Cyberleek has been uploading footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 since August, most recently a 25-minute video featuring co-protagonist Jason totally nude. Given that GTA 6's November 19 release is just over a month away, on console at least, it seems natural that interest in these kinds of leaks would wane. Cyberleek has found a new way of generating hype: promising to leak a build of the game if their memecoin's marketcap goes up another $26 million or so.

"Here's the deal, nice and clean. CYBERLEEK hits 30 million marketcap, the build goes out – full story mode, played to the end, credits and all. Don't believe it has full story mode? Ask for what you want to see, and it gets provided. Take-Two gets one way out: physical disks and a public apology. They can take it at any moment. Or they can gamble that CL is bluffing. Everyone knows which one they'll pick."

The other half of the deal suggests that publisher Take-Two Interactive could prevent this by releasing GTA 6 physically and apologizing, presumably for not releasing it on discs in the first place. Which will never happen, but does fit with Cyberleek's previous history of cosplay Robin Hood consumer rights complaints.

We know that Cyberleek has access to a playable build since one of the previous leaks ended with the word LEEK being machinegunned into a wall to prove the point. But an early build of GTA 6 seems like the worst possible way to play it on PC, though after the Xbox streaming thing turned out to be a bust, maybe there are people who don't want to wait?

Personally I'm looking forward to a slow November where I might actually get a chance to catch up on this year's other releases, like The Blood of Dawnwalker and that Hellraiser game that just came out.

I really don't know how to build up to this one. Grand Theft Auto 5 is Doom now, okay? I put in a mod that imports DOOM2.wad into GTA 5 and now that's what the game is. There are demons. The game is first person. I have a minigun and a BFG. That's the truth of the matter and we're all just going to have to find some way to live with it.

The mod is Doom 2 in GTA 5 Hell On Earth (D2IGTA5HOE), and it does all those things I said. Hit F9 and the game you are playing shifts from GTA 5—usually a third-person open-world acting game—to Doom 2, an FPS from 1994. You need to provide your own .wad—everybody be cool. No one call the cops.

The world remains, mind you. You don't warp to Doom 2's levels. Instead, you roam Los Santos with an arsenal of weapons from id's seminal shooter (gross). You can take on taxis with your super shotgun, fight cops with a plasma cannon. It's two great tastes that taste incomprehensible together. Hit F10 and the game goes into Hell On Earth mode—authentic Doom 2 enemies start manifesting in the street.

One issue, of course, is that F10 is also my button for activating flossing and Superman mode, so I can't play Doom 2 GTA 5 Edition without a full quarter of my screen being taken up by a (still utterly Arabic) flossing UI screen and various Kryptonian powers sometimes activating. One of those is super speed when I sprint, though, which is at least appropriate for Doom Guy.

Anyway, here's a gif of me fighting demons and armed furries at an airport with Doom 2 weapons while a tornado closes in.

Cyberleek, the anonymous someone who's been sharing clips apparently taken from a Grand Theft Auto 6 development build, has returned after a hiatus with a new, 25-minute-long video that's circulating in places like the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit and social media.

The most notable thing about the clip—or most noticeable, at least—is that protagonist Jason spends much of it naked. His genitals are fully modelled, physics and all, which isn't too surprising given we previously saw fully nude NPCs in another of Cyberleek's GTA 6 clips.

It remains unknown whether players will be able to walk around in the buff in the retail game, as Cyberleek presumably has access to developer tools. A floating tank seen partway through the clip makes it apparent that at least some console command shenanigans are at play. It's also notable that NPCs do not react to Jason's nakedness, and that the video shows first-person driving, a feature GTA 6 was previously reported not to include.

IGN did see a naked Jason during a cutscene in an official preview of GTA 6, but "thanks to some carefully positioned camera angles, his modesty remained entirely intact." So we just don't know, although it wouldn't be the first time a GTA game included full frontal male nudity of a prominent character, which occurred in GTA 4's The Lost and Damned DLC.

GTA 6 co-protagonist Lucia also appears topless in the Cyberleek clip, facing away from the camera and wearing a thong. Whether the underwear was the leaker's choice, or if GTA 6 unevenly enforces modesty, is also unknown.

A new era of videogame dong?

Whatever level of nudity GTA 6 ultimately does or doesn't allow—and once it's on PC, you can be sure that modders will make sure nothing is disallowed—it's a bit surreal to see how not-a-big-deal it all is after once experiencing Fox News hosts being scandalized by alien boobies in Mass Effect.

I want to say that things sure have changed since GTA's infamous Hot Coffee 'sex minigame' incident, but have they? We're certainly far from a golden age of people being chill about things; you can't throw a stone on the internet without hitting some new sect shouting about its brand of traditional values (and the dietary supplements that complement it).

And yet it didn't seem like an especially big deal to conservative critics when Baldur's Gate 3 casually gave its characters detailed nude bodies and underwear lore. If it was, I didn't see it—perhaps it's just harder to stand out in today's noise bath of discourse.

Probably more relevant is that games just got more mainstream and have an older audience on average, and so they now have an easier time getting away with all the things Hollywood does.

As Andy observed recently after reaching out to infamous GTA critic Jack Thompson: "...Grand Theft Auto won. Netflix airs its special, the NBA wears its uniform, Walmart sells it, middle-aged cops and politicos buy it, and the state of Florida wraps itself in it."

Oh, and about Cyberleek: They're back to claiming they've got a "project" underway that you should help fund. I don't recommend that. Take-Two and Rockstar continue to look for the culprit, but we haven't heard any new developments on that recently.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I think we, as a society, as a people, are generally fine with furries at this point. The phenomenon of ragging on furry subculture has been, gladly, consigned to the dustbin of history. It's a 2010 disease from which we have convalesced. Let nothing I write from here on be taken as a slight against them.

That being said, it is very funny to give someone in a fursuit a gun and a military objective.

I have installed, well, two mods actually. The first, preliminary mod is Gang and Turf Mod, which adds a sort of gang war system in the vein of GTA: San Andreas. Different factions will wage war over areas of Los Santos, from the heart of downtown up to the podunk rural hamlets in the north.

Then I installed the main course: Furry Gang for Gang and Turf Mod, which festoons the city streets with murderers in wolf outfits who are here to take their corners with blood and gunpowder. There are other gangs—gangs installed by default with the base mod—but I honestly didn't pay much attention to them. Some of them were in suits? They truly all got steamrolled by the marauding bands of fursuited raiders.

Like an embedded reporter in a war, I followed one band of armed furries into battle. Dodging cars, they dispatched most of their foes pretty quickly, but then a tornado manifested and started whipping them into the sky. At one point, I punched one of them, mostly out of overstimulation. Then I got eaten by the tornado too. Then I teleported somewhere else. Nearby, on a ridge, was a single furry in a purple suit, immobile and gazing, planning some future conquest.

All of these things happened.

It's hard to imagine now, but a little over 20 years ago the gaming world was absolutely scandalized by Hot Coffee, a mod to activate abandoned code in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that enabled CJ to have interactive sex with his girlfriend.

The game was re-rated as "Adults Only" by the ESRB in 2005, forcing it off retail shelves—this was a time when retail shelf space mattered—and it was banned outright in Australia. Even the US Federal Trade Commission got involved, complaining that Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive "did not tell consumers that the game discs contained potentially viewable nude female characters and a potentially playable sex mini-game."

22 years later, with Grand Theft Auto 6 on the verge of console release, it all seems rather quaint. From the ESRB's newly posted rating, here's what we've got to look forward to in GTA 6:

• Blood and Gore
• Intense Violence
• Mature Humor
• Nudity
• Strong Language
• Strong Sexual Content
• Use of Drugs and Alcohol

All of which adds up to an M rating—that is, "generally suitable for ages 17 and up." PEGI, the European game rating agency, came down a little harder, rating it 18+ in a since-deleted listing that also noted the presence of "detailed decapitation" and "frequent and prominent" drug use.

How did we get from there to here? Well, we grew up—literally. The Entertainment Software Association said in 2025 that the average gamer in the US is 36 years old and has been playing for 18 years: That's police, politicians, and parents who all came up playing games (including GTA) and view them as no more remarkable than a spicy episode of Miami Vice.

The societal collapse that some alarmists anticipated, meanwhile, failed to materialize—well, it failed to materialize as a result of games, anyway. But a sudden uptick in violent crime and killings, sparked by "murder trainers" like GTA, Call of Duty, and Halo? It never happened. If anything, we've seen the opposite: As gaming has become increasingly mainstream, and the number of gamers has gone up, violent crime has seen a decline over the last two decades.

