Immediately after triggering it, a bunch of police cars started blasting toward him from a distance, and a helicopter starts chasing him. This wasn’t new to ClicheUsername, though. Enabling six stars was something he claims he tried shortly after the release of the PC version. This was just the first time he was documenting the chaos. “I was mostly just surprised that it didn’t crash the game,” ClicheUsername told me via email.

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Unfortunately, the six-star wanted level didn’t seem to make things more intense. “I don’t think any law enforcement spawns and comes after you,” ClicheUsername wrote on Reddit. “The cops that attacked me in that video were already there.” Funnily enough though, setting the wanted level to seven crashed the game altogether.

ClicheUsername seems convinced that the sixth wanted level isn’t just some unused code that never made it into the actual game. He believes, or perhaps hopes, that there is more to the wanted levels than people have found so far.

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“I can’t be sure about this yet, and the only way to be certain may be if we can get a look at the code for wanted levels and how they work,” ClicheUsername said. The hunch ties back to the big mystery at the heart of GTA V.

“If you’ve seen the blueprint map that came with the Collector’s Edition of the game, there’s a few interesting messages that you can see if held under a UV light,” ClicheUsername said. Specifically, he’s referring to this:

Image for article titled The Mystery Of GTA V's Six-Star Wanted Level
Image: shartedmypants
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The words appear on a part of the map known as Fort Zancudo, a military base in GTA V. Remember how people found it suspicious that GTA V’s wanted levels don’t include military weaponry, like tanks? Yeah. That’s where this theory is going.

“I think if the sixth star is obtainable, Zancudo very likely has something to do with it, considering that’s where the military is and that’s who I’d expect to be after you if you had six stars,” ClicheUsername said. The assumption now is that maybe, just maybe, players haven’t found the specific way to trigger the six stars in-game yet. That they haven’t “taken control” yet, if you will. Years later, the folks on r/chiliadmystery haven’t been able to crack it, even after testing things out at Zancudo. Nor have newer versions of the game incorporated more wanted levels. But the hope remains alive for some, if only as a curiosity.

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Theories about secrets hidden inside of GTA are a dime a dozen, and any gamer who’s spent long enough playing the game probably has a story or two to tell you about such-and-such rumor. Usually, those hunches don’t pan out. Most “evidence” leads to dead ends.

This mystery, the mystery of the six-star wanted level stands apart from most others. There is another wanted level in the game. It may just be unused code, and it may not do much (yet?), but still, it’s in there.

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This post originally ran in 2015.