I sent emails, pored over PDFs, and filled enough Google Docs to constitute a novella.

But me? I could fling a dart and hit something worth writing about. Fans didn't benefit, hackers didn't benefit, and Rockstar certainly didn't benefit. It became, for a week or two, very easy indeed to choose what story to focus on when I came into work: The one with its own Wikipedia page. We got gaming history in motion: a rapidly developing and complex story to really sink our teeth into. And videogame news writers everywhere, to be exact. If the true culprit isn't the teen picked up by UK police, then it's probably only a matter of time before they're caught, and painting a target on your back for international law enforcement in order to reveal to the world that GTA is gonna have a woman in it does not, to me, feel like a particularly glorious act of martyrdom.īut there's the feeling I can't shake. Dumping a wealth of contextless early build footage out on the internet is confusing and dispiriting, not educational, and it will only make Rockstar guard its secrets more jealously.

I'm all for tearing up the absurd obfuscation that surrounds game development: by all means, let fans see what it's like to make a game from day one, but not like this. Whatever GTA 6 ends up being, it will only vaguely resemble the strange videos-awash in placeholder text and recycled assets-that we saw in September. Well, the fact that it's an early and ramshackle mess, mostly. After all, the people most excited about GTA 6 got a brief, tantalising look at the game well in advance. If you're trying to work out who comes out ahead in all this, which I am for some reason, it's tempting to point to the fans. That's pretty neat, but I'm not sure it's go-to-prison neat. Probably the only new thing we did learn is that GTA 6 will likely feature at least two protagonists, one of whom-a Latina woman called Lucia-would be the singleplayer games' first playable female protagonist since GTA 2 on the Game Boy Colour. There will be crimes, cops will be dispatched to stop the crimes, the action will take place from a third-person perspective, and in the background of it all, NPCs will say zany and outrageous things much as they've been doing in GTA games for the last 20 or so years. What did we learn? That GTA 6 will look a lot like GTA 5 (which looked a lot like GTA 4, which… you get the idea).

It's all been quite quiet since then.Īnd that's… pretty much where we are at the end of the year: A teenager in a youth detention centre, myriad videos of a game that won't see the light of day for years floating around the internet, and the gnawing possibility that someone, somewhere out there, might have access to GTA 5 and 6 source code, which has probably generated no end of sleepless nights for Rockstar technicians.ĭumping a wealth of contextless early build footage out on the internet is confusing and dispiriting, not educational, and it will only make Rockstar guard its secrets more jealously. He denied one charge of computer misuse but pleaded guilty to violating a prior set of bail conditions. The FBI got involved and, in an investigation performed alongside the City of London police, a 17 year-old in Oxfordshire in the UK was arrested mere days after the leak took place. But rather than a cinematic, Holmes-and-Moriarty-style war of intellects between cops and crooks, the tale arrived at an anticlimax a few days later.

Gta 6 90 videos