You could argue, I suppose, that the mainstreaming of Grand Theft Auto represents social desensitization—a loosening of the standards and decorum that made certain kinds of mature content much more taboo. But after years spent bearing witness to the moralizing hand-wringing that gave us the Satanic Panic, the Parents Music Resource Center, the bloody-minded determination to keep the Comics Code Authority alive despite its complete irrelevance, and of course the creation of the ESRB, I'm more inclined to think that what we're really doing is slowly figuring out what actually matters, and acting accordingly.

Plus ça change...

An infamous voice of criticism from this distant generation has not softened his position, however. With GTA now a mass-market entertainment franchise, no more frightening than a typical Marvel movie, I reached out to former attorney Jack Thompson; 20 years ago he was notorious among gamers for his determined, often theatrical efforts to link violent videogames to real-world violence and have them stringently regulated as a result, and I was curious how he felt about Florida's embrace of the GTA marketing machine, and the changed world we live in.

Thompson was such a high-profile presence on the videogame scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s that he was portrayed by Bill Paxton in The Gamechangers, a BBC Two docudrama about his long-running feud with Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser.

Thompson, who lives in Florida, is clearly unhappy with various GTA 6 promotional partnerships being enacted across the state. "If you don't understand that government promotion of commercial interests is fascism then we have very little to talk about," Thompson told me. "Ask the County Sheriff what she thinks about this unholy corporatist alliance."

I had in fact asked the sheriff, and the sheriff's department told me that it is not concerned by "promotional decisions [made] by private businesses or organizations." I relayed this to Thompson, who accused me of drinking the "fascist Kool-Aid," likened me to Joseph Goebbels, and told me to stop bothering him. He elaborated on that, very slightly, in a subsequent email: "The problem is your work proves you are not an honest journalist."

I feel a bit bad about that. I thought that with nearly 20 years of water under the bridge, Thompson may have softened, or at least reached a place where he could reflect soberly on the way the world has changed. That clearly hasn't happened.

Maybe that's understandable, because—and this isn't meant to be triumphal, I'm not spiking the ball, it's simple fact—after a life and career spent warring against it, Grand Theft Auto won. Netflix airs its special, the NBA wears its uniform, Walmart sells it, middle-aged cops and politicos buy it, and the state of Florida wraps itself in it. And here we are—we're fine. To me, that's a good outcome, but to someone who bet everything on the irresistibly corrosive impact of GTA? The absence of chaos and catastrophe—that everything is fine, at least in the sense that violent videogames didn't herald the end times—might just be a little disappointing.

The diary of my time with Grand Theft Auto 5 so far consists, in the main, of struggles with cars. The perfidious automobile, the horseless carriage, has run rampant in Los Santos for weeks now, causing all manner of chaos as I attempt to live my life and do backflips and what-have-you.

Time to put them in their place. To do so, I have utilised Toy Cars – Make any car tiny, whose nature is right there in the name. The pitch is that you can transform any car you drive into its Micro Machines equivalent, shrinking them down to fit in a child's hand, keeping "your original vehicle visible, sounding, and behaving like itself while using a hidden RC-sized chassis underneath to provide miniature collision, suspension, and road physics."

This is not quite how it goes for me.

As ever, this is not the mod's fault. It seems to work well. After teleporting my way into a car (they are mostly too airborne to hijack normally), I drive around a bit and tap F7—the magic car-shrinking key. This is where it all goes to pot, you see.

The shrinking bit? Works great. My car—a taxi—instantly transmogrifies, becoming a Lilliputian replica of itself. Then it all goes off the rails. Somehow, for reasons that will forever be beyond me, I think the game stops registering the car as having a driver. If it's not a player-character vehicle, it suddenly becomes subject to the laws (or lack of laws) that govern every other car in the game: it careens off like a scared horse, bouncing off walls, ducking under low arches.

It is entirely beyond my control and I cannot get out. If I hit F—the traditional button for exiting a car—a notification pops up that there are no deer nearby. This is saddening news but not immediately relevant to my being taken hostage by a car.

Fortunately, I can return the car back to scale with another tap of the F7 key, but I am somewhat sad. For a moment there, I thought I could live the Borrower life I always dreamt of. Maybe some other time.

We still don't have a PC launch date for Grand Theft Auto 6, or even official confirmation that it's ever going to come our way, even though we all know it is. But for one brief shining moment, fans on PC had hope that maybe they'd be able to backdoor their way into the cool kids club—that despite the absence of a PC version, they might be able to play it on November 19 anyway, without having to shell out for a new game console.

Alas, the word has come down from on high, and that word is: "No."

The ball got rolling when The Verge reported on October 6 that Xbox had secured the exclusive right to deliver GTA 6 via streaming platforms—that is, Xbox Cloud Gaming. And that would presumably make the game playable on PC, as Xbox Cloud Gaming is accessible through any PC rocking Windows 10 version 20H2 or later.

You'd almost certainly have to sign up for Game Pass Ultimate to access it, and you'd need a better internet connection than mine to make it work, but even so: Grand Theft Auto 6, on PC, on launch day. Holy guacamole!

Alas, it is now time to lock eyes with the metaphorical skull in your hand and ponder that dream, that faraway hope, and all that has brought them low—which in this case is Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball, who delivered the bad news on X.

"While the excitement for GTA 6 and Xbox is great to see, it has also led to some misreporting," Ball wrote. "We are looking forward to launching GTA 6 on Xbox November 19, though the game will not be streaming exclusively or to PC."

That's some real infinite jest, alright! Which I think is applicable to the whole situation: I actually buy the argument that it's better to develop a game of this scale within the constraints of consoles and then expand to the greater (and more unpredictable) power of PC later, and I have no doubt that Rockstar and Take-Two also enjoy the tighter constraints on the user end of things too: You're not going to find shenanigans like Joshua Wolens' effort to mod GTA 5 into GTA 6 in the worst way possible on a PlayStation 5, after all.

But I also think PCG's Ted Litchfield hit the nail on the head with his analysis: "Rockstar banks on a second revenue bump from its games' PC releases, a little afterburner of profit that includes no shortage of PC-favoring players who buy the game twice." There really is no dip like the double dip.

Anyway, some of the responses to Ball's message complain that the message is vague or ambiguous, although I'm not sure how: There are questions, sure, most obviously how Xbox will stream GTA 6 without making it accessible to PCs that can normally access streamed Xbox games. It's a fair point, and I suppose if one has an inflated sense of optimism and squints at the statement just right, a faint glimmer of that hope might remain. But to me, 'will not be streaming to PC' seems pretty cut-and-dried: Our long, wintry wait will continue.

A shift in the fabric of reality: I launch Grand Theft Auto 5 and, following the now-customary hitch-and-stutter loading screen that can last anywhere from 10 seconds to five minutes, Franklin spawns into his familiar void apartment. Within seconds, he begins plummeting, screaming.

All of this is fine and normal.

But something new: Franklin carries a duffel bag with him into the abyss now, and I am unsure as to why. My guess is that it is a byproduct of my newly installed mod, ScamV, which "turns Los Santos into your digital playground." Let the possibilities unfurl ahead of you—"Take on the role of a cyber-criminal, exploit vulnerabilities, use cloned cards, and build your underground fortune."

Mostly, though, it has given me a bag. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that all of these things would be present in a regular installation of ScamV, but unfortunately ScamV in my world is forced to compete with an armageddon of other mods: the flying cars, new interiors, deleted exteriors, credit ratings and so on.

So mostly it is a bag. But wait, there is also this—the possibility of walking into a bank, any bank, and interacting with the teller by paying in fake cheques. "You don't have any fake cheques," the game tells me when I attempt this. It does not tell me where or how to obtain them. Kafka-esque. Five stars.

THEN:

NOW:

WHAT?

Vice City and Leonida, the fictional city and state that serve as the setting for Grand Theft Auto 6, are largely based on Miami and the state of Florida, and Rockstar and publisher Take-Two Interactive are moving heavy and hard to leverage that real-life inspiration to promote GTA 6 as its console release gets closer.

The sheriff made no bones about her position on the matter when the proposed partnership came to light in September, however, characterizing the game as exactly the sort of thing Miami-Dade shouldn't associate with.

"Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity," Cordero-Stutz said at the time. "Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office work every single day to prevent."

It was a hard line in the sand, but it didn't add up to much. Despite some opposition from local positions, much of it predicated on similar law-and-order concerns, those PR campaigns have moved ahead. The City of Miami Beach voted in September to approve a 'discreet' campaign, for instance, while the Kaseya Center, a downtown arena in Miami that serves as home of the NBA's Miami Heat, took a rather less subtle approach, erecting a massive "Welcome to Vice City" sign on its roof that can be seen by travellers flying into Miami International Airport.

