The 2022 GTA 6 leak, years later: how 90 stolen clips previewed the game

On September 18, 2022, a user calling themselves "teapotuberhacker" posted roughly 90 clips of work-in-progress Grand Theft Auto VI footage to the GTAForums message board — about 50 minutes of raw alpha material lifted straight from Rockstar's internal servers. Nearly four years later, with the game now due in November 2026, it stands as one of the most consequential leaks in gaming history: almost everything it showed has since been confirmed by Rockstar itself.

The footage was unglamorous — debug camera angles, untextured geometry, animation and physics tests, and placeholder dialogue. But buried in that mess was the shape of the whole game. This is what the leak revealed, how Rockstar responded, what happened to the person behind it, and how much of it has since turned out to be true.

What actually leaked

The dump ran to around 90 video files pulled from an early development build. As TechCrunch reported at the time, the clips showed early-stage gameplay rather than anything close to a finished product — but they were unmistakably the next mainline Grand Theft Auto.

The footage lined up around a handful of concrete details that fans and outlets pieced together almost immediately:

• Dual protagonists — a male and female lead, shown working together across multiple clips.
• A Vice City setting, Rockstar's fictional take on Miami and the wider state of Leonida.
• A dynamic robbery scene in a diner, where the player could hold up and rob individual NPCs.
• Early driving, shooting, and combat scripting, plus level layouts for interior spaces.

The material was stolen alongside other confidential data. In the criminal case that followed, prosecutors said the hacker had accessed Rockstar's internal systems and threatened to release more, including source code — so the leaked gameplay was only part of what was taken, per the trial coverage from Bloomberg.

How Rockstar and Take-Two responded

Rockstar broke its usual silence within a day. In a statement posted September 19, 2022, the studio confirmed the breach directly, saying it had "suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto."

We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you all in this way. — Rockstar Games

Crucially, Rockstar said the leak would not disrupt its live services and that work on the game would continue "as planned." It was a remarkable moment: the leak forced Rockstar to publicly acknowledge that GTA 6 existed at all, more than a year before it chose to reveal the game on its own terms.

Parent company Take-Two Interactive moved on the legal front, saying it had "taken steps to isolate and contain" the incident and issuing DMCA takedowns to scrub the footage from YouTube and social platforms, as PC Gamer documented. The clips spread far faster than they could be removed.

Who was behind it

The hack was the work of Arion Kurtaj, a British teenager linked to the Lapsus$ hacking group, which had already breached Uber, Revolut, Nvidia, and BT/EE. According to Bloomberg's account of the trial, Kurtaj pulled off the Rockstar intrusion while he was already under police protection in a Travelodge hotel — using little more than an Amazon Fire Stick, a hotel TV, and a phone.

In August 2023, following a roughly seven-week trial, a jury found that Kurtaj had committed the offenses, which included computer misuse, blackmail, and fraud. He had been deemed unfit to stand trial in the conventional sense after a diagnosis of acute autism, so the jury was asked to decide whether he had done the acts rather than to return an ordinary criminal verdict.

That December, he was handed an indefinite hospital order. As BleepingComputer reported, the sentence keeps him in a secure hospital for as long as he is judged a danger — potentially for life. A psychiatric assessment cited in court found he intended to return to cybercrime "as soon as possible."

The story has since moved on again. As of July 2026, PC Gamer reports, Kurtaj has been moved out of the secure hospital and into a regular prison, and is now awaiting a full criminal retrial scheduled for November 2026 after being assessed as fit to face it.

How much the leak got right

This is what makes the 2022 leak so unusual. Most leaks are a mix of real detail and noise, and time tends to expose the guesswork. The GTA 6 leak has aged the opposite way — Rockstar's own marketing has steadily confirmed it.

The first official trailer arrived on December 5, 2023, followed by a second on May 6, 2025. Between them they confirmed the leak's biggest claims: the two leads are Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos — Lucia being the first playable female protagonist in a mainline Grand Theft Auto — and the game is indeed set in a modern-day Vice City, as detailed on the game's Wikipedia entry.

The specifics held up too. The dual-protagonist structure, the Vice City setting, and the moment-to-moment feel of driving and gunplay were all visible in the leak long before Rockstar showed a single polished frame. Even the leaked diner robbery — where Lucia could shake down individual patrons — fit the dynamic, systems-driven crime the trailers later teased, as outlets like DualShockers noted in their breakdown of the leak.

Where GTA 6 stands now

Rockstar has since set Grand Theft Auto VI for release on November 19, 2026, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. As Take-Two has reaffirmed, that date follows two delays: the game was first pitched for 2025, then moved to May 26, 2026, before slipping to its current November window. The Standard Edition is priced at $79.99 and the Ultimate Edition at $99.99.

The leak's legacy is a strange one. It cost Rockstar the surprise it guards more carefully than almost any studio, it fed a years-long DMCA cleanup, and it ended with a young man in a secure hospital. But it also handed players an unusually honest preview of a game that, by Rockstar's own reveals, is arriving largely as the stolen clips suggested it would.