The new GTA 6 trailer opens with a self-referential gag that reminded me of how wild the 2022 hack was

The new Grand Thefty Auto 6 trailer starts with a throwaway line that I didn’t think anything of until Rich pointed out that it’s clearly a joke.

“Oh, just fixin’ some leaks,” protagonist Jason says as he climbs down from a roof in the very first scene, and Rockstar is a meticulous sort, so I have to imagine that this is an intentional reference to the many leaks GTA 6 has seen over its long development.

The biggest of them came from a 2022 hack, and it’s an incredible and unhappy story.

In 2022, 90 videos from a GTA 6 development build were posted online. It was one of the biggest leaks in gaming history, up there with the Half-Life 2 source code theft, and also felt like a sign of the times. The rise of remote working in response to Covid meant that far more information was being transmitted outside of office networks, opening new avenues for hacking and social engineering.

The hack wasn’t the first time GTA 6 details leaked, and it confirmed previously leaked details, such as the dual protagonist setup and Vice City setting. It wouldn’t be the last GTA 6 leak, either: In 2023, the first GTA 6 trailer hit X before Rockstar officially published it, prompting the developer to put it up early.

But the 2022 hack was the most significant incident, and incredibly, it was carried out by a teenager who was out on bail and under police protection over other hacks, including a major Nvidia breach, which he was involved in as part of hacker group Lapsus$.

Arion Kurtaj reportedly managed to bypass Rockstar’s security from a Travellodge hotel where police had placed him for safety after he’d been doxxed by rivals. The conditions of his bail included an internet ban, but he reportedly used an Amazon Fire Stick, smartphone, and a keyboard and a mouse to make his way onto protected Rockstar servers.

Kurtaj, who is autistic, was deemed unfit to stand trial but was found responsible for the Rockstar hack and others, and in 2023 was sent to a secure hospital for an undefined duration.

As reported by the BBC, the sentence was motivated by belief from the court that Kurtaj was likely to repeat the offense as he “continued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possible.”

A 17-year-old hacker was also tried and was found guilty, and sentenced to an 18-month Youth Rehabilitation Order, which the BBC reported involved “intense supervision and a ban on using VPNs online.”

Perhaps it’s appropriate that a game series about gleeful criminality would be the target of real crime, but Rockstar seemingly did not find the irony amusing, testifying that it spent $5 million to recover from the hack.

The new trailer’s opening lines would’ve been funnier had it also leaked early, and Rockstar might’ve even anticipated that possibility, but, nope, this GTA video actually dropped when Rockstar intended it to.

It wasn’t exactly a big surprise, though. We were expecting a new trailer closer to the start of the year, and when that didn’t happen, we started to anticipate a delay announcement. We got that the other day, when Take-Two announced that GTA 6 has been delayed to May 2026.

The news didn’t help Take-Two’s share price, but that’s nothing a new trailer to stoke the hype can’t solve—shares in the company rose 2.89% today.