If you have a one-star âwantedâ level in GTA V, the police will chase you. At two stars, theyâll shoot to kill.
At three stars, a helicopter follows you and the police use more advanced strategies to try to stop you. At four stars, the gameâs equivalent of a SWAT team comes after you. At five stars, the streets of Los Santos are overrun with a murderous cops, all of whom are determined to stop you, no matter the cost.
And at six stars? Well, there is no six-star wanted levelânot in GTA V, at least. Previous games had a system that went up to six stars, but the system was reduced into five stars for the newest GTA game. This has never been a secret; since the release of GTA V, players have known that thereâs only five starsâ worth of wanted level.
Most players accepted this. But around late 2014, some hardcore players dove into the code of GTA V and found what they say is evidence of a hidden wanted level. Inside the code, Reddit user GlassGoose45 claimed to see dozens of instances where a level six wanted level was referenced. Stuff like âPLAYER::SET_MAX_WANTED_LEVEL(6);â and such.
The question then became: what did this mean? Was it just unused code? Were people misunderstanding what the code was saying? Was it possible to trigger six stars somehow, but players just hadnât found out how to do it? Was this something that was going to be implemented in the current-gen versions of the game? Was it related to the big ongoing mystery that players swear is hiding inside of GTA V?
That may sound ridiculous, but consider whatâs at play: People knew that previous games had six stars, and suddenly the new game doesnât have itâthat was kind of suspicious, in their eyes. A lack of six stars means that GTA V doesnât throw things like tanks at you, which seemed like a weird omission to some players. There are tanks in GTA V, after all. Why not throw some of them at the player, like older games did?
It wasnât until 2015 that someone brought the hidden wanted levels back up again, which is around the time that the PC version of GTA V came out. The release allowed players to mess around with the gameâs inner workings to a degree they couldnât on consoles. Prime opportunity to see what GTA V might be hiding, yeah?
So thatâs exactly what ClicheUsername, a member of r/chiliadmystery, did. He booted up something called âCheat Engine,â and used it to set the wanted level to 6 in the game. And it actually worked. The game gave him six stars. You can see what happens here, in this video:
Immediately after triggering it, a bunch of police cars started blasting toward him from a distance, and a helicopter starts chasing him. This wasnât 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. âI was mostly just surprised that it didnât crash the game,â ClicheUsername told me via email.
Unfortunately, the six-star wanted level didnât seem to make things more intense. âI donât think any law enforcement spawns and comes after you,â ClicheUsername wrote on Reddit. âThe cops that attacked me in that video were already there.â Funnily enough though, setting the wanted level to seven crashed the game altogether.
ClicheUsername seems convinced that the sixth wanted level isnât 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.
âI canât 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,â ClicheUsername said. The hunch ties back to the big mystery at the heart of GTA V
âIf youâve seen the blueprint map that came with the Collectorâs Edition of the game, thereâs a few interesting messages that you can see if held under a UV light,â ClicheUsername said. Specifically, heâs referring to this:
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 Vâs wanted levels donât include military weaponry, like tanks? Yeah. Thatâs where this theory is going.
âI think if the sixth star is obtainable, Zancudo very likely has something to do with it, considering thatâs where the military is and thatâs who Iâd expect to be after you if you had six stars,â ClicheUsername said. The assumption now is that maybe, just maybe, players havenât found the specific way to trigger the six stars in-game yet. That they havenât âtaken controlâ yet, if you will. Years later, the folks on r/chiliadmystery havenât 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.
Theories about secrets hidden inside of GTA are a dime a dozen, and any gamer whoâs spent long enough playing the game probably has a story or two to tell you about such-and-such rumor. Usually, those hunches donât pan out. Most âevidenceâ 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, itâs in there.
This post originally ran in 2015.
