The world is bigger than the total size of the worlds from Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas combined.

There is an underwater UFO that can be accessed by mini-sub. The UFO is found in the north of the world map.

In its first 24-hours, Grand Theft Auto V made over $800 million. This surpassed the previous record of $500 million set by Call of Duty: Black Ops II in 2012.

The mission "Grass roots - Trevor" is thought to be a reference to a scene in the movie "PeeWee's Big Adventure". Both scenes are hallucinations, contain clowns, and both have the same background music.

In the Suburban store that you visit in the mission 'Friend Request', one of the shirt stalls allows you to buy a parrot tropical shirt, similar to the one worn by Max Payne in Max Payne 3. Also, if you give Michael just a light scruffy beard while he's wearing his grey suit, he looks oddly similar to Max Payne at the beginning of Max Payne 3.

In the Discount Clothing Store in Grapeseed, you can find a diamond print white and black jacket with a yellow crab on the back. This is a reference to Ryan Gosling's Jacket in the movie 'Drive', where he had an almost identical diamond print white and black jacket but with a yellow scorpion on the back.

On GTA's Facebook parody, Life Invader, you can see that Michael has a man named Nicholas Bell in his friends list. This is a reference to GTA IV's main protagonist, Niko Bellic. Roman is also on his friends list.

There are billboards around the game that say "Rehab Island". The logo bears resemblance to the logo from the game Dead Island.

At $270 million, Grand Theft Auto V had the largest budget of any game in history. Comparing that to Hollywood blockbusters, it is second only to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which had a budget of $300 million.

It's possible to glitch the visual filter that appears when your player character dies so that it persists in normal gameplay. If you are on foot, you will always load into the game facing north, so to perform this glitch, you need to be facing a wall to the north. While facing it, take out an RPG, save your game, then load back into the game while attempting to fire it. You should die from the explosion as the game loads back in, and you will respawn with the death visual filter, which will remain on-screen until you die again.

Certain cars that have the option to add spoilers will either add or reduce the car's downforce, meaning the combined effect of air pressure and gravity pressing down an object toward the ground and increasing its stability, and in the case of the cars in Grand Theft Auto V, reducing the object's airtime:

•Feltzer: spoilers add significant downforce.
•T20: active spoilers create significant downforce, damaged spoilers take away that downforce.
•RE-7B: stock spoilers have little downforce; prior to the Grand Theft Auto Online: Gunrunning DLC, custom spoilers gave significant downforce, but this has since been reduced.
•X80 Proto: spoilers add only a little more downforce on their own, but gets significantly more downforce when braking while the flaps are active.

According to video game researcher Liam Robertson, Rockstar Games considered porting the game to the Wii U as they were at one point creating a prototype for the system's hardware, but it was soon scrapped due to the Wii U's poor sales. In an interview with IGN, Dan Houser was asked whether the game would receive either a PC or Wii U release:


Former Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime was soon asked about the company's attempts to provide action-based games for its fan base, to which he responded:

If the player goes near Raton Canyon at Chiliad Mountain State Wilderness between 19:00 and 20:00, they'll see a car parked on a cliff road surrounded by police vehicles that'll drive off the cliff when an officer approaches it. This is a reference to the end scene in the 1991 movie Thelma & Louise.

The script for Grand Theft Auto V was 3500 pages long. In Ned Luke's own words:

"It’s a brilliant script. Dan [Houser] and Rupert [Humphries], the writers, are prolific. You have to understand, this is a 3500 page script, it’s unbelievable is what it is. They’re up there till their fingers are bleeding."

The Ten Cent Cinema was originally named "Fifty Cent Cinema". This was most likely a reference to the rapper, 50 Cent.

East of the rock quarry a mysterious underwater hatch can be found, with light shining out of the small window. The hatch itself is very similar to the one seen in the television series Lost and emits a morse code in the form of a banging sound. This code can be translated to "Hey, you never call, how d'you fancy going bowling?", referencing Roman Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV.

In the international version of the game, Michael tatoos a penis onto Lazlow in the mission "Reuniting the Family". This drawing was replaced with a rocket-ship in the Japanese version. The dialogue was also changed to say "Should I draw a little bit more smoke? Is it about to begin now?".

At one point in development, Amanda had a ponytail in "Did Somebody Say Yoga?".

As seen in the Official Gameplay Video, the statistic bars were originally full bars, not segmented like in the final game.

An early picture of Professor Rashkovsky can be found in the game's files.