Young people sometimes do dumb things, like throw rocks at cars or roll each other down hills. What a Rockstar Games dev’s son allegedly did might rank among the top five in the dumb kid moment pantheon.
According to a series of unconfirmed reports, today’s GTA 6 leaked footage comes from the son of a Rockstar Games employee. The seven-second leaked video was posted to TikTok.
Now, there are a number of problems with taking every single gameplay leak, even one coming from someone connected to Rockstar, as a cold, hard fact. The footage may be from an earlier or scrapped build of the game, it may be a portion of early game content and not be representative of the whole, and it may just be flat-out incorrect. The overview of Vice City, which has been more or less confirmed to be in the game, appears to be very real though.
If the leak is real, this kid may never be ungrounded. This could get his dad in a metric ton of legal trouble, not to mention it could cost him his job if Rockstar is feeling especially vile today. This is very much beyond simply normal kid shenanigans.
Game developers treat all aspects of their games like military secrets. They notoriously get upset about any leaks, and a portion of the players themselves prefer to consume the marketing the companies put out on the developers’ timeline. There’s a ton of community pressure not to leak anything, and developers have used DMCA laws to get leaks and mods taken down in the past. It both seems and feels silly to go into all of this trouble to combat leakers, but games are a bigger entertainment industry than Hollywood at this point. There are only two current takeaways from this saga as it unfolds: This kid is in a lot of trouble, and the reverence gamers have for marketing is silly.
