How a Brazilian Modder Stripped 120GB Down to 2.5GB and GTA V Still Boots!

Tuesday, 17 February 2026 at 08:50

One thing most of us (gamers) know is that GTA V, normally eats over 120GB of storage. A Brazilian modder called @OptiJogos just posted a version that fits inside 2.5GB. And somehow it still runs! Pretty much everything that isn't the core sandbox. Story missions? Gone. Cutscenes? Gone. GTA Online? Completely removed. Most of the audio got stripped out. Interiors disappeared. Large chunks of the map no longer exist. North Yankton—the snowy prologue area that takes several gigabytes alone—was deleted entirely.

Textures got hammered down to bare minimum quality. Only a sliver of Los Santos stayed accessible. You're locked into playing as Michael with no option to switch characters.

Key Points:

Brazilian modder @OptiJogos compressed GTA V from 120GB+ down to under 2.5GB
Story missions, cutscenes, GTA Online, most audio, and map sections completely removed
Core sandbox mechanics survive intact including car theft, police system, and wanted levels
Runs at 30FPS on low-spec hardware that normally struggles with modern games
Project reveals most of GTA V's size comes from assets rather than core game systems

What Actually Works

Here's the surprising part. Despite gutting basically everything recognizable about the game, the sandbox mechanics survived intact. You can walk around. Steal cars. Run from cops. Trigger wanted levels. The fundamental loop that made GTA V addictive in the first place still functions.

Opti demonstrated it running at roughly 30FPS on a low-spec machine. The kind of hardware that chokes on modern games entirely. Visually it looks rough—really rough—but it boots, runs, and plays without crashing.

Why Someone Built This

Hardware is expensive. In Brazil and plenty of other regions, buying a PC capable of running 120GB games isn't realistic for most people. Storage costs money. GPU requirements exclude millions of potential players.

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This project wasn't really about creating a practical game version. It was a technical experiment pushing one question: how much of GTA V can you delete before the thing stops working? Turns out the answer is almost all of it.

What the mod accidentally reveals is interesting. Most of GTA V's enormous file size comes from assets—textures, audio files, cutscene videos, online content. The actual game engine and core systems? Tiny by comparison. Strip assets away aggressively enough and you've got something that fits on a cheap USB stick.

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The Risks Worth Mentioning

Downloading modified game builds from the internet carries genuine risks. Compatibility breaks in unexpected ways. Missing components cause crashes. Security concerns exist whenever unofficial executables get distributed online. Anyone curious about this mod should understand what they're getting into before downloading anything.

What This Actually Proves

As a proof of concept it's genuinely impressive. Nobody expected a 98% size reduction to leave anything functional behind. GTA V's core sandbox surviving that kind of brutal stripping proves something about how Rockstar architected the game underneath all those gigabytes.

It's closer to a skeleton than a game. But skeletons are still something, and watching one walk around Los Santos at 30FPS on budget hardware is hard not to respect.

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