Rockstar has a history of putting cryptic Easter eggs in its games, and its most famous is Grand Theft Auto 5’s Mount Chiliad mystery. Soon after GTA 5’s release, players discovered a strange mural at the top of the game’s tallest mountain. The Grand Theft Auto community exploded with Mount Chiliad theories about the mural’s true meaning, speculating about UFOs, jetpacks, and the Illuminati. While the true solution does provide a spooky surprise, it’s a lot simpler than what many fans might think.
Despite releasing in 2013, Grand Theft Auto 5 has continued to be relevant in the games industry. The game’s online component, GTA Online, continues to grow, enjoying its most populated holiday season ever in 2019. Both the online mode’s consistent updates and a community of Grand Theft Auto roleplayers have helped keep GTA 5 selling since its release, making GTA 5 the best-selling game of the decade.
All those sales mean many players have had a chance to see Mount Chiliad’s mural. The image shows four symbols - an egg, a jetpack, a UFO, and an eye-like object on top of a mountain - accompanied by a network of branching lines and a field of lightning bolts. Additionally, the phrase “Come back when your story is complete” is carved into an observation platform elsewhere on Mount Chiliad’s peak. Fans theorized that figuring out what the mural meant would lead to a big reward, like a jetpack locked away in a secret room inside Mount Chiliad. But the real solution was much more straightforward.
It was soon discovered that, upon 100%-completing the single-player game, players could see a hidden GTA UFO above Mount Chiliad during a storm at night. This seemed to explain the eye-like shape above the mural’s mountain, but the rest of the symbols were a mystery. Could the jetpack still be out there somewhere? Rockstar hasn’t confirmed any one theory as true, but the most plausible theory says there’s nothing left to find. As explained by Reddit user Sir_Galehaut in 2016 (and recently summarized by YouTuber Strange Man), the mural is most likely just a set of instructions for getting the UFO to spawn above the mountain.
According to the theory, the symbols along the bottom of the mural each represent Grand Theft Auto 5’s protagonists: Michael, alienated from his family and the rest of society, is the UFO. Trevor is the jetpack, being a rather wild character with a piloting past. And the egg represents Franklin, who experiences a symbolic rebirth into a new life of success by the story’s end. The lines, then, refer to the characters’ interactions with one another and the various major events of the story, while the two “x” marks near the mountain’s top represent Michael and Trevor’s possible deaths at the end of the game. Only Franklin’s path continues to the top (since he always survives the story’s end), meeting the eye symbol among the lightning. This represents the UFO’s appearance after “your story is [100%] complete.”
This is just one theory of many, but it requires the least amount of wild speculation, and therefore seems most plausible. It’s unlikely that some other big reward is still waiting for players all these years after GTA 5 launched, so the real unresolved Mount Chiliad mystery was simply figuring out how the mural connected to the rest of the game, and this theory provides the most likely solution.
Next: 10 Small Details You Only Notice Replaying Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto 5 first released on September 17, 2013, for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
