I Still Cannot Believe Someone Did This to the People Who Made GTA 6

I never thought we would see a day when someone like CyberLeek would challenge the creators of GTA 6, expose so much of their hard work without their permission, and put it all in front of the public like that. It is honestly hard to believe that something this unexpected could happen.

Nine days.

That is the gap CyberLeek chose to work inside, and I do not think it was an accident. Rockstar had its Extended Look booked for the 27th, on Netflix, six hours ahead of YouTube, and somebody at that studio had spent months on the order of the cuts and the music under them and which street you would see first. Whoever leaked this knew that and went early on purpose, because the whole point was to be the one who showed you.

So the first time most of the world watched Grand Theft Auto 6 move, it was a screen recording of a screen recording of a build that is reportedly more than a year old, with a crypto ticker and a QR code burned into the corner of the frame.

Rockstar has said nothing. The copyright notices did the talking, dozens of them, which is how everyone worked out the footage was real in the first place.

The argument, and the moment it fell apart

There is a manifesto attached to all this. Three demands, and I want to be fair about the first one because it is not stupid. No digital pre-orders before release and independent review. A digital copy cannot sell out, so the reason the queue existed vanished years ago and the practice stayed anyway. People have been saying that for a decade without stealing anything to say it.

Then, three days in, the account ran a poll asking followers what should leak next, a strip club tour won with 73.8 per cent of a thousand-odd votes, and the footage was to arrive once the token had been pumped hard enough.

Ross Scott’s Stop Killing Games campaign, which is the closest thing to a real movement behind demand three, put out a statement telling people not to send CyberLeek any money.

When the people you claim to be fighting for ask you to stop, the fight was never theirs.

The part I keep coming back to

Four years ago a teenager took ninety-odd clips out of a hacked Slack channel and put them online, and Rockstar’s public response at the time said it was extremely disappointed at how the game had been shown. Take-Two’s chief executive later talked about what those leaks did to the emotions of the people building it.

Same studio. Same wound. Four years apart. And this time there is a coin.

Arion Kurtaj was given an indefinite hospital order in December 2023 for the 2022 breach, has since been moved to a regular prison, and faces a retrial listed for November this year, which is the month the game finally comes out. CyberLeek has called him a colleague. Take-Two is now trying to subpoena Discord to work out who is behind this one, so there is a decent chance we find out the answer the hard way.

Here is what I cannot square. The footage everyone spent last week dissecting, arguing about the clothing and the driving and whether the lighting looked dated, came from a version of the game that no longer exists. Hundreds of people have spent years on the version that does, and they have had that week taken off them for a token nobody will remember by Christmas.

Was any of it worth watching early?