So Rockstar put out a statement today confirming what basically everyone already knew from the weekend: someone got into their systems and walked off with early development footage of the next Grand Theft Auto. Over ninety clips, all through GTAForums first, then mirrored everywhere before Take-Two's lawyers could even get their coffee. I'm not going to do the whole rundown here — you've read it three times already this week on every other site that covers games, unfinished HUD elements, debug menus still visible in the corner, a robbery at a gas station, what looks like a female protagonist for the first time since Vice City Stories. It's out there, you've seen the thumbnails.
What I actually want to talk about is how weird it felt watching it, because it dragged up a memory I hadn't touched in almost twenty years.
Back in 2003 I was fifteen and the Half-Life 2 source code leaked. Not gameplay footage, the actual source, hundreds of megabytes of it, and somehow it ended up circulating on IRC channels that a friend of a friend had access to. I remember sitting at a beige Dell desktop at like 1am on a school night, dial-up long since replaced by our first cable connection but it still felt illicit and slow and thrilling, watching a progress bar creep along for something I had zero business having. I never even did anything with it. Couldn't compile it, didn't understand half of what I was looking at. I just wanted to have been there for it, to say I'd seen the thing before it existed officially.
Watching the GTA 6 clips this weekend felt exactly the same in my stomach and completely different in every other way. In 2003 getting access to something like that took actual effort — a channel invite, a filename you had to trust, twenty minutes of your life waiting on a transfer that could die at 94%. Sunday night I opened Twitter and it was just there, autoplaying, no friction at all. Somebody's cousin's account had it reposted with a caption like "not clickbait" before Rockstar had even said a word. That's the part I keep chewing on, not the leak itself but how instant the whole thing was. No waiting, no ceremony, no sense that you'd earned it.
I ended up watching maybe four of the clips and then closed the tab. Told myself it was because I didn't want spoilers for a game that's still years out (fair reason, it is), but honestly it was also because it felt gross watching stuff that was clearly ripped from someone's private build environment, mid-development, not meant for me or anyone outside that studio. There's a difference between a leaked trailer and this. This was somebody's unfinished work getting picked apart by strangers with slow-mo and freeze-frame, in real time, while they were presumably still in the office trying to figure out how bad the breach was.
A few of the outlets covering it this weekend were already quietly connecting it to the Uber breach from a couple weeks back, same style of intrusion, similar bragging tone in how it got posted. Nobody's confirmed that officially as of right now and I'm not going to pretend I know more than the reporting does. But if it does turn out to be the same person or crew, that's a pretty remarkable two weeks of work, for entirely the wrong reasons.
Anyway. My one actual complaint in all this, separate from the ethics of it: can people stop calling every leaked build "basically the finished game"? It's placeholder textures and a debug HUD. I watched Half-Life 2's leaked source get treated the same way in forums back in the day, people convinced the leak proved the game was "basically done," and then it took another year to ship. Early footage is early footage. I'll wait for the actual trailer whenever Rockstar decides to give us one, on their terms, not some stranger's Sunday night upload.