Easter eggs evolved: Why gamers spent 3-years-plus studying GTAV’s Mount Chiliad

Just below the peak of Mount Chiliad, a huge mountain in the far north of San Andreas, a mysterious mural sits high atop a cliff face. It looks like a map of the mountain's interior—a network of tunnels that connect five small chambers and three large ones with what appear to be a UFO, an egg, and a jetpack within them. Whether it's actually a map isn't clear. Nearby, painted on the bottom edge of a lookout platform, are the words "come back when your journey is complete." And beneath that, painted on the ground, there's a red eye.

It's a strange and alluring set of odd, possibly related mysteries. And for most people who see them, that's all they are—a curiosity in a world full of curiosities that Rockstar made to give Grand Theft Auto V's setting a sense of being lived in.

But for a diehard group of mystery hunters, and for the hundreds of thousands of intrigued onlookers who keep tabs on their work, these phenomena hold the key to something big. Possibly huge. It's a secret that may be of monumental significance, or that at the very least must involve something really cool: a hidden jetpack, maybe a UFO you can fly, or a super-awesome weapon. Whatever it is, these sleuthing gamers want it. And they won't stop until they either find it or prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the whole thing is one enormous wild goose chase.

These Truth Seekers have spent the past three years trading theories, studying strange signs around San Andreas, investigating paranormal phenomena, and poring over Grand Theft Auto V's data, resource, and script files in a relentless quest to solve the so-called Chiliad Mystery. It has been a tough journey, beset with more red herrings and dead-end leads than actual discoveries. But every day the community of secret hunters edges closer to cracking the code—if indeed there is a code to crack.

What's in the shed?

This epic three-years-and-counting odyssey began with a shed. Perched somewhere near the top of the mountain and visible in the background of that July 9, 2013, pre-release gameplay trailer, the shed was spotted by Reddit user Bertojones—who shared a screenshot on Imgur and r/gaming. "That damn shed" went viral. Everybody wanted to know what was in the shed. Theories ranged from the practical to the extraordinary. Some suggested it housed a safe or a jetpack, a parachute, or some other treasured object. The top commenter wryly speculated that the shed may turn out to be just a box with a door texture slapped on one side of it.

Fans spent the following three months arguing about the shed's contents and speculating on the presence of as many as three UFOs in an earlier GTA V trailer. When the game came out on September 17, they all hurried to the mountain and rode an aerial tramway to the top—whereupon they'd see a glyph of what looks like either an eye or a UFO above a mountain. With a bit of poking around, players soon discovered the mural, eye, and message.

This triggered more wild speculation, primarily clustered in two threads—one on GTAForums, the other on the GTA V subreddit. Within days, four more glyphs were discovered along with four UFOs. (User SuperMaruoBrassiere wrote a helpful timeline of early publicly recorded discoveries on GTAForums, for those curious about the details.) But amid widespread speculation and theorizing, nobody had a definitive answer to either what the mural meant or whether they had more to discover.

Much of the broader player base moved on within a month or so. They'd lost interest in trying to separate genuine discoveries from fake ones, and they were bored of searching. "This sh*t is getting old," one player wrote on October 25, capturing the mood. "I'm pretty sure there's nothing more to the mural, because it would've been solved by now."

But enough people disagreed that a vibrant mystery hunting community was able to survive three years and counting. These mystery hunters investigate anything and everything with the slightest possibility of being related to the mural, often then reinvestigating with a different character, or at a different time of day, or when it's raining (or not), or with a five-star wanted rating—because you never know what might trigger something. This attitude is borne out by actual conditions for some of the game's found Easter eggs, such as a UFO that only appears above Mount Chiliad at 3am in the rain.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery came when, in September 2015, Rockstar added an achievement called Cryptozoologist that had the following flavor text: "You unlocked all animals for use in Director Mode… or did you?" In Director Mode, you can control other "actors" in the game world, including birds and land-based animals, but you have to ingest a different peyote—a hallucinogenic plant—in order to unlock each animal.

Users StipularPenguin and Supakim1 dug through the game files and pulled out audio cues, peyote graphics, and scripts that might help find a hidden animal. Then, it was rkRusty who managed to put all the pieces together and actually discover the golden peyote. This gamer believed, from studying the scripts and vetting them in-game, this golden peyote spawned only on Tuesday between 5:30am and 8am when the weather was foggy and the player had collected all other peyotes and completed the mission The Last One, which involves helping a Bigfoot hunter.

However, it eventually came to light that there were actually seven golden peyotes—one for each day of the week—but nothing happened when players consumed them. In December 2015, Rockstar added the line, "He was wrong to start his hunt on Tuesday" to the script that had allowed rkRusty to identify the weather and time conditions. Nobody determined what this clue meant until this past June, when NIC779 ate the peyotes in the right order and found the Sasquatch hunter dead. Further investigation revealed more clues, but no answer, until Rockstar changed its message in the code to "his quarry seemed familiar." With help from the "codewalkers" decompiling some of the game's scripts, the community ultimately found their Easter egg this summer: a homage to Michael J. Fox's character in 1985 werewolf movie Teen Wolf.