GTA V Players Have Solved A Beastly Mystery
Mystery solved!
The urban legends surrounding Grand Theft Auto V [official site] and its supposed myriad of secrets are just about as daft as people who actually think Bigfoot exists. But I guess the only people laughing now are 30 "codewalkers" who, against all odds, believed in their conviction and have solved a months-long mystery involving golden peyote, Bigfoot, and a 1985 teen comedy about a werewolf.
This all started last year when players discovered a fabled golden peyote plant that, upon being consumed, transformed them into Bigfoot so they could run around doing Bigfoot things. But as players scanned through the code in GTA's files, they began to suspect there was more to the golden peyote plant than just turning into a hairy beast.
Thus began the long journey to get to the bottom of this rabbit hole. Kotaku has a great write up about the specifics, but the gist of it is that Rockstar left a hint in the code that eventually led players to discovering that other peyote plants existed but could only be found by standing on specific coordinate at a certain time of day with certain weather conditions active. To do this without hacking the game would be mostly impossible, but players were able to engineer the proper conditions to make each of seven golden peyote plants appear.
From there, players were tipped off by another clue in the code that made them realize that by using Bigfoot's special growl, they could hear a beastly snarl in the distance. By following that snarl, they'd encounter a series of corpses until finally encountering the beast itself…
Yup. It's Michael J. Fox from the movie Teen Wolf. And after killing him, players are rewarded by being able to play the wolf in GTA V's director mode, which is used to make videos. All of this for a movie reference? I just don't understand the internet.