GTA 6 leak reveals first playable female character

Few games have been as anticipated at Grand Theft Auto 6, a consequence of not just the franchise’s popularity but the fact that its last iteration came out in 2013 — a whole nine years ago, when David Cameron was still the UK Prime Minister, before we knew what the word “Brexit” meant and back when you could buy poppers over the counter. As it turns out, almost a decade is far too long for gaming fans to wait, leading to one impatient fan to take matters into their own hands.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about already, Rockstar Games, the developer behind GTA and Red Dead, has been hacked! As a result, over 90 videos and images from GTA 6 were leaked onto the internet over the weekend in what has been one of the biggest confidential data breaches in gaming history.

As a result, we’ve gained an extra exclusive sneak peak of what we can expect from the newest version of the game — and there is a big reveal. For the first time, GTA is set to have a female playable character: while it was reported in Bloomberg in July that this could be in the pipelines, this is the first time we had a confirmed clip of her in action. This comes after a history of female figures being used as props, rather than fully formed characters, in the franchise.

The unreleased game material — mostly animation and gameplay tests and level layouts, some of which showing a female character in — was supposedly obtained by hacking into Rockstar’s internal Slack channel and gaining access to company servers was then posted on  GTAForums website. The hacker in question went by the bait (yet also whimsical) username teapotuberhacker and has also been linked to a high profile data breach of Uber.

Writing in an official post on their website, Uber left the following update: “"There are also reports over the weekend that this same actor breached video game maker Rockstar Games. We are in close coordination with the FBI and US Department of Justice on this matter and will continue to support their efforts.”

Check out some of favourite responses to the leak below.