Summary
For the second year in a row, there has been a hugeGrand Theft Autoleak on Christmas.
As reported byGTA Focal, a forum user named FrankieLiberty posted several Rockstar Games documents dating back to 2001 in protest of someone known only as “John Doe”, who they accuse of profiting from stolen assets and even game builds.
The leaked design documents detail the cancelled GTA 3 Online game that Barking Dog Studios developed in 2001. It was planned to feature character customisation, factions, a skill system, Cops and Crooks, and even the ability to own properties and garages. All familiar to a modern GTA Online player.
There would have also been voice chat, emotes, and an inventory system.
There would have also been several playable factions, including the Police, Mob, Mafia, Yakuza, Dogheart Massive, and Bikers (as broken down by@GTAVI_Countdown). Each of these would have had a reputation system. As for your individual character, you could level up skills like hacking and intelligence. And if you were caught committing a crime, you’d even be sentenced to court where you could plead guilty or not “and win based on legal skill”.
Why They Leaked The GTA Design Documents
“Select ex-developers have made a killing off his sales while being entirely protected with him acting as a fence,” FrankieLiberty writes. “John Doe has easily made tens of thousands of dollars, often times reselling the same asset priced at e.g. 2k dollars to five different parties.
He still sits on beta builds, production asset discs and a plethora of documents, ranging from design to some signed by company heads.
“That cannot stand AND shouldn’t stand any longer - John Doe has done enough damage, to his buyers, to Rockstar, and to our whole community, by being a greed-driven, deeply irresponsible bad faith actor who thinks of themselves as the Robin Hood of stolen property, giving back to select few from our community”.
They also claim it was a “Christmas gift” to the community. But what’s especially bizarre about this case is that last year, also on December 25, an early version of GTA 5’s source code was leaked online.
It revealed cancelled games like Bully 2 and GTA Tokyo, as well as a scrapped Liberty City DLC. Reportedly,the information was sold for just $2,000to a modding group, only to allegedly be leaked by TMP (TickleMePickles) “out of spite”. Sounds eerily similar, eh?
