Mythmaking and Codebreaking: The Hunt for GTAV's Bigfoot and/as Digital Cultural Memory

This extended abstract argues that play itself is an archival practice, and that player-generated activity shapes the future histories of videogames and digital culture. Using Grand Theft Auto V as a case study, it asks how videogame preservation should account for transformative and noncanonical works that conventional approaches overlook.

The case study begins with GTAV's persistent life. Released in September 2013 and rereleased in 2014 on newer platforms, with the GTA Online component continuing to expand through patches, it still drew peaks above 100,000 daily Steam users by 2019. Under a games-as-a-service model and long-tail revenue strategy, the 2019 game plays quite differently from the 2013 original. This instability compounds a long-standing preservation problem: videogames are both objects and activities. Preservation efforts split between those prioritizing long-term access to the playable software, such as emulation, and those documenting configurative and performative play, with some combining both. Mods, machinima, art installations, social commentary, and live-action roleplay further extend the game in unpredictable ways.

The central example is the mystery of Bigfoot in GTAV, which grew from player speculation, originated in an earlier Rockstar release, and spanned multiple titles. It was eventually resolved when a group of players calling themselves the Codewalkers decoded cryptic clues that developers had embedded in the game code. The author treats such player stories as valuable both as records and as evidence of how knowledge is produced through play, a form of media archaeological inquiry into the layers of the game.

Theoretically, the argument draws on De Kosnik's double-helix model of digital cultural memory, which pairs works (archive) with the activities that make them (repertoire), building on Taylor's emphasis on embodied transmission. Parallels are drawn between fan fiction production and configurative play. De Kosnik's rogue archives and Eichhorn's archival genres support the conclusion that noncanonical and anticanonical works and practices deserve reevaluation for their role in forming and transmitting digital culture. The work is conceptual rather than empirical, with no survey or dataset.