Take Two Interactive has gone to court in New York over the apparent Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks, seeking records that could identify the accounts sharing the clips. The move on Friday came after footage described as GTA 6 in action began circulating just before a planned extended look at the game.
The legal filing asks Microsoft-owned GitHub and Discord to hand over user details linked to accounts thought to be passing around copyrighted material, according to the filings obtained by Newsbeat. Copies of the clips are already being pulled down fast, and multiple accounts claiming to belong to the group behind the hacks have disappeared.
That scramble matters because Rockstar had been preparing to break its long silence with a special extended look at Grand Theft Auto 6 in a Netflix special a few weeks ago, only for the apparent leaks to surface on Wednesday. Rockstar has not publicly acknowledged the clips or answered requests for comment since then, leaving the company to respond in court while the footage keeps circulating in fragments.
The group behind the apparent leaks says it is acting in the interests of players. Rockstar and Take Two Interactive are treating the material as stolen copyrighted work, and the gap between those positions is now the core of the story. If the clips were authentic, even partly, they would have exposed work from a game built over a decade by thousands of people before Rockstar was ready to show it.
Obbe Vermeij, who worked as a technical director on GTA 3, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas before leaving Rockstar in 2009, said the company’s secrecy has long been remarkable. He said it was amazing that Rockstar can keep things under wraps so well, and that the studio always wanted to keep things secret because it made launch day more fun for players who knew very little about the game.
Wesley Yin-Poole said the scale of GTA 6 helps explain why the leaks landed so hard. He described it as an enormous endeavour built over the course of a decade with thousands of people involved, and said exposure like this would have been devastating to many people who worked on it. The next step is the court fight over who shared the material and who must turn over the account details — the answer that will determine how far Take Two can go in its Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks response.