The Kaseya Center campaign became even more prominent in October when the Heat, one of the NBA's highest-profile teams, became directly involved via the Night in Vice City campaign, a one-night-only promotion that will see both the arena and the team rebranded in Vice City livery. It is, as former US President Joe Biden once said, "a big fuckin' deal."

(It also revealed that our UK team does not know ball, but that's a whole different kind of problem.)

I thought the sheriff might take issue with such a high-profile embrace of a videogame she had so wholeheartedly decried just a month ago, Despite her previously-expressed opposition, though, she seemingly has no issue with the Heat hopping on board.

"Sheriff Cordero-Stutz’s comments focused on the proposed use of publicly owned facilities and infrastructure, including public transportation, transit stations, and Miami International Airport, to promote Grand Theft Auto 6," a sheriff's department representative told PC Gamer. "Her concerns addressed the message conveyed through the use of these public assets. Those comments were not directed at promotional decisions by private businesses or organizations."

I'm not sure how much of a difference the public/private thing makes in a practical sense—public or private, 'Miami is becoming Vice City' is the very high-profile crux of the campaign—but in spite of the many years passed since the Hot Coffee scandal, it's a needle that some are still trying to thread. The promo campaign approved by Miami Beach, for instance, will be managed by Boucher Brothers, a "hospitality management" company in Florida: Advertising materials will appear on things like Boucher Brothers chairs and umbrellas, rather than on city property.

Those chairs and umbrellas may appear on city property, which makes me think that trying to put some sort of minimum safe distance between them and the responsibilities of civic leadership might be largely moot.

On the other hand, the outright alarmism of days past has clearly receded. The glitzy rebranding of Miami and other parts of Florida speaks for itself, and Cordero-Stutz's admonishment notwithstanding, police don't seem too worried that pretending to be Vice City is going to turn Miami into actual Vice City: During the Miami Beach debates, for instance, one city commissioner said an officer he spoke to laughed off concerns about the impact of the game and promotional campaign on the city. Crass commercialism isn't really my bag but as someone who was around for the entire Jack Thompson era, I have to admit that this is kind of nice to see.

La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind." He wrote this some time before the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, and was likely referring to Mirror's Edge instead.

Regardless, it holds true today. And you know what? Whatever their qualities, the gentlemen of GTA 5 simply don't have much grace to them. They are lumpy, ambling figures, and move like young children unused to their bulk. I have rectified this using Back Flip Mod—a mod for back flip. "Simple backflip for Single Player," it says, with an alarmingly cavalier attitude to capitalisation and style-guide coherence.

But it's true. Now, with a tap of page down (enormous shoutout to the author for choosing page down, by the way: one of few keys left on my keyboard not already colonised by another mod) the lads of Los Santos will, whimsically, backflip in place. Then they'll get very pleased with themselves for pulling it off.

"There's a chance the backflip fails and your character ragdolls," notes the mod's author, which is delicious. Of course, in my testing so far, failures happen not mid-backflip but more at the conception of the backflip idea.

That is to say, you hit the backflip button and—if the dice roll deems it to be a failure—your character collapses immediately, without even moving. In fairness, many of my own ideas and impulses fail in precisely the same way.

There is no more room in hell—the dead are at the beach. Grand Theft Auto 5, already burdened and bedraggled by the parade of mods I have inflicted on it, must now contend with a new disorder: revenants from beyond the veil.

I have installed ZombieInfection, which adds zombie and, indeed, infection. In any given populated space, you will look about yourself to notice that some of Los Santos' denizens are more bloody and shambling than usual. This is because they have been rejected by the grave.

Whenever these undead pedestrians brush up against other city-dwellers, the latter converts instantly to the horde. Before long, what began as just two or three bloodied weirdos becomes a city-threatening catastrophe, which is both horrifying and a good way of demonstrating the power of exponential growth.

Fortunately, zombies are just as prone to the impact of tornadoes, cars, fire, and so on as anyone else. They're also rather slow. More often than not, they get taken out by one of Los Santos' countless ambient threats before they can do any real damage. A lesson for mayors everywhere.

Shockingly, the curse of the undeath is so strong that it can somehow break my own aura of immortality. Franklin—you may have noticed from previous articles, where he does things like surviving tornadoes and being used as a ramp by cars—is invincible in my GTA 5 install. But let a zombie brush up against him for long enough and he will succumb to the afterworld like any other mortal. It's very scary. Happy Halloween.

Disregard that other thing I said. Grand Theft Auto 5 no longer only launches in windowed mode. It now only launches in fullscreen mode. We're choosing not to investigate this and are just hoping the whole thing works itself out.

Another thing to disregard: what I said earlier about Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The greatest game of all time is, in fact, 2009's Prototype, which is about being a really angry flu who can take on the appearance of anyone he eats. You can turn your arm into a sword, you fight some sort of flesh-Christ in Times Square. There's a lot going on.

Anyway GTA 5 is like Prototype now, in that I have installed Shapeshifter V. This allows you to immediately become any pedestrian you happen to stealth attack, to no real discernible end. It is quite novel, though. So an outfit you like? Take it. Also, take the in-fit. You are a great roving blob on a quest to consume and to replicate.

I am fairly certain that the act of becoming a new person doesn't change your voice, so do brace yourself for the piercing screams of Shawn Fonteno to emerge from the throats of old men and young men as they find themselves whipped up in a passing tornado or teleported a few thousand feet into the sky.

But these are bagatelles. Overall, shapeshifting is another fascinating patch in the great GTA 5 tapestry I am forging. I just have to remember to only launch that tapestry in full-screen now. Or maybe tomorrow it will be windowed again. What an adventure.

Sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and do what's necessary. No sentimentality, no squeamishness—just pure, solution-oriented bluesky thinking. This philosophy once guided Maximilien de Robespierre and now it guides me, in my equally epochal struggle to simply make Grand Theft Auto 5 boot in spite of the vast cargo of mods I have now encumbered it with.

Long story short: the game ceased to launch even in windowed mode, which had hitherto been a surefire way to coax it from its deathbed. After many restarts and a lot of graphics noodling, I was forced to ask myself if this was it. If this was the end of my GTA journey.

Then I started deleting essentially random files from the game's directory and now it works. So let that be a lesson to you.

Now that's out of the way: new mod. This one is called TornadoV and what it does, you see, is it adds absolutely ginormous tornadoes to the already somewhat hectic map of Los Santos (or what remains of it). Hit F5 to configure your tornadoes, hit F6 to spawn them.

That last bit is a point of concern, as F6 is also my button to enable noclip and jet about the map at speed. So I can't do that without summoning a twister now, I guess. Okay.

It's good fun, anyway. Franklin really does go to pieces as the mod stuffs him in an express elevator to God's kingdom. As for the rest of the world, well, with everything in a constant state of explosion, fracas, and breakdown, a slowly migrating whirlwind really just sort of blends in.

There is an anxiety to my movements now. The stench of death lingers about Grand Theft Auto 5 like petrichor after hard, hot rain, and I am nervous that any addition will finally nudge it over the edge.

As we've previously established, the game now only launches properly in windowed mode, and once it churns through all the modifications I have burdened it with, it deposits me in an empty void where Franklin Clinton's house used to be, sending him tumbling through the abyss. Every time I load GTA 5, Franklin screams.

Anyway, I added a new mod. It's called Fortnite Floss Dance [OIV] and it adds "Smooth looping Floss dance, same speed as Fortnite." Convenience is its philosophy: whenever you begin flossing, music will play automatically, so you don't look weird. Don't like the music? Its volume is controlled by a slider. Also, the entire UI is in Arabic, which I did not expect when I downloaded it but which adds something indefinable that I like a lot.

What to say? Franklin flosses now. He flosses indiscriminately, indefatigably. Nothing can deter him. The ongoing chaos of a semi-deleted Los Santos does not faze him. His endlessly perishing and replenishing bodyguards do not concern him. Smash him with a car and he will only right himself and keep going. There is only him, the music, and a command in a language I do not speak but which I must assume reads 'Begin flossing'.

Videogames are so cool.

Can a game go on life support? Can it begin, in its dotage, to show signs of the ailment that everyone knows—but would never say—is the thing that will one day bring it down for good?

