It’s been a giant week of video game news. Nintendo announced a May 5, 2023 release date for the next Legend of Zelda game (now titled Tears of the Kingdom, definitely not an intentional reference to the Queen’s death); we’ve seen a new trailer for God of War: Ragnarok in which The West Wing’s Toby Ziegler yells at Kratos; and we learned that the beloved N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 is finally coming back, finally. But it was all overshadowed on Sunday, when a hacker posted more than 50 minutes of in-development footage of Grand Theft Auto VI, stolen from Rockstar’s internal Slack channel. The hacker also claims to be in possession of the game’s source code. This is, along with the theft of the Half-Life 2 source code from Valve in 2003, one of the largest data breaches in video game history. Here’s an explanation, if you want to keep up with all the details. It’s Grand Theft Grand Theft Auto.
Rockstar confirmed the leak on Monday afternoon, saying a third party had illegally downloaded confidential information, including early development footage for the upcoming Grand Theft Auto. “At this time,” Rockstar said, “we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services or any long-term effects on the development of our ongoing projects.”
The leaked images show animation tests, level designs and a heist mission, featuring a female protagonist (the first of the series) and her accomplices. It also shows a modern Vice City, Rockstar’s version of Miami. Debugging commands and technical information are prominently overlaid throughout – there are voice acting, but the game is nowhere near finished. This leak will have disrupted years of marketing planning: Grand Theft Auto VI has been in development in some form since 2014. It also represents a financial loss for the publisher as investigations are launched and plans are upended .
Aside from those things though, a leak like this will affect how a game is perceived. Unfinished video games almost universally look and play like garbage, because game development is delicately choreographed between about 200 different dancers that only come together at the end. If you saw, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Assassin’s Creed even six months before they were finished, and you didn’t know the final sprint to put in all the right graphics and sound effects and bug fixes, you’d probably think that was rubbish Some of the misinformed interpretations of the GTA breach on social media are so blindingly stupid that they cross themselves, from “Now someone stole the source code maybe they can do a better job with the game than Rockstar” to “The developers so lazy they deserve a leak.” like this.”
This is extremely demoralizing for video game creators. It’s like hacking into a novelist’s laptop and stealing a first draft, then posting bits of it online. I’m not one to bemoan the loss of corporate profits, but I can’t help but feel for the people making this video game, which, if it’s anything like what Rockstar has done before, will be one of the most complex and ambitious yet. game development projects ever made.
This also comes at a strange time for Rockstar: Since Grand Theft Auto V launched in 2013 and broke all sales records, co-founder Dan Houser has moved on. (His brother, Sam, remains the company’s president.) In 2016, another founding member, Leslie Benzies, sued the company for tens of millions in denied royalties, alleging that expelled During the development of the exquisitely detailed Red Dead Redemption 2, there were allegations of working conditions at their studios, particularly at Rockstar Lincoln, which handled quality assurance, notoriously one of the most incessant areas of development. games The developer who made GTA V is no more, and there is so much anticipation for GTA VI. It’s hard to imagine that this leak won’t affect employee confidence.
Will Rockstar advance their schedule now? While it can’t speed up development, it can speed up your marketing machine, at which point it’ll be a lot easier to get excited about.
what to play
Return to Monkey Island. Photo: Devolver Digital via Tinsley PR
It’s finally here! Return to Monkey Island takes us back to the golden days of Lucasarts’ point-and-click comedy games. I’m about to turn it on as soon as I finish writing this newsletter, after reading Oliver Holmes’ review: “The result of the reunion of the old team is a tale that retraces old paths, but which also wants to be more than an ode. to a bygone era of video games. when [adorably shambolic pirate Guybrush] Threepwood goes to an oracle, Voodoo Lady, for advice, she sums up the paradox this game faces: “You must walk the path, but you’ve already made the path.” Return to Monkey Island achieves this by looking backwards and forwards at the same time, reminding us that the point-and-click adventure will never die: it’s a zombie pirate that won’t stay down for long.
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch Average playtime: 7-11 hours
what to read
-
Alongside a trailer and release date for the upcoming Zelda, last week’s Nintendo Direct presentation offered a few surprises. These include Pikmin 4, a game that has been in development for so long that I convinced myself it no longer existed. If you’ve never played this strange and rather harrowing game about miniature alien plants trying to survive in the terrifyingly dangerous gardens of our planet, you’ll get your chance next year.
-
GoldenEye 007 is back! Hooray! Except that online multiplayer is only available on Nintendo Switch, and a 4K graphics upgrade will only apply to the Xbox version. I haven’t seen this kind of feature split in years, and it must be the product of some tortuous licensing talks. Additional Info: GoldenEye 007 was remade years ago for the Xbox 360, but never released.
-
Arena battle game League of Legends has employed the inimitable gay pop star Lil Nas X as its new president as a marketing gimmick, and I have to begrudgingly admit that this celebrity content partnership is actually a lot of fun.
-
The Sims 4 will be free-to-play from October, which will no doubt attract even more helpless teenagers and students to its fiendishly compulsive mix of life management and house design. The Sims 2 was responsible for almost failing my final school exams, so good luck to them.
-
Last Friday’s Wordle managed to piss everyone off with its solution: opinion, a word that not even my phone’s autocorrect, with its pathological need to turn every sentence I type into my phone into word salad, recognizes that it’s real. If you were furious, know that you’re not alone: The New York Times tweeted that only 41% of players actually solved it, compared to a usual 99%.
Register at Pulsadors
Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertisements and content funded by third parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
-
Big news for fans of open-world action games set in Japan: in addition to a new Assassin’s Creed, there are also three new Yakuza games coming from Sega: Yakuza 8, the next in the long line of epics of Tokyo gangsters; a spin-off game on a smaller scale; and Like a Dragon: Ishin, a remake of a PS3 game that transports Yakuza to 1860s Kyoto. Unfortunately, I have yet to find the 1,000 hours required to complete every Yakuza game in existence; the last one I finished was Yakuza 2, back in 2006. Another interesting tidbit: After nearly two decades, Sega is abandoning the game. name Yakuza in the West, and the series will now be known as Like a Dragon, which is closer to the Japanese title.
what to click
Grand Theft Auto 6 Leak: Who Hacked Rockstar and What Was Stolen?
The Nintendo DS was more than just a console, it’s part of my family history, Dominik Diamond
Splatoon 3 review: Nintendo’s new squid game is inky fun
Monkey Island Return Review: This return game isn’t just a rehash of the greatest hits
Block of questions
There is no question blog this week because this week’s issue is already gigantic, but please send me your questions, especially the silly ones. You can do this by pressing Reply in this newsletter. See you next week!