Pushing Buttons: The grand theft of Grand Theft Auto
Rockstar is the victim of one of the biggest data breaches in gaming history. It's not only a blow to developers - it's a loss for fans
It's been a giant week for video game news. Nintendo announced a release date of 5 May 2023 for the next Legend of Zelda game (now titled Tears of the Kingdom, certainly not an intentional reference to the death of the Queen); we've seen a new God of War: Ragnarok trailer in which The West Wing's Toby Ziegler shouts at Kratos; and we learned that the beloved N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 is finally, finally coming back. But it was all overshadowed on Sunday, when a hacker posted more than 50 minutes of in-development footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, stolen from Rockstar's internal Slack channel. The hacker claims to have possession of the game's source code, too. This is, along with the theft of Half-Life 2's source code from Valve in 2003, one of the biggest data breaches in video game history. Here's an explainer, if you'd like to get caught up on all the details. It's Grand Theft Grand Theft Auto.
Rockstar confirmed the leak late on Monday, saying that a third party had illegally downloaded confidential information, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto. At this time," Rockstar said, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services or any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects."
Alongside a trailer and release date for the next Zelda, last week's Nintendo Direct presentation delivered some surprises. These include Pikmin 4, a game that's been in development for so long that I'd become convinced it no longer existed. If you've never played this odd and rather heartbreaking game about miniature alien plant people trying to survive our planet's terrifically dangerous gardens, you'll have the chance next year.
GoldenEye 007 is coming back! Hooray! Except that online multiplayer is only available on the Nintendo Switch, and a 4K graphical 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 conversations. Bonus fact: GoldenEye 007 was remade years ago for the Xbox 360, but was 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 stunt, and I must reluctantly admit that this celebrity content partnership is actually very funny.
The Sims 4 will be free to play from October, which will doubtless draw even more helpless teens and students into its diabolically compulsive mix of life management and house designing. The Sims 2 was responsible for me almost failing my end-of-school exams, so best of luck to them.
Last Friday's Wordle managed to enrage absolutely everyone with its solution: parer - a word that not even my phone's autocorrect, with its pathological need to turn every sentence I write on my phone into word salad, acknowledges is 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%.
Great 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 Tokyo gangster epics; a smaller-scale spinoff game; and Like a Dragon: Ishin, a remake of a PS3 game that transports Yakuza back to 1860s Kyoto. Unfortunately, I have not yet found the 1,000 hours necessary to complete all of the existing Yakuza games - the last one I actually finished was Yakuza 2, in, er, 2006. A further interesting detail: after almost two decades, Sega is dropping the name Yakuza in the west, and the series will now be known as Like a Dragon, which is closer to the Japanese title.
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