Grand Theft Auto 5 can. Installing my latest mod, Dynamic Traffic Colours, has brought my installation of the game to the point that it's failing death rolls. It will only launch in windowed mode, now. Trying to fullscreen the game before it has loaded will leave you suspended in the void. Quite literally: you will reside in an eternal black screen from which escape is impossible, unless you hold CTRL+ALT+DEL.

Anyway, once I was in and windowed, I encountered a mystery. The point of Dynamic Traffic Colours is to mix up the hues of Los Santos' cars. I think it is doing that, but with a conservatism that borders on timidity.

For the most part, the cars I see (and, to be fair, many of them more-or-less implode on spawn) are the same humdrum colours you get all the time. But then, like a vision, you get a car that's a garish mix of tints, sailing past you and into the side of a building.

So I don't really know what's going on there. Perhaps it's a lesson to change my thinking. Rather than letting me gorge myself on clown cars, the mod presents them like rare, nourishing treats: oases in the windowed desert. I'm thankful for that.

I have filled a yawning void in the soul of Los Santos. I have returned the heart to a heartless world. I am a teacher, a healer, a gardener of human happiness. My efforts have ensured the general flourishing of society and the wellbeing of the spaceship Earth.

Grand Theft Auto 5 has Working Hotdog Vendors now.

Based on the evidence, Rockstar probably intended the hot-dog-purchasing experience in GTA 5 to work much as it did in GTA 4. Why didn't it? A mystery. Dundee was busy working on horse testicles, or whatever it is they do up there, and forgot.

Anyway, it works now. You can now stroll up to the meat-slingers of Los Santos beach and give them five (thanks Obama) dollars for some sort of fleshy tube in a bun. This is electrifying.

The hot dogs heal you, just like in real life, but my favourite part is how they interact with the random-teleport mod I hucked onto my teetering GTA 5 pile just yesterday. One moment you'll be handing over your money, the next you will be perched atop the not-Hollywood sign, lazily chowing down on your grub. Also, the bodyguards that the celebrity mod has assigned you will keep manifesting in thin air next to you before plunging to their deaths. This does not interrupt the hot dog consumption process.

It's great. GTA 5 should have been like this the whole time. I can only hope that GTA 6, with its budget of 'roughly Saddam Hussein's gold bullion reserves,' will let you fully experience hot dogs.

It's the greatest challenge I've yet faced. Not in Grand Theft Auto 5, in life (I was a sheltered child). Forget hit squads, forget running a billion-dollar privacy-invading company, forget bad credit, forget the absence of gravity. My enemy now is space itself, the third dimension. Maybe spacetime. Never been clear on what that is.

I have installed the Random Teleport Challenge, which is not a challenge in the American Gladiators sense but more of a challenge in the debilitating disease sense. Every 50 seconds, the game whisks me to one of 28 locations scattered across GTA 5's map. I have no list of which locations these are, which makes the whole thing quite exciting.

I don't know how you live your life, but for me, it's actually quite disruptive to find myself randomly spatially displaced every 50 seconds. It's probably how the Quantum Leap guy felt, if he sometimes Quantum Leapt underneath a truck.

It's a confusing and disconcerting time. Utterly impossible to plan for. But you know what? It taught me an important lesson, probably. Not sure what it is yet, but this seems like one of those things people turn around at the end of and say they learnt an important lesson, so there must be one in there somewhere.

This will probably make it quite difficult to experience mods going forward. I may have to edit an .ini file. Or maybe I just live like this now, ever jaunting. Ever lost in the creases of the sheets of the universe. Just check under the nearest truck; I'm probably there.

Every nation has its kooks—excepting of course the Swiss—but there's something utterly American to me about the UFO sighting. It's probably something to do with the sheer size of the place. A tired, potentially hopped-up trucker, trundling across the endless plains of… whatever state has endless plains in it, spying something mysterious and illuminated in the canopy above? That's America to me.

Also America to me: the Grand Theft Auto videogame series, so it was only natural that I bring real UFO visits to Rockstar's fake LA. I installed UFO Sightings, "a simple script that spawns a UFO at random locations throughout the map."

Its aim is to be eerie and mysterious, which is probably why it limits UFOs to appearing at night. I didn't know that at first, though, so I spent quite a lot of time flying around Mount Chiliad at high noon, trying and failing to find visitors from other worlds. I did find the now-ever-present swarms of hitmen trying to kill me, though, so I had fun.

Once I realised my error, I nudged the game clock forward. Voila! All of a sudden, a distant part of the map glowed red. "UFO sighting reported" declared a pop-up. My reaction was swift—I immediately took flight (I have Superman powers; don't worry about it) and headed towards the marked zone.

Now, look, here's where things didn't quite go as I planned. In my idyllic visions, the American spaceman-spotter sees a hazy disc in the middle distance. He squints, he rubs his eyes, he thinks but is never sure that the object he's looking at is aliens, and there is no one in a 10-mile radius to back him up when he talks about it later. His defining trait is uncertainty. If he speaks, he becomes a disbelieved outcast. If he keeps quiet, the questions haunt him to his grave.

The truth wasn't quite so romantic or secretive: My UFO appeared about 30 feet in the air over an intersection in downtown Los Santos, flashing with enough enthusiasm to immediately kill anyone who's even familiar with epilepsy.

I guess it worked out. At some point, possibly in response to me shooting it with my laser eyes, it stopped flashing and began to ascend, eventually vanishing completely. Maybe I never saw it. Perhaps it was never there at all.

Have you heard? Crazy Taxi is coming back. As a game, yes (with some rather off-putting gen-AI mixed in there), and also as a movie. You may have heard this. What you have not heard is that I, personally, am bringing Crazy Taxi back. I am bringing it back to Los Santos, to Grand Theft Auto 5.

Simply put, I have installed the aptly-named Crazy Taxi Mod, which has populated my doomed and bedraggled city with a new variety of quest: a taxi quest. A crazy taxi quest.

Approach a yellow circle and the game will prompt you to hit H. Hit H and you will enter a world of point-to-point transportation. The mod gives you a selection of cars, all yellow, and none of which I can remember because all the cars in my game are seized by irresistible movement, which means they immediately jet off the vehicle-select screen as soon as they appear.

An added consequence of this behaviour is that you have to choose a car quickly. The mod will teleport you into the one you've chosen, whatever its location. Wait too long, and the car you want to drive will have either taken flight or ploughed into the side of a building and exploded.

Regardless, once you're in, it's pure Crazy Taxi. You've got a time limit and the sidewalks have punters. Pick them up and your time limit extends. The goal is rapidity, to keep your pickups and dropoffs frequent enough that your time limit is actually growing in the aggregate, rather than depleting.

Or it would be, but my various fares keep getting scared off by the rolling gang war that Los Santos has, at this point, descended into. Or they get hit by cars, or shot by my bodyguards, or they have bad credit maybe. Who knows? Point is, they sometimes fail to actually get in the car, leaving me idling my big yellow taxi forlornly at the side of the road, eternally.

But aren't we all doing that in some way, when you think about it?

It might feel minnowish compared to modern open worlds, but Los Santos is still a schlep to get across. Whether you're on a bike, in a car, or hoofing it on-foot, it takes a while to get from the city itself out to the northernmost boonies. Well, no more.

Flights V is a mod that turns GTA 5's airports into, ah, airports. That is to say, you can now rock up to a desk in the terminal, pick up a ticket, and jet off (as a passenger) to one of a select few other points on the map: LSIA, Sandy Shore Airfield, McKenzie Airfield, or Paleto Bay International Airport.

I'm not entirely sure that the real-world LAX airport maintains routes to podunk personal hangars out in the middle of the desert, but America is a strange and bewildering place.

It is a replication of the true airport experience par excellence. You know how in airports you can choose what kind of plane you want to travel on, and how the space between the jet bridge and the plane itself is protected by a vast bank-vault door? We've got that. You know how the departures lounge is filled with dead-eyed half-people staring listlessly into the void? That's here too.

Okay, that one actually is accurate, I guess.

My only issue is that actually trying to board a plane can sometimes result in an infinite loading screen. This is inexplicable. It is assuredly not related to previous mods that have deleted a vast swathe of the exterior world map, nor my attempts to carry NPCs on my back into the plane. It's just plane travel, you know? They always find ways to make it a little bit worse.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming! Not to us on Team PC, mind: It will eventually, but right now it's a strict console exclusive. Why? Hard to say: Publisher Take-Two Interactive has taken pains to reassure PC gamers that they're very important and loved, but also, y'know, not now.

The latest reassurance to gamers on personal computers came during Take-Two's annual shareholders meeting, held yesterday, during which Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the potential impact of PlayStation 5 Pro shortages—ironically, driven at least in part by the looming launch of GTA 6—on the company's plans for releasing the game on PC.

