GTA scandals and leaks before GTA 6

The leak that is happening right now looks unprecedented only if you look at it alone. Over twenty years GTA has built up its own history of leaks, lawsuits and attempted bans — and almost every one of them was larger in scale than this one.

Briefly: what has leaked before, who sued whom and how it all ended.

The 2022 hack: ninety clips and the source code

In September 2022 Rockstar was hacked. Seventeen-year-old Arion Kurtaj from Oxfordshire, a member of the Lapsus$ group, got into the studio’s internal Slack with an employee’s stolen credentials and took around ninety clips from an early GTA 6 build — four times what has gone online in a week of the current leak. The source code went with them.

Rockstar confirmed the breach the next day, a rare public statement for the studio. Kurtaj was not tried for it alone: Uber and Nvidia were on the same list. In December 2023 he was found unfit to stand trial and detained indefinitely in a secure hospital.

The story did not end there. On 25 December 2023 the GTA V source code was put into the open by people who had received it from the same breach. In July 2026 Kurtaj was moved from hospital to prison, and a retrial is set for November 2026 — the month GTA 6 comes out.

The trailer that leaked three days early

Not every leak is a hack. On 2 December 2023 a TikTok account posted a clip captioned “first look at GTA 6” — three days before the scheduled premiere of the first trailer. Rockstar did not wait: it published the trailer officially, ahead of time, with a short line saying their trailer had leaked and people should watch the real one on YouTube.

Even with the surprise spoiled, the clip took more than ninety million views in a day — a record for game videos on YouTube. This is probably the only case on this list where a leak cost nothing at all: the studio simply moved the button forward by a day.

Hot Coffee: how a mod changed the game’s rating

The most expensive scandal in the series began not with a lawsuit but with a mod. San Andreas shipped with an interactive scene that had been cut but not deleted from the files. In the summer of 2005 a mod unlocked it — and on 20 July 2005 the ESRB pulled the game’s M rating and gave it AO, Adults Only.

That is not a ban, but it works like one: Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Circuit City took the game off the shelves, and Take-Two halted production. Returns alone cost the publisher 24.5 million dollars.

Two proceedings followed. In June 2006 Take-Two and Rockstar closed the Federal Trade Commission’s claims with a settlement and no fine: the companies undertook to disclose rating-relevant content more precisely, with an agreed civil penalty of 11,000 dollars per violation. The consumer class action was settled in 2008 with a fund of 20.1 million dollars, of which 15.2 million was paid by insurers.

The lawsuits: from a diaspora to a murder case

December 2003, Vice City. The Haitian coalition of Palm Beach County filed suit demanding the game be taken off sale — the defendants were not only Rockstar and Take-Two but the retailers and platform holders as well. The complaint was about the line “kill the Haitians”: in the story it refers to the Haitian mob, but out of context it reads differently. Rockstar removed it from later editions and the case closed there.

2005, Alabama. The Devin Moore case — a teenager who shot two police officers and a dispatcher. The victims’ families sued the publisher and the retailers, arguing that the game had “trained” the shooter. They were represented by the Florida attorney Jack Thompson, who in those years was the series’ loudest public opponent.

2007, Manhunt 2. Not GTA, but the same studio. The ESRB gave the game AO, the British BBFC refused a certificate outright, and Take-Two suspended release. The game was re-edited and came out that autumn with an M rating — and not one ban held.

How it ended for Thompson

Jack Thompson wanted GTA declared a cause of killings and Bully a public nuisance, and he ran those cases loudly. It ended neither in victory nor in defeat on the merits: on 25 September 2008 the Florida Supreme Court stripped him of the right to practise.

The disciplinary case ran to 31 counts; on 27 of them judge Dava Tunis recommended a finding of guilt. Twenty-one counts came out of the GTA proceedings and four more from the attempt to declare Bully a public nuisance. The wording concerned conduct in court: false statements to the court, breach of a court order, a stream of unfounded motions. He was disbarred for that, not for his views on video games — but the cases against Rockstar produced most of the counts.

What this means for the current case

Three things that only show up over a long distance.

• A leak on its own has never once moved a release. In 2022 ninety clips and the source code went online, and it changed nothing about the development schedule.
• What costs money is the rating, not the leak. The one time a scandal cost the publisher real money was Hot Coffee: 24.5 million in returns plus 20 million into the lawsuit fund. No leak has come close to those numbers.
• Bans do not hold. Every attempt to pull a game from sale ended either in a re-edit and the rating coming back, or in nothing at all.

What is happening with the case right now is in the GTA 6 leak timeline: who is leaking, what Take-Two is doing about it and which reports of an arrest turned out to be invented.