Historic GTA 6 Leak Shows the Game Is Set in Vice City, Gameplay Looks Awesome

Miami residents can smile for another reason now – their city is going to once again be made popular worldwide thanks to Rockstar Games and their all-new GTA 6 or Grand Theft Auto VI. New leaks appeared late Saturday night and Sunday morning, showing gameplay footage, testing, and debugging. A lot of photos have been published as well.

A set of nine pictures posted on the popular platform Reddit show a couple of in-game snapshots that suggest the popular Malibu Club is going to make a comeback. Unfortunately, they've already been deleted. But don't worry. You can see some details in the photo gallery.

There’s also a preview of the urban environment. Miami residents or visitors might recognize the Bayfront Park Solar Amphitheater. You can also look at what the developers are doing with the characters. But the most important thing these images show is some branding on a subway train that reads Vice City Metro.

The Redditor who published these images says they’ve been taken from GTAForums, where users were awaiting some sort of an official announcement for GTA 5’s ninth anniversary. That didn’t happen. Instead, the leaks started being published all over the internet. As expected, everyone started to freak out. They couldn’t believe it was actually happening. At the time of writing, the forum is down, presumably because of too much traffic.

The leaks

But the whole thing gets even more complicated.

Originally, people believed that a developer got angry with Rockstar Games because of too much work and little compensation. But this has remained an unproven theory. Some videos have been published on YouTube. They have some very explicit descriptions aimed at the maker of GTA 6, but the story ends there.

Now, people on Twitter think there are even more leaks ready to be deployed online. Someone claims they’re discussing with a hacker who has the source code for GTA 5 and GTA 6, and they’re willing to refrain from publishing them online in exchange for money. Essentially, this is blackmail. But Rockstar Games might have to deal with this situation if it wants the game to remain a secret. Revealing everything before it’s ready could ruin the surprise for all the eager fans.

But someone already uploaded various clips on Twitter, and there’s also a 30-minute-long video on YouTube that previews a lot of the alleged GTA 6 gameplay and its development.

The footage published on various platforms previews a massive map for GTA 6, more control over different in-game items, a lot of new cars that resemble real-life models, complex character behavior, huge buildings, and well-written dialogues. You can watch it all at the end of the article.

There's also confirmation of the Bonnie & Clyde rumor - the restaurant robbery scene is in the leaked game that has "Project Americas" as its codename.

The amount of information that is spilled online is so huge that we're forced to refrain from putting it all here. But one thing that deserves to be mentioned is that there'll be at least two protagonists, and their names will be Jason and Lucia (or Alexandra Cristina), according to what has been uploaded online.

Let’s get ready

According to what the debugging data shows in some of the videos, what we get to see leaked now has been in development since at least 2015 or 2016. The IT people worked with graphic cards that were available back then, but testing has also been done with Nvidia's RTX 3080, which was launched in the fall of 2020. Early builds might not look that great, but the progress is real, and the final result could be impressive. There's so much potential for a great release since not all the team's work has been leaked!

But because nothing can be confirmed, take all this with a grain of salt. However, other developers and game testers that have seen these leaks agree that this can’t be a fake release. According to them, there’s just too much detail and work put into all of it. But we can draw that conclusion by ourselves just by listening to the videos down below - the voice acting alone would be too much to handle for someone that’s trying to trick people into believing GTA 6 is real and nearing completion.

Moreover, Take Two Interactive – the Grand Theft Auto distributor – has been actively trying to take down all the YouTube videos, which might indicate they’re trying to contain this situation. Some have been made private or deleted already. They succeeded, but the company can’t get to everyone in time.

And on top of all this, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier confirmed on Twitter that everything's real after talking with his Rockstar Games sources, even though there is no glimpse of the final product on the internet - yet.

Now that this massive leak is online, could Rockstar prepare a statement for Monday and show everyone some glimpses of the game or at least a logo? Or will they continue trying to keep everything secret? We’ll find out soon enough. What's certain is that GTA 6 just became a massive headache for the company.

At the end of the day, if this is how the testing and debugging look like, then we might be in for one heck of a game. Let’s hope it will be as good as all of us want it to be.