After clarifying that the question is really about "the cadence of PC launches," Zelnick continued, "The strategy of the company is over time, generally speaking, to launch for any platforms for which there's a meaningful audience. But that isn't always the case, and certainly if platforms were no longer viable, we would change that strategy. And I would note that the PC platform is becoming more and more important to our company over time."

So, what does that mean? Essentially, that Zelnick doesn't want to talk about it: GTA 6, for better or worse, is a console exclusive, and that's clearly where the studio's focus is.

Which isn't to say Zelnick's response isn't confusing, but that's something of an ongoing pattern: In May he said PC can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases, but that GTA 6 is debuting on consoles because Take-Two is focused on "serving the core consumer," which apparently does not include PC gamers—those gamers who, you may recall, can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases.

Those struck me as inherently contradictory statements, and saying the PC is "becoming more and more important" when it's clearly already very important doesn't really clear that air. I can understand why Zelnick wouldn't want to just come out and state the obvious reason for holding back GTA 6 on PC—double-dipping—but if he did, we'd at least be able to relax and say, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense.'

Speaking of not wanting to talk about things, Zelnick was also asked about GTA Online during the meeting, to which he reminded attendees that GTA 6 is "a singleplayer experience," and that GTA 5 Online "continues to be a robust business for us" that Take-Two will continue to support. The CEO of Twitch thinks GTA 6 multiplayer will come out next year, but it's not entirely clear whether he's speculating or relaying inside info.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19. We'll get it someday.

In a previous life, long before I began making millions writing about videogames professionally, I wrote marketing copy for a finance firm I still don't really understand. Do you know the fine art of embedding payment iframes in customer payment gateways? I did. Once. Do you know the riotous history of the SWIFT international banking system? What about SEPA? No? What a sheltered life you must lead.

My point is this: absolutely nothing is more interesting, cooler, or sexier than finance and banking. We all know it. There was a whole song that was pretty much about just that. And now, I have integrated this glamour into Grand Theft Auto 5. I have installed Realistic Bank System – San Andreas ONE.

Exciting times: I can get into debt now. The thrill of thrills is that San Andreas ONE lets you apply for lines of credit in ways that are fascinatingly reminiscent of real life. GTA 5's protagonists even get actual, meaningful credit scores (based on… something) that impact their eligibility to open new lines of the stuff. Franklin's was 680 (Good), in case you're wondering. That gave him a positive soft eligibility for getting a loan. Yes, this thing has soft and hard credit checks.

Anyway, I got a $30,000 line of credit and set it as my default payment method. Anything I purchased in GTA 5 would go onto the credit card, not my actual money, at least until I maxed the thing out. This was largely immaterial, as in my position as megacelebrity and CEO of Facebook, I am incontinentally rich. But still, nice to have.

The only thing that didn't quite take was the mod's implementation of physical bank branches. I could go in, sure, and mix with the hoi polloi who also wander in to do their banking, but I couldn't actually interact with the teller. In fairness, this might be because of the constant, chaotic churn of my modded Los Santos, which is ever disgorging flaming corpses in and around their desks. I guess it would be sort of hard to work in those conditions.

I grew up by a dry riverbed. This was, on the whole, positive, because what a big empty riverbed is good for is setting things on fire, firing air rifles, and walloping golf balls into orbit. Some say they never stopped travelling. They're still out there, somewhere, in the space between the stars.

The reason Grand Theft Auto 5 is worse than a riverbed is that you can't do that last thing. Or, well, you can, but only at officially designated golf courses, which are prisons for the soul. I have now fixed this omission. I installed Street Golf, which lets you play golf, but in the street.

Much like the previous two mods I've bolted onto GTA 5's sagging frame (LifeInvader Business Mod and Become A Celebrity), I was immediately impressed by how much of the mod there is. This is no ramshackle creation—the possibility of equipping a golf club and whacking some balls in the street—but comes with a suite of tweakable menus, golf stats, and potent balltypes. Normal balls? Yes. Fire balls? Absolutely. Detonating balls? Very much so. And super balls, which you can set to travel about 200x further than any other ball in your arsenal.

Being as I am now accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, who is instantly replaced by an almost-identical bodyguard whenever he happens to get pancaked by a flying car or assassinated by a squad of mercenaries, I opted to use him as a kind of ambulatory mini-golf windmill.

My shots were angled towards him, alternately sending him cartwheeling hilariously down the street, sending him cartwheeling even further down the street (super ball, you see), or setting him on fire. The detonating balls never quite worked. The mod procced some sort of achievement when I successfully nailed him in the dome with a maximum-power shot.

It's a pleasant distraction. Whenever the travails of my life in Los Santos get too much I can, at any moment, drop into Golf Mode. Would that real life were the same way.

You might have heard that I am Mark Zuckerberg now. This is true. Indisputable, even. But something isn't right—wherever he went, Zuckerberg Cool Original was recognised. He was a famous, or infamous man. When I stroll around Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5, even as the enormously wealthy owner of its barely-disguised Facebook parody, no one recognises me.

No longer. I have installed the Become a Celebrity mod (coincidentally, from the same author as the LifeInvader Business Mod), with the aim of becoming a prominent man about town. As with the LifeInvader mod, it's actually rather impressive in its feature set: the mod measures your public approval and your overall fame on separate axes, and allows you to undertake little repeatable quests to change both.

You start out, naturally, at zero fame, and the only things you can do to improve it are so-called "Z-lister" gigs. This means: busking. This means: busking upwards of 20 times at disparate locations scattered around Los Santos, each performance netting you about $500 and 0.5 fame points (which is not many fame points). This is fairly arduous, and made harder by all the flying cars, gang warfare, etcetera.

Also, people don't seem to appreciate it. As Franklin stood on the steps of city hall, strumming his heart on guitar, only his hired bodyguard offered any applause. Elsewhere, Los Santos either looked on impassively, ignored him, or died (due to the hazards, you see). Sometimes, to be fair to the stoic crowd, Franklin's guitar-playing animation would not trigger, and his 15-second performance would consist of him standing still and sort of grimacing.

I did it, though. All 20 gigs, eventually letting me crest a new summit of fame and take on a whole new type of gig: the Meet and Greet. In a sunny spot in the Los Santos business district, my fans gathered to revere and adulate me. They whooped, they clapped, they bounced up and down as Franklin stood stock-still and stared blankly into the middle distance. This is what it's all about. This is what I deserve.

The event was brought to an end when a significant portion of my fanbase was hit by a truck.

Let's skip the preamble: I am Mark Zuckerberg now. The original Mark Zuckerberg? Who cares? He's knocked out in a ditch somewhere. Whatever. He's the past; I am the future. Specifically, the future of Mark Zuckerberg, who I am.

The latest mod I have installed into my increasingly uncontrollable build of Grand Theft Auto 5 is LifeInvader Business Mod, which grants you the ability to buy Rockstar's thinly veiled (which is to say, not veiled at all) parody of Facebook for the cool sum of a million bucks. I did not actually have a million bucks, but one of the 46,000 other mods I have installed let me grant myself that amount at the office's front door. In real life, this is called quantitative easing.

The mod is actually quite robust. It's not just a matter of buying the website and letting passive income roll in. You get a whole new menu through which you can staff up—acquiring devs of varying levels of talent—expand your server capacity, and even hire security to keep the hoi polloi away. You can donate to charity to buff your business' reputation, and have to keep an eye on staff morale.

Staff morale, by the way, is largely unimpacted by the flying car which has careened through the second floor window and begun gyrating around the server racks, gathering a pursuing swarm of monitors and wastepaper baskets behind it like a Saab Pied Piper. Nor do they mind, particularly, when armed men burst in and try to shoot their CEO, and they are equally unfazed when that CEO uses his laser vision to turn those men to hot slag.

Actually, while all this was ongoing, the mod kept serving me notifications: staff morale was at a steady 100% because the boss had showed up in the office, which is both appreciated and also not my experience of what happens when the boss shows up in the office. But Facebo—sorry, LifeInvader's developers are made of a different, hardier stock. It's a privilege to own them.

Here's some logic for you: Grand Theft Auto 6—fattened on its billions—cannot help but be the greatest game of all time. This I have gathered from the apocalyptic euphoria that surrounds its release. But GTA 6 is not out yet, and the greatest game of all time, currently, is The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the PlayStation 2, original Xbox, and GameCube.

Ergo, QED, post hoc ergo propter hoc, abracadabra: GTA 6 will basically be like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.

