The September 2022 GTA 6 Leak: What Actually Happened
Around 90 videos of in-development footage were posted publicly by an extortionist. Here is the event — the breach, the response and the fallout — without the material itself.
On September 18, 2022, a newly registered user on GTAForums posted download links to roughly 90 video files taken from the unannounced next Grand Theft Auto. It is routinely described as one of the largest leaks in the history of the medium.
GTA6DB does not host, link, describe or catalogue leaked material, and this article is not going to start. What follows is the event: how it happened, who said what, and how it ended.
The poster was not a whistleblower. Alongside the files came a claim to hold source code for both GTA V and the next Grand Theft Auto, an invitation to buyers — "Tell me your price" — and an attempt to open negotiations with Rockstar and Take-Two. This was an extortion attempt. The same handle claimed responsibility for the Uber breach of roughly three days earlier, which is what first linked the two incidents in press coverage.
Rockstar responded the following day, September 19, confirming "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." The statement said the company did not anticipate disruption to live services or any long-term effect on development, and added the line that stuck: "We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you all in this way."
Take-Two moved legally within hours, filing DMCA notices against videos on YouTube and posts on Twitter, and sending a cease-and-desist to GTAForums itself. The enforcement net was wide enough to catch unrelated videos that merely referenced the leaked material.
Markets reacted: Take-Two stock fell more than 6% pre-market on September 19, against a share price already down roughly 31% across the year. Jefferies called it "a PR disaster."
One claim from that week remains unresolved. The leaker said source code was taken; at Take-Two's November 7 earnings call, chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick said there was "no evidence that any material assets were taken," and that the leak "won't have any influence on development." Those two statements have never been reconciled on the record, and we label the source-code question unresolved rather than picking a side.