Rockstar Games was surprisingly honest when it casually confirmed a new Grand Theft Auto back in February. The announcement didn’t come with any screenshots, a trailer, or a simple logo, but it was something. However, now Rockstar is having to contend with a whole host of leaked Grand Theft Auto VI videos and screenshots that have been dumped onto the internet in one of the more substantial leaks in video game history.
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The footage and screenshots started leaking out of GTAForums from a user named teapotuberhacker before quickly spreading to other places. The user, who also claimed to have hacked Uber, said they got the data through a Rockstar employee’s Slack account.
Not that there was much doubt, but I’ve confirmed with Rockstar sources that this weekend’s massive Grand Theft Auto VI leak is indeed real. The footage is early and unfinished, of course. This is one of the biggest leaks in video game history and a nightmare for Rockstar Games
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 18, 2022
While leaks like this can be suspect, the many videos were quite revealing and hard to refute. They also corroborated an earlier Bloomberg report that stated the protagonists would be a couple that robbed places in Vice City and some of the gameplay here features said couple robbing a fast food restaurant. Their names, according to these videos, are Jason and Lucia, the latter of whom appears to be of Latin descent, which was also in the Bloomberg report. Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier took to Twitter to say that he contacted his sources at Rockstar and they confirmed to him that this was all indeed real.
The many, many videos are from a game that’s early in production, as evidenced by the unfinished textures and dialogue and, as such, should not be indicative of the final product. Grand Theft Auto VI is, according to some within Rockstar, still about two years away.
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The videos have many bigger Grand Theft Auto staples like punching civilians, shooting out of cars, running from the cops, and visiting the club to smaller ones like mentions of the LifeInvader app and other GTA-specific brands. These videos have slowly started to get taken down, so it’s unclear how many of them will stay up for the foreseeable future. Regardless, there are many mirrors and it will be almost impossible to stomp them all out.