As you may recall, in September last year, a 17-year-old genius hacker named Arion Kurtaj uploaded a compressed package of about 30GB in size to the official R-Star forum, which included 90 video clips showing the gameplay of GTA6, completely disrupting the rhythm of GTA6 announcement.
Although R-Star later promised that the game development would still go as planned, this incident not only wiped out thousands of hours of hard work by employees, but also directly caused R-Star to lose more than $5 million. As a result, on December 22 of this year, Arion Kurtaj, the initiator of the GTA6 leak, was sentenced by the court to be placed in hospital for life unless doctors believe that he no longer poses a threat.
As a "tribute" to the legendary hacker Arion Kurtaj, an anonymous hacker released the full source code of GTA 5 on Christmas Day, which contains a large number of files, concept images, and cuts from the RAGE engine.
The leaked file size is about 4GB, although it is not as exciting as the GTA6 leak, but players can also find some interesting development insiders from it, such as the fact that GTA Tokyo is true by players, such as the real existence of "Bully 2" that R Star has never publicly admitted, and GTA 5 originally prepared 8 DLC for story mode, including the "Return to Liberty City" that everyone longed for, but later these plans were all abandoned, and some DLC was adapted into the content of the online mode.
In addition, some of the game's early beta features have been unearthed, such as GTA 5 Story Mode Ending A "Smart Move", in which Trevor is burned alive by gasoline and in the scrap version, where Mike crashes Trevor into a liquid nitrogen tanker, which freezes into ice and is smashed alive, and Ending B, "Cause and Effect Loop", in which Mike dies in the official version of a tower fall, while Mike in the scrap dies in a helicopter rotor strangulation.
Of course, in addition to those unknown development insiders, players also found a lot of small easter eggs left by programmers, and the sentences hidden in the code perfectly reflect the unique temperament of the GTA series to this day, and the beautiful vision of these programmers who don't want to go to work.
For R star, this somewhat special "Christmas gift" is undoubtedly a heavy blow, but the hacker does not seem to plan to stop there, according to the leaked chat logs, including 3D models, art assets, 200 GB of source code may be released soon, when R star can still have a leg left is hard to say.
The source code leak stems from a hack last year in which members of the notorious hacking group Lapsus$ gained access to R-Star's internal Slack servers and Confluence wiki to steal GTA 5 and GTA 6 source code files. At that time, the hackers who got the data chose to sell the data online, but now they have chosen to make it public for free, I don't know if they have made enough money, or purely out of revenge against the R star.
Even for a large company like Take Two, the parent company of R-Star, it is not so easy to deal with a sophisticated hacker group. Lapsus$ has launched a series of attacks against Nvidia, Ubisoft, Samsung and other well-known manufacturers in recent years, and they even alarmed the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), forcing the Cybersecurity Review Board to analyze their intrusion methods, but to this day, Lapsus$ has not been arrested en masse.
With GTA 6 just around the corner, GTA 5's source code data may no longer seem so valuable. But from another point of view, the leak of the source code will inevitably be accompanied by the appearance of cheats that call the game code, and those ransomware disguised as cheats are likely to spread to your computer along the network cable, which is not an exaggeration considering the proliferation of GTA OL cheats. We don't know if GTA 6 reuses GTA 5's source code in large quantities, but just dealing with the mess left by hackers is enough for R-star programmers to drink.
In any case, it is the Christmas holidays in Europe and the United States, and the corresponding measures may come more slowly than usual. As of the deadline for this article, R Star has not made an official statement, and perhaps this large-scale source code leak has made us a little further away from the long-awaited GTA 6.