Twitterverse was sent into a frenzy several hours ago when what looks to be test footage of GTA 6 has found its way online.
Allegedly, a disgruntled ex-Rockstar employee dumped a total of 90 clips totalling over an hour of footage on GTAforums. The footage appears to be development tests of the game, including various assets such as source code, animation tests for clothing, swimming and character models, NPC interactions, gameplay footage of a heist at a diner and interior footage of the games iconic strip clubs.
Feels Real
Based on the leak, a lot of previous rumours have been confirmed. For one, there are two confirmed main protagonists, including a Hispanic female that looks and sounds eerily like Hollywood actress Eva Mendez, who was also alleged to be playing the role. Furthermore, a white male character with a southern drawl is also confirmed in the leak.
The footage shows code running above the gameplay that confirms the game’s location is indeed in Miami, or GTA’s fictional Vice City, yet the .mp4 files released are titled ‘Americas 2021-12-17 10-31-22,’ which could be a clever codename used in-house by Rockstar, or prove an early rumour that the game would take place across the entire North and South Americas, involving multiple protagonists with the story centred around drug cartels and the illicit international drug trade.
Real or fake? The thing that leads me to believe it is indeed real is an NPC interaction with the male protagonist; the ‘redneck’ conspiracy theorist NPC begins rambling, “So Jay Norris can download your brain, and send it to the (expletive) Chinese,” the protagonist responds in disbelief, “Come on! Not this (expletive) again, and Jay Norris is dead man!”
If you’ve played GTA V before you would know Jay Norris and ‘Lifeinvader’ are caricatures of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and one mission “Friend Request” involves planting a explosive device in a prototype phone for Lester Crest, which ultimately sees the untimely death of Norris at the end of the mission. Suffice to say, with that information we can also, at the very least, confirm that the game’s setting takes place after the events of GTA V.
An extensive one-hour compilation can be found online without too much effort, though most sources will likely be taken down once Rockstar and Take-Two respond, but as the saying goes, “once on the Internet, always on the Internet.”
Of course, this could all just be early beta footage that Rockstar ended up scrapping entirely, so all information should be taken with a grain of salt.
[Update] Rockstar has responded to the leak with the following statement:
