



Given the scope of the leak, the fame of the game, and the years of Rockstar radio silence surrounding the follow-up to the second-best-selling title of all time, the unsanctioned sneak peek was huge news. ( GTA V wasn’t unveiled until less than two years before its September 2013 release.) In February, Rockstar said “active development” was “well underway,” adding, “We look forward to sharing more as soon as we are ready.” Clearly, Rockstar wasn’t ready yet. Most estimates suggest that the game won’t be out until at least 2024, which means it may be some time until Rockstar officially lifts the lid. The notoriously secretive Rockstar didn’t confirm that the next GTA was in progress until this past February, and it still hasn’t announced the game’s title or release date, forcing analysts to parse Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive’s financial disclosures for clues about timing. And on Monday, GTA developer Rockstar Games-which had already started spamming takedown orders in an attempt to play Whac-A-Mole with the rapidly proliferating footage-ended any doubt, announcing that it had “recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information about our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto.”Ī Message from Rockstar Games /T4Wztu8RW8- Rockstar Games September 19, 2022įor fans of GTA who’ve spent two console generations anticipating the next mainline title in one of the medium’s most famous franchises, seeing the first tangible evidence of GTA VI’s existence was as wondrous as spotting Bigfoot on Mount Chiliad. But by Sunday morning, credible reports had confirmed its authenticity. In the hours after the illicit data dump, fans debated whether the material was real or an extremely elaborate hoax. The leaker also posted images of assorted game assets and snippets of additional Rockstar code.

#Gta vi protagonist code#
Much of the footage featured debug code and other normally non-public-facing architecture and interfaces that illustrated some of the systems working under the hood. The leak came from a thread at the website GTAForums, where a user named “teapotuberhacker”-who claimed to be the same person who hacked Uber last week-matter-of-factly stated, “Here are 90 footage/clips from GTA 6.” And there they were: images and nearly an hour’s worth of clips of a nowhere-near-half-baked build of the game, including videos of a female playable protagonist (accompanied by a male sidekick) orchestrating a hostage situation inside and outside of a diner, a male playable protagonist strolling around a strip club and talking to NPCs at a pool, and several sequences of outdoor driving or walking. Nine years to the day that Grand Theft Auto V came out, nearly 100 videos and screenshots of an early version of its successor had surfaced. This time, though, the smoke on social media was wafting from a five-alarm fire: one of the most scandalous leaks in video game history. And when you clicked-because of course you clicked-you were almost definitely disappointed to discover that the source was some baseless speculation about potential protagonists, settings, or release dates. If any online algorithm has learned that you like video games, then you’ve almost certainly seen “GTA VI” trending at some point (or maybe many points) over the past several years. Late on Saturday night ( Los Santos time), something incredible happened: A rumor about Grand Theft Auto VI actually turned out to be true.
