to play the full release in the future.
GTA Online players have earned over $2.5 sextillion in-game dollars since the game launched
Last week’s leak of data from Rockstar Games revealed a lot about how much money GTA Online has made over the last few months and years. But what about how much (fake, in-game) money players are making? As people continue to dig through the data, we’re also getting other stats about GTA Online, with perhaps the most interesting being the fact that since the game launched over a decade ago, fans have earned an astronomical amount of money from completing missions, tasks, activities, and other events.
The total number? Take a deep breath before reading this whole thing out. Fans have earned $2,933,053,579,559,480,000,000 in-game dollars in GTA Online. You could buy a few mansions for that much, I reckon.
Someone counted every single tree in this GTA 6 screenshot
If you’ve been following Grand Theft Auto 6 news for the last few years, you likely recognize this image of a plane flying over some water and trees. It’s very pretty. Well, someone decided to spend the limited amount of life we are all given on this planet to count every tree in this screenshot. Using Photoshop, a lot of free time, and some guesswork, they arrived at 14,287 trees in the image, “give or take maybe a couple hundred.”
Rockstar, please, you can’t delay GTA 6 again. We already have people figuring out the SPF level of NPC suntan lotion and counting trees. Fans are going to start counting how many atoms make up someone’s hat soon at this rate.
Take-Two Boss says AI should replace people like Elon Musk after he suggested AI can make GTA 6
During an on-stage conversation at the Semafor World Economy 2026 event, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick talked briefly about AI and, completely unprompted, proceeded to pivot to dunking on Tesla CEO, world’s richest man, and history’s saddest dork, Elon Musk.
“If AI were going to get rid of employment, the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, knows a little something about AI, last time I checked,” said Zelnick.
“He has unlimited financial resources, and he has unlimited human resources, and he has, apparently, an unlimited number of ideas. He knows his way around AI. The man works 20 hours a day. If AI were going to take anyone’s job, wouldn’t it take his job? The richest guy on Earth, wouldn’t that be job number one for AI to take? Why is he so busy? By the way, why am I working harder than ever despite the fact that I’ve totally accepted AI into every part of my life?”
Perhaps Zelnick wasn’t happy to see Musk claiming earlier this year on Twitter that, in the near future, AI content generation tools will be able to create a game like GTA 6 in minutes. He even suggested that at some point, AI will just make games you like without you having to ask. That’s nonsense, but rich tech bros basically only speak in nonsense and gibberish, so it’s to be expected.
As for Zelnick, when asked if AI could generate a game like Grand Theft Auto 6, he called the idea “laughable.” Which, to be fair, is what you should say if your company is primarily banking on selling and profiting from GTA 6 after a nearly decade-long development timeline.
See you later!
Stealing Cars might be a twice-monthly thing moving forward? We’re still trying to figure it out.
