Grand Theft Auto 6, in development at Rockstar Games, suffered a huge leak of in-development assets and content showing the game will be located in Vice City and star a playable female protagonist. Rockstar Games is unlikely to add any details despite what became known on Sept. 18, 2022.
Two terms I’ve grown accustomed to, in writing about video games, are “marketing cadence,” and “work in progress.” They relate to all the authorized, pre-release, preview stuff I see about new video games. And they help explain why Sunday’s unprecedented Grand Theft Auto 6 leak would dismay so many within the industry.
This leak, comprising about an hour of in-development footage, is a work-in-progress in its rawest form, albeit without that little disclaimer at the bottom of the screen. And it definitely doesn’t follow some marketer’s plan, which is to hand-feed a discussion of a big game’s features, to sustain interest in (and desire for) a game from announcement to launch.
But setting Stuff They Don’t Want You to See loose into the wild like this is hardly a victory for transparency, or whatever higher-minded idea some might try to attach to what was, from the looks of it, an online burglary. The truth is that this is just hype of a different kind, and just like the more conventional hype, we’d all do well to cool our expectations.
It’s strange to see Twitter comments comparing the Vice City environment to Google Earth textures — as both compliment and insult — when it’s possible everything seen here is a placeholder. Yes, as Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported this summer, GTA 6 has been in development “in some form” since 2014. But I have no idea what “in some form” really means, and what this game should look like at this point. Do you?
Take everything seen at face value: This is visual confirmation of previous rumors. It’s a cinch this game is set in Vice City, and I’m excited to go back there 20 years after playing the original. We also know that developer Rockstar is committing to playable female and male leads, which is a series first. But there’s so much more we don’t know about Grand Theft Auto 6, or how it is being made, much less what Rockstar expects we will enjoy in it.
The hacker claiming responsibility — who also claims responsibility for hacking into Uber’s internal systems last week — says they have the game’s source code, and they’ve cryptically signaled they want to strike a deal with Take-Two/Rockstar.
