Huge GTA 6 leak includes gameplay footage of robbery, Vice City locations, and two playable characters

(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

On September 19, a user on GTAForums called "teapotuberhacker" posted 90 videos from a test build of Grand Theft Auto 6, running with "GTA 5 and 6 source code and assets". Screenshots and clips from these videos have gone around on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and elsewhere, and line up with details from another recent GTA 6 leak, as well as an earlier one, both of which suggested the upcoming open world game will have two protagonists, a man and a woman, and be set in and around the Miami-esque Vice City.

The legitimacy of the videos has been confirmed by Rockstar. "An unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto," the company wrote.

GTA publisher Take-Two has been using copyright rules to get the videos taken down from any mainstream website that hosts them.

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In one video, a player-character named Lucia robs a waffle restaurant with an accomplice named Jason, taking hostages like they're in Pulp Fiction. A meter counts down "Time Until Cops Dispatched", and it all looks reminiscent of the robberies in Red Dead Redemption 2, in spite of the mannequin NPCs clipping through objects, placeholder dialogue text like "Jason: GENERIC_CURSE_TO_SELF", and a cop car that's been recycled from GTA 5 only with V.C.P.D. written on it.

In a poolside conversation between a male player character and a couple of redneck associates, we hear some very GTA dialogue, such as, "Oh yeah, he's dead, is he? Just like there's a country called Finland." The notification saying "WhatUp! message received" during a sequence in a strip club suggests a parody of WhatsApp, another very Rockstar thing to do, as does setting entire scenes in a strip club complete with detailed pole dancing.

For more, here's what what we learned, and what we didn't, from the GTA 6 leak.

The previous GTA 6 leak claimed the game has been in development since 2014 and was originally codenamed "Project Americas". These files, which have the word "Americas" in their names and some of which show a version running on a PlayStation 4 dev kit, may well be several years old. A source with knowledge of GTA 6's development told PC Gamer that the majority of the videos would likely have been attached to bug reports from QA testers.

The person apparently responsible for this GTA 6 information heist has also claimed responsibility for hacking Uber. The FBI is investigating.

This article was last updated on September 20, 2022.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.