For Grand Theft Auto Online diehards, there is nothing more infamous than the Vinewood Casino. A rumoured playable location since players first got their hands on the game in 2013, I remember parking my busted Sultan on Mirror Park Boulevard and seeing the ‘Opening Soon’ banner for the first time – a beacon of hope back then for an ambitious multiplayer game that hadn’t quite found its feet.
Since its inclusion, gumshoed players (myself included) have obsessed over this eerily quiet corner of Los Santos, searching for clues behind the scenes and lobbying Rockstar to put together a grand opening. Alas, much like that decaying lot you see each time you return to your hometown – nothing changed.
That was true until 6th June this year, when something extraordinary happened. During a routine weekly update, the once-legendary banner vanished, a selection of props changed location, and every corner of GTA fandom on the internet erupted in tandem.
After nearly six years of waiting, the Diamond Casino & Resort will land in GTA Online today, 23rd July, touting almost everything that fans had been clamouring for: high-stakes card games, penthouse suites, bottle service and even aircraft concierge. Yet this route from speculation to spectacle has not been as simple as it seems. In fact, the story is tangled up in years of GTA Online data-mining, lost single-player DLC, cowboys, zombies and an inevitable detour into gambling law.
GTA Online The Diamond Casino & Resort – PS4, Xbox One, PC Watch on YouTube
I asked two veteran data miners within the GTA Online community, Tez2 and Yan2295, to help me unravel the community mythos behind what has now become The Diamond Casino & Resort.
It all started with the seemingly innocuous November 2013 Beach Bum update. Interior-starved fans had already latched onto the idea of opening the casino doors shortly after GTA Online launched in October, but our first concrete clues arrived in the form of leaked vocal snippets from online quest givers. “So listen, I just heard a casino opened up in town” says nervous heist master Lester Crest in the datamined audio, seemingly confirming that a gambler’s paradise was on the way. It’s worth noting that the Beach Bum newswire post also teased “exciting new Story Mode updates” coming “very soon” – back when the promise of single-player DLC for Grand Theft Auto 5 was still alive.
Turning the viscous plot into a thick porridge, Tez2 exposed some very important strings of code in early 2014 which tied a number of allusions to the casino to a potential three-pronged single-player DLC plan for GTA5, the individual parts tagged ‘GTA’, ‘Trevor’ and ‘Dead’ – the latter supposedly alluding to a zombie apocalypse expansion, with the datamined DLC selection menu checking for the tag ‘SPZOMBIES’, showcased best in this video from GTA YouTuber Chr0m3xMoDz.