With that key fact in mind, and with the aim of continuing to transform Grand Theft Auto the fifth into a facsimile of GTA 6 (this time on PC), I have installed Superman V into GTA 5. Your heroes now have laser eyes (also cryo eyes, pulse eyes, solar flare eyes, and so on), super speed, freeze breath, the ability to fly, and X-ray vision—which so far as I can tell is a heat-haze effect that happens intermittently.

I have waved goodbye to guns, much like the protagonist of A Farewell To Arms, who also probably did that after learning he could set people on fire by staring at them.

It works alarmingly well. I can ignite passing cars with my heat vision, freeze cops where they stand, and subject Los Santos' now-roving ambient hit squads to the carcinogenic effects of sustained X-ray exposure. I can also fly, which sometimes works, and sometimes results in Franklin, Michael, or Trevor tumbling lazily but uncontrollably through the sky, like an airborne flower.

My only concern is that, at this point, I am rapidly running out of keys on my keyboard with which to activate the various mods I have installed. At time of writing, hitting any of my function keys will summon a pile-up of distinct mod menus: Enhanced Native Trainer, Menyoo, the one that controls giving people piggybacks, the one that controls summoning dogs. What if what breaks by the end of this thing is not GTA 5, but my ability to control it?

Despite vocal opposition from some commissioners, the city of Miami Beach has voted in favor of a Grand Theft Auto 6 promotional campaign that will see Rockstar drop a reported $3 million on the city in exchange for what looks to be some surprisingly light-touch advertising.

The vote on the proposal was streamed on September 10 on the City of Miami Beach YouTube channel, and it was close, finishing at 4-3 in favor. Opposition to the campaign was rooted in familiar concerns about the nature of the GTA games themselves: Violent, criminal, and just a bad influence all around.

"Grand Theft Auto is an adult videogame where players steal cars, deal drugs, commit robberies, murder civilians, and assassinate police officers," commissioner David Suarez said to kick things off. "That's their right. They can make it, they can sell it, and they can advertise it. But that doesn't mean that the city of Miami Beach has to help them do it.

"We ask our police officers every day to put themselves in harm's way protecting this community. We spend enormous resources fighting drugs, violent crime, and disorder. And we've spent over a million dollars over the past three years on a spring break marketing campaign trying to move Miami Beach away from an image of chaos and lawlessness. Now, we're going to take our beaches, one of the most recognizable symbols of this city, and turn them into a space for Grand Theft Auto. What kind of message are we sending to the world?"

Suarez also played a montage of clips from past GTA games and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, showcasing an extensive range of crimes that players can commit: "I for one don't want Miami Beach associated with this connotation of a brand. I don't think that this is worth what they're offering. I don't think it's worth really anything."

Commissioner Monica Matteo-Salinas countered by pointing out that "we're not going to be doing live action GTA in the city. We're not giving away pistols and cocaine to people." Instead, she said, the campaign is about people who play GTA, and videogames in general, who aren't going to embark on crime sprees because of a videogame, but who might just drop a lot of sweet tourist dollars on Miami Beach.

Money was also a focal point for commissioner Joseph Magazine, who said GTA 6 is coming to the world regardless of what Miami Beach does. "That spotlight's coming. The question remains whether we actually stand on the sidelines and allow that narrative and die to be cast or whether we actually take control and create an opportunity that works for the residents."

Rattling off a list of projects the city has had to put off due to lack of funding, he continued, "Protecting Miami Beach doesn't mean hiding. It doesn't mean shooing something away that's going to happen. It means the confidence to engage, to strike partnerships, to actually take control over something that we can embrace."

Magazine added that he'd spoken to police about it, and it seems like they're not particularly concerned: "One actually kind of laughed at me, he goes, 'Dude, you think a videogame is going to change what we do in the city or that's what we're worried about?'"

Interestingly, it sounds like this campaign will be fairly subtle compared to the excesses of GTA itself. Commissioner Laura Dominguez said GTA 6 logos won't appear on city property like lifeguard chairs or "iconic public places," but instead "will be advertised discreetly with our partner, the Boucher Brothers ... it'll be on their chairs and their umbrellas."

Boucher Brothers is a Florida-based "hospitality management" company that provides services to municipalities in the state. Amusingly, it's also famous enough that it's being parodied in Grand Theft Auto 6 as Sol Sisters, whose umbrellas can be seen in the background of the first GTA 6 trailer. The similarity in design is hard to miss.

Despite the hand-wringing from some commissioners, the vote ultimately passed 4-3, authorizing the Miami Beach city manager to negotiate a deal with Rockstar for a GTA 6 marketing campaign.

It should be noted that, as far as I can tell, this campaign is different from the proposed collaboration with Miami-Dade County that came to light last week: Miami Beach is a resort city within the county, and this particular campaign was focused on that city specifically. That could indicate that other such collaborations, with other cities in Florida, are in the works—I've reached out to Rockstar to ask and will update if I receive a reply.

The Independent Workers of Great Britain union held a rally today in Glasgow, Scotland to mark the beginning of the final workplace tribunal hearing that will resolve the case of 31 former Rockstar employees who were fired by the company in October 2025.

The dispute turns on the cause of the terminations, or lack thereof: Rockstar says the employees were fired for leaking information about "upcoming and unannounced" games in a public forum, while the IWGB says it's plain-and-simple union busting, and that Rockstar further erred by firing the employees immediately rather than following a disciplinary process or granting the former employees any opportunity to appeal. The fired employees are seeking a ruling declaring that their terminations were unfair, along with reinstatement or compensation.

"We believe Rockstar has tried to get away with Grand Theft Employment Rights," IWGB union president Alex Marshall said. "After a year of fighting to get answers, we hope this tribunal will finally back them into a corner and bring the truth to light. As the world gets its first proper look at GTA 6, this hearing will give people a chance to look behind the scenes at what happened to the workers who helped make it."

One especially powerful moment at the rally was a speech given by former Rockstar programmer Rachel Crawford, who worked on Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and was among the employees terminated in 2025.

Closing out the rally, @nershly.bsky.social beautifully speaks about her experience being fired by Rockstar and how they try to use fear.

— @austinkelmore.com (@austinkelmore.com.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T13:29:32.149Z

"The modern workplace runs on fear. Fear of speaking out. Fear of being punished. Fear of being fired, losing your livelihood and even your home.

"On October 30 2025, I was fired by Rockstar Games. I was fired without warning and without even being given a clear answer as to what it was I'd done to deserve it. Within minutes, I was out the door, feeling humiliated and ashamed, and ever since I've replayed that day in my head, wondering what I could or should have done differently.

"On that day, fear asserted its dominance. I felt its claws deep in my heart, urging me to run with my tail between my legs and never to look back. I saw it in my former colleagues, too afraid to talk to me or even, in some cases, to look at me. I heard it every time the ones who did speak to me told me how powerless they felt to do anything to stop or undo what had happened, even though they knew it was wrong.

"Fear wants to rule us. It closes our minds, our hearts, and our horizons. It makes us small, sad and hopeless.

"But today, we are fighting fear. This long-awaited hearing is an opportunity to put fear in its place below us. Over the next five weeks we will face fear and show that we refuse to be silenced by it. In spite of fear, we will stand up proudly, speak our truth, and demand a better industry—a better world—that we all deserve.

"And we're not just fighting fear in the courtroom. Many of my former colleagues at Rockstar Games have taken up the union's flag and are now pushing for the recognition, protection, and power that fear has denied them for too long. Fear will not defeat them and it will not defeat us. Union makes us strong."

The hearing is set to run until October 16, just over a month ahead of the console release of Grand Theft Auto 6, which happens on November 19. The union and fired workers are asking people not to boycott the game, saying in August that "we spent years pouring our hard work, skill, and creativity into making GTA, and we want people to experience the universe that we helped build." Instead, supporters who want to do a solid for the cause are encouraged to contribute to a fundraising campaign launched by the IWGB in support of the legal action against Rockstar.

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Rockstar reiterated its defense on the matter. "“Rockstar Games' position has been clear and consistent throughout," a Rockstar representative said. "Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal.”

The Labor Day weekend is upon us (in Canada and the US, anyway, and we'll be sure to spare a thought for our UK colleagues who will be working on Monday) and holy cow, it is about time. If you find yourself in need of something to do, here's a thought: Play Civilization 7, because it's free to play on Steam until September 10.

Civ 7's had kind of a rough go of things since it launched in early 2025. It made some big changes to the formula that didn't go over well with a significant portion of the fan base, the UI was almost universally unpopular, and performance was dodgy.

