The GTA 6 map is playable right now. It is eleven years old.
192 GB of Rockstar's files went public and modders loaded an early Leonida into GTA 5. Several of the week's biggest discoveries are already published on Rockstar's own website.
By Wes Calloway
Method: the week's reported discoveries checked one by one against Rockstar's own published map and landmark list.
On 18 September, roughly 192 gigabytes of Rockstar's internal files went public. Within about a day, people had imported early Grand Theft Auto 6 map data into Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC and were walking around in it.
That part's true. Most of what's been written about it since is pointed at the wrong game, though, and some of it isn't a discovery at all.
There's been no new hack
Nobody's broken into Rockstar again. These files come from the attack of September 2022, carried out by Arion Kurtaj working with the group that called itself Lapsus. Kurtaj was convicted and ordered to be held indefinitely in a secure hospital.
About 4 GB was posted at the time, and that's where the world first saw Jason and Lucia in a diner. The rest passed quietly between a small number of people for four years. On 18 September all of it went public as a torrent, which is why it isn't coming down.
A blockout, with labels floating over it
The people who've looked through it describe it the same way, and it's worth reading carefully before you look at any comparison screenshot.
| Foliage | largely absent |
| Textures | extremely basic |
| Layout | broad and flat, closer to a planning model than to a city |
| Labels | floating text marking what each area was meant to become |
That's a blockout. It's what a map looks like before it's a place. At that stage a team isn't building Vice City yet, it's working out distances, sight lines and drive times. Everything that makes Vice City look like Vice City goes on top, years later.
The files are from 2014 and 2015
The files are dated to 2014 and 2015, and some of them started out at Rockstar India.
Put that in order. Grand Theft Auto 5 came out in 2013 and Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018. This map data sits between them, drawn five years before Red Dead 2 shipped, by a studio in the middle of making a completely different game.
Eleven years separate these files from the release date. So when you see a grey, untextured coastline next to a Rockstar trailer frame this week, and somebody points at everything that's different, what you're looking at isn't cut content or a downgrade. It's just the eleven years.
Several of the discoveries are already public
This is the bit to check for yourself, because a lot of the coverage was written in a hurry.
Things reported as leak findings include a town at Mount Kalaga, Vice City's downtown, an airport, a stadium, docks, a cruise terminal, and Florida and the Everglades.
Every one of those is on Rockstar's own website.
| Reported as a leak find | Where it actually is |
|---|---|
| Mount Kalaga | one of the six regions Rockstar has named itself |
| The Everglades | published as Grassrivers |
| A large airport, a football stadium | both on Rockstar's confirmed landmark list |
| Vice City having a downtown | the setting of the game |
South America, a fake NASA and a theme park
The genuinely new stuff is a short list, and it's interesting enough without being blown up: scrapped maps based on South America, a parody of NASA with a rocket launch area, a shipwreck treasure museum, and an abandoned theme park.
Read those the right way. An idea in a 2015 planning file isn't a cut feature. Every big game gets made by producing far more than ships and throwing most of it away, and a theme park that existed eleven years ago as a label floating over a grey box was never promised to anybody.
Is there a playable build in there?
No. Dataminers have been through the archive and nothing like that has turned up, and something that size wouldn't stay quiet for a fortnight.
What's in there is a photo of an enormous game back when it was still a sketch. As history it's fascinating. As a preview it's worthless, and the real preview arrives on 19 November.
We won't show any of it
No frame of the leaked material appears here, and nothing on this page links to it. Those files are Rockstar's stolen property, and the people distributing them are being subpoenaed. Everything above is either reported from named outlets or checked against Rockstar's own published pages.
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