It’s been a giant week for video game news. Nintendo announced a release date of 5 May 2023 for the next Legend of Zelda game (now titled Tears of the Kingdom, certainly not an intentional reference to the death of the Queen); we’ve seen a new God of War: Ragnarok trailer in which The West Wing’s Toby Ziegler shouts at Kratos; and we learned that the beloved N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 is finally, finally coming back. But it was all overshadowed on Sunday, when a hacker posted more than 50 minutes of in-development footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, stolen from Rockstar’s internal Slack channel. The hacker claims to have possession of the game’s source code, too. This is, along with the theft of Half-Life 2’s source code from Valve in 2003, one of the biggest data breaches in video game history. Here’s an explainer, if you’d like to get caught up on all the details. It’s Grand Theft Grand Theft Auto.
Rockstar confirmed the leak late on Monday, saying that a third party had illegally downloaded confidential information, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto. “At this time,” Rockstar said, “we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services or any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects.”