Firaxis has been banging away on it ever since, to mixed results: A major update released in May brought a big bump in player numbers on Steam, but the reactions expressed via Steam reviews were almost literally split down the middle. Civ 7's Steam rating remains "mixed," with only 48% positive user reviews, while concurrent player numbers on the platform are still running neck-and-neck with the 16-year-old Civilization 5.

Civ 5 is much beloved but I imagine Firaxis and Take-Two would like to see people move on.

Ah, but here's the counterpoint: It's free. Just go around to Steam and click the "Play Game" button, and after some requisite amount of downloading, you're playing Civ 7 without spending a penny. It's hard to go wrong, really.

If the past year-and-a-half of updates have got Civilization 7 to a point where you think to yourself, 'Yes, I would like to play this game all the time,' you can also pick up the standard and deluxe editions for half price until September 17: That's $35/£30/€35 for the former, and $50/£45/€50 for the latter.

The Civ 7 development team (a small part of it, anyway) will also be discussing what comes next during a livestream from PAX on September 5—you can catch that on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook.

Officials with Miami-Dade County have held talks with Rockstar about using facilities and landmarks in the county to promote the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, according to a recent report by The Miamian, saying it could represent "a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience." Just one problem: the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office is dead-set against it.

The Miamian report (via RPS) says the county submitted a pitch deck to Rockstar on June 29, after which staff had "some conversations with Rockstar about potential opportunities around the launch of GTA 6," said Carlos Suarez, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

"Nothing has been formally agreed to or approved, and any idea would have to go through the appropriate review and approval process," Suarez said. "Given Miami-Dade's clear influence on the game, we think there could be a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience."

Miami-Dade is the inspiration for Vice City in the GTA series, and by "inspiration" I mean it basically is Vice City, although Miami exists as a separate city in the game's fiction. Vice City will serve as a central location in GTA 6, and will represent the seat of Vice-Dale County, much as the city of Miami is the county seat of Miami-Dade. Given that, the campaign makes obvious sense, and most of the ideas floated don't sound too overly disruptive.

Some examples:

• A display aircraft wrapped in Vice City logos and a GTA 6-inspired baggage claim at Miami International Airport
• Vice City signage and colors at the Metromover and Metrorail transit stations
• Vice City-inspired installations or public art at PortMiami
• A "family appropriate" celebration of "Miami car culture" with cars, bikes, DJs, food, artists, and branded installations at Tropical Park
• A Vice City Radio Lab at the city's main library, providing access to recording, editing, and digital media equipment to support "music production, podcasting, oral histories, neighborhood storytelling, sound engineering, video-game development, and other creative programming, while reflecting the central role that music and radio play in the GTA experience

The pitch also includes ideas for Rockstar funding permanent upgrades to county infrastructure:

That all sounds pretty cool to me, and some of it is quite civically wholesome, too. Yes, it's all part of the monstrous marketing machine for the biggest videogame of all time, but it also seems like the county is coming at it as a way to celebrate the real people and civic culture that led Rockstar to embrace Miami in the first place, and that counts for something.

The big stumbling block, of course, is that the GTA games are the polar opposite of civic-minded and wholesome, and that's led Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz to speak out against the idea.

"Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity," Cordero-Stutz told the Miami Herald. "Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office work every single day to prevent."

Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez also spoke out against the idea: "We should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence."

The sheriff isn't wrong. GTA games have always been notoriously violent: Former attorney Jack Thompson, at one time the videogame industry's foremost nemesis, spent years campaigning hard against the games and publisher Take-Two Interactive before he was finally disbarred for his relentless antics and misconduct.

But the game industry, and its audience, have matured in the 25 years (that's right, look it up) since Grand Theft Auto 3 changed everything: GTA is still steeped in criminal violence, but the shock factor—and the hand-wringing over it—are long gone. These days it's completely mainstream, as evidenced by the performance of the GTA 6 reveal showcase on Netflix, which was the platform's biggest show of the week.

Would Miami-Dade have to tone down some of the seedier elements of GTA 6 for its "family appropriate" events? Sure. But I also have no doubt that a significant number of sheriff's deputies and police in the county grew up playing GTA themselves, and I bet an awful lot of them will be calling in sick when GTA 6 drops.

Okay, two things. First: Los Santos Customs will be taking a hiatus next week, as I spend nine days in a row sleeping and attempting to develop the antibodies to counter whatever exotic German illness it is I acquired at Gamescom 2026.

Second: it's snowing in Los Santos, just like the real-life LA.

I have installed WinterV Beta, with the aim of making Grand Theft Auto 5's weather a little more interesting than it usually is. The pitch is simple: what if there was snow? Well, reader, having played a little GTA 5 with WinterV Beta, I can assure you that there very much is snow. Plus, all the world's lighting takes on a kind of a sickly, ochre hue, which is also just like LA.

From the sky: flurries of flakes. On the roads: cars covered in a sheen of powder, tyre-chains inexplicably equipped (the snow does not, in my version of GTA 5 where a significant chunk of the exterior map has absconded to the phantom zone, settle). In the air: a crisp winter chill. Santa Claus is coming to town; fire a truck at him.

I can't tell you if the presence of snow on the city roads impacts car handling because, as we have established, cars in my GTA 5 no longer have handling. Nevertheless, it does change the vibe quite a lot. As someone who's spent a lot of the last month looking at GTA 5—a change is as good as a rest.

But also, it is time for a rest. I will see you the week after next, whereupon we'll probably finally convert this game into GTA 6. I can feel it.

The problem with Grand Theft Auto 5, really, is that its world lacks verisimilitude. Unlike GTA 6, which will be more real than real, a psychosis-inducing perfect recreation of reality that we will be both unable and unwilling to tear ourselves from, Los Santos in GTA 5 is just sort of… stagey. It's a big Hollywood set (of Hollywood), all outside and no inside.

I have now added the inside. I installed Open World Interiors, whose aim is to furnish various GTA 5 businesses with actual, inhabitable inside zones. Restaurants, hospitals, gyms—all these and more, so the pitch goes, unfurl beyond you as new territory to explore and conquer.

That's the pitch. In reality, stepping outside of Franklin's Beverly Hills house quickly revealed that a significant chunk of Los Santos had been inexplicably deleted. I do not know where it has gone or why it has gone there. Maybe, one day, it will return.

Some things do work, though! Navigate through the hit squads and flying cars until you find a fast-food joint, and you can now dip inside, at which point you will be confronted by a taster's plate of Los Santos freaks sat in infrangible silence while one of the game's radio stations plays, inscrutably, from somewhere.

So, all well and good—Los Santos has an inside now. Only one thing is broken (apart from the large chunks of the outside that are broken): attempting to enter a gym will send you plummeting into the fathomless void at the secret heart of the world. You will scream. The radio will continue playing. "This is the rhythm of the night," declares Corona as Franklin tumbles, screeching into the void. After falling for some time, he reappears in front of the gym's doors. Los Santos is a mysterious place.

We saw many things during Grand Theft Auto 6's weird Netflix reveal, and it's official: GTA is simmy now. The gendarmes will meticulously document your physical appearance, and escaping them will necessitate changing it up. Jason and Lucia will also, the prophets tell us, feel the effects of sleeplessness and bad diet, just like mortals.

One thing we haven't seen from official sources: cars needing petrol. That particularly sim-ish feature has only been part of contraband GTA 6 leaks. Nevertheless, I have completely internalised this mechanic into my vision of the game. If you can't trust anonymous online weirdos trying to flog you some crypto thing, who can you trust?

So, naturally, I had to incorporate a working gas mechanic into my ongoing quest to turn GTA 5 into GTA 6 or kill it by trying. I installed Fumes – Animated Persistent Fuel, whose functions are thus: "Every vanilla and online vehicle carries a real fuel tank. It empties as you drive and it is still empty when you come back to that car tomorrow.

"Refuelling is not a menu," it says, casting subtle shade on all those non-hardcore car-gassing mechanics out there. "Get out, walk to the pump, take the nozzle off it—it goes in your hand and the hose comes with you on a real physics rope." Yes. All of these things are refuelling, to me.

It works like this: on your minimap, while driving, a new meter now tracks how much petrol your car's got left in it. Run out, and your journey's at an end. You know, like how cars work.

This was difficult to test. As we've already well-established, my current installation of GTA 5 is a nightmare merry-go-round of frictionless cars and increasingly contradictory mods. To actually acquire a car, I first had to figure out how to make one stop, and how to make sure it did not get immediately detonated by the hordes of hitmen and ambient gang violence that have become the burden of my Los Santos life. It's harder than it sounds: even throwing myself beneath a car's wheels didn't really help. Yes, the driver would get out to ask if I was okay (I was not), but the car would keep going.

