Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Many of y'all may not know this, but once upon a time, Rockstar was planning on featuring the Nissan GT-R (R35) in Midnight Club LA. Unfortunately, it didn't end up making the cut, maybe due to time constraints or licensing woes. The car was left unfinished and forgotten in the game files. For years, I've wanted to get my hands on this thing and recently I finally made it happen.

This footage was recorded on PC via Xenia, an Xbox 360 emulator. Due to the GT-R being unfinished, it has some idiosyncrasies about it that I tried to demonstrate in the video. For one, it's performance is very lackluster; it accelerates slowly, only has 5 gears, tops out at 100 MPH/160 KMH, and has the cornering ability of a semi-truck. It's clearly unfinished in this regard, further demonstrated by the fact that installing performance parts on it makes no difference. Additionally, most of its customization is inaccessible via in-game means. Off-screen, I had to modify the game's live memory in order to swap the car's visual parts.

It's really cool through that it got far enough along the development pipeline to receive custom parts. I've seen a handful of videos over the years showing pre-customized GT-R's, but never one that displayed each individual part, and so that served as motivation to put this video together.

Ultimately though it is a shame it never made its way to retail. The GT-R has been my favorite car since it debuted back in 2007, and the original 2007-2009 model is my favorite bodystyle. I know I would have loved this thing back in MCLA's heyday.

EDIT: there is now a mod that almost completely fixes the GT-R, I'd highly recommend giving it a go. Some of the fixes include it now having proper performance, an exhaust note, and customization accessible in-game. Please see this video by GrandTheftAero for the full breakdown + download link: youtube.com/watch?v=oOExJGEkFjs

This file will add the GT-R (and the R8) to the dealer: mediafire.com/file/9j6pu7d97rfx9e9/xarchive_cache.rar/file

This file will likely only work with the Xbox 360 version of the game. if you're playing the PS3 version of MCLA via RPCS3 (or a jailbroken PS3), I do not believe this file will work properly with that version of the game. Additionally, I am unsure if this file will work with the non-Complete Edition of MCLA.

To use this file, you will need to first extract MCLA's ISO image (this should be the file you're opening when launching the game in Xenia). Then, replace the resulting xarchive_cache.rpf in the directory you've extracted the ISO image's contents to, with the xarchive_cache.rpf from this .rar archive. Make sure you back up the original xarchive_cache. Finally, going forward, you will need to launch the game in Xenia via the default.xex file in the same directory.

To extract the game's ISO image, you can use tools like ISOExtract or ISO2GOD.

0:00 Customization
4:46 Driving

The song used in the first half of the video is Sea of Voices from Porter Robinson's Worlds. I was debating if I even wanted to feature background music in this video and just leave the in-game music, but I edited the footage to shrink the gaps between changing each of the visual parts. This resulted in an unsettling skip in the in-game music every couple of seconds, so I ended up overlaying a few songs until I landed on Sea of Voices and felt that this one kinda fit:
youtube.com/watch?v=lSooYPG-5Rg