I eventually commandeered one, however, by teleporting (Franklin can teleport now). The mod worked! Also, numerous other mods I already had installed kept throwing errors, which is probably fine. But amid the error messages and chaos, I managed to make it to a petrol station, in order to test the mod's robust in-person refuelling mechanics.

Never mind.

Netflix's exclusivity deal for the Grand Theft Auto 6 reveal in August struck me as a little silly. Sure, it'd probably make "a little pocket change," as PC Gamer's Harvey Randall put it at the time, but a video that would remain exclusive for only six hours? Not days? How much of an impact could that really have?

Well, uh, quite a lot, as it turns out. We already knew that Netflix was probably pretty happy with how it all worked out, but a Variety report nails it down more specifically and impressively, saying Netflix pulled in 31.1 million views with the GTA 6 reveal between its August 27 debut and August 30, which is when the window for its weekly top 10 ranking closes.

That's not just a huge number, it makes the reveal showcase Netflix's most-watched title of the week, topping the English-language film list, where it was classified, in 87 out of 93 countries.

It's not a direct comparison because of the differences in how they count "views," but that Netflix number—again, over just four days—is almost double the 17 million views YouTube has put up in total since the showcase went live on that platform.

Here it is, if you haven't seen it—although given those viewership numbers, my guess is that if you wanted to see it, you likely already have.

The GTA 6 reveal was a unique phenomenon, not the sort of thing that's easily duplicated year over year, but it was obviously a big win for Netflix, which got to be the tip of a very pointy spear for a short but lucrative stretch of time. Take-Two hasn't said what it got out of the deal, although I imagine money would figure prominently.

But the scale of its success makes me wonder if maybe we'll see more of this in the future: GTA is a rare bird but I could see Microsoft setting something up for future Call of Duty reveals, possibly, or Sony opting for a similar exclusivity window for particularly important State of Play showcases. Gaming is mainstream now—maybe this is what that ultimately looks like.

I imagine it like one of the cutscenes that play in Civilization when you construct a wonder of the world. A scant few days ago, humanity put its differences aside. The guns fell silent. Nary a harsh word was said. For a shining moment, we were one—ensconced in the warm glow of our television sets and monitors as we took in our first legitimate glimpse of Grand Theft Auto 6.

I guess people without Netflix subscriptions continued shooting each other.

Anyway, amid the hullabaloo we got our first insight into how GTA 6's wanted system will work. Seems simmy. Cops will now remember things like your physical description and the clothes you're wearing as they work to bring you to justice, and it all, in general, seems a bit deeper and more involved than in GTAs of yore.

So I brought it to the GTAs of yore: VI Wanted System does what it says on the tin—it brings a facsimile of GTA 6's cop-suspicion mechanics to GTA 5. Clothes, hair, and what-have-you all factor into the police's hunt. Losing the heat doesn't mean you're free anymore: you'll have to anonymise yourself to evade pursuit entirely.

I immediately put it to the test by opening fire on all and sundry in downtown Los Santos. Very quickly, the cops had my physical description and knew the expensive clothes I was wearing. This did not, necessarily, help them find me, as they were too busy dealing with their frictionless vehicles, ongoing gang warfare, and ambient hit squads that were also out to kill me. Nevertheless, they theoretically had a better chance of pinning me down than before.

My attempts to lose the heat by dipping into a clothing store were foiled by the store's 'no selling to people flanked by angry, armed cops' rule, so I was forced to dash home through the cacophonous and exploding streets of Los Santos in order to find a new shirt. This helped, somewhat, but the rest of me remained an issue.

San Andreas' barbers are less strict about their clientele, it seems, because I was able to get a haircut just fine, the probably offensively camp stylist remarking that my outfit was "Goooooorgeous" in what felt like a divine stamp of approval on my effort to avoid being punished for murder.

I tested the system to breaking point by standing in front of the police station. They did not recognise me. They did recognise that I had a shotgun equipped and which I had forgotten how to holster using a keyboard. The cops began to shoot me to death. I considered my mission successful.

It is high time I paid for my crimes. There are things I've done that can't be forgiven, mostly relating to that time I drove a Chinese anti-air missile truck into Beverly Hills, and someone should make me face consequences for that.

Alas, in GTA 5, no one will unless I make them. So I made them. I have installed Ambient Hit Squads, a mod inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2 that will dispatch armed men to eliminate you every so often as you're out exploring the game's world.

This functions more or less as it should in my nightmare-frankenstein version of GTA, already lumbering under so many mods. Once in a while, my map will bloom with red dots as armed assassins arrive to kill me, and the clatter of gunfire will join the now-constant chorus of cars ramming each other, pedestrians, geometry, me, and themselves.

But of course, these hitmen have to navigate this reality too. For the guys who are just there—just men on the ground running at me, that's not so much of a problem. For the ones in helicopters, it is an irresolvable problem.

They are trapped in a new circle of hell, constantly trying to orient their choppers toward me while other mods wrestle to send them unstoppably forwards. This is, at least, very funny, and has the effect of making the helicopters look like they are piloted by drunk drivers as they bob up and down through the sky.

And as for the guys on the ground? Well, I just shoot my car gun at them.

Original story:

The Grand Theft Auto 6 leak party is presumably over: The Netflix showcase has wrapped, and Cyberleek has made off with more than $200,000 in a perfectly predictable yet somehow still very lucrative rug pull. I imagine the leaker is now looking for a good hole to hide in, and for their sake it better be a deep one because it sounds like Take-Two's hunt is zeroing in on something.

Take-Two Interactive filed subpoena requests with Discord and Microsoft shortly after the GTA 6 leaks began to flow, seeking "business records and investigative records associated with Microsoft’s internal investigation of the 'cyberleek' persona sufficient to identify the user(s)," as well as detailed information on potentially thousands of users who interacted with certain Discord servers. Subsequent subpoenas seeking similar information were filed with X and YouTube.

Those requests were very broad, but a newer filing made on August 28 (via TorrentFreak) is much narrower: "Take-Two has identified one additional Discord user and obtained additional identifying information for a previously identified Discord user, as well as additional information concerning the community servers identified in its prior subpoena for which it now seeks more targeted information. These additional accounts and server are believed to be involved in the same infringing activity as that described in Take-Two's first request."

A footnote adds that "Take-Two's investigation of the infringement at issue is rapidly evolving and ongoing," and says the information sought by this subpoena is different from what was covered in the first, "and provides additional clarifying information regarding one of the user IDs specified in the first subpoena."

Also interesting is that while previous subpoena filings were public, the details in this one are sealed. A motion requesting the seal remain intact argues that the filing in question is "not subject to the presumption of public access," and says that even if it was, Take-Two's "countervailing interests" would take precedence because the document "reveals highly sensitive, confidential information about an ongoing investigation into copyright infringement and the misappropriation of Take-Two’s confidential information."

"Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two's ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two's investigation and information Take-Two has gathered about the infringement, creating a substantial risk that the infringers will delete, destroy, or otherwise conceal evidence of their infringing activities, and/or take further steps to evade identification."

At this point, a ruling on the request to keep the document sealed hasn't been made, and the subpoena itself hasn't been issued.

Also on August 28, Take-Two withdrew its request for a DMCA subpoena filing with Google, repeating that the situation "has been (and is) evolving rapidly as new information becomes available."

Florida is a vast and wonderful menagerie. It is home to over a billion species (I didn't research that claim and nor should you), ranging from alligators to snakes to… alligators. Grand Theft Auto 6, I must assume, will be basically like a trip to the zoo with gun crime.

GTA 5, though? It does its best, but the animal quotient is low. In fairness, Los Santos, like its real-life counterpart, was not built to sustain life. But like so many things, this can be rectified through mods.

I have installed DogDog (it's about dogs), which is both a fan-made modification of the videogame Grand Theft Auto 5, and the source of history's most perfect English sentence: "You can summon your favorite dogs in any quantity you desire."

But it undersells itself. DogDog allows you to summon dogs(dogs), yes, but not just them. In addition to a small legion of loyal canines, you can also manifest cats, cows, lions, and—the following is based on the verified personal experience of this reporter—at minimum one chimpanzee.

Combo this dizzy-making new power with one of our previously installed mods, 2gether, and you can patrol the roadways of Los Santos with the entire cast of Homeward Bound at your back while a partying great ape sits on your back like you are a majestic and powerful steed. Which you are. Believe in yourself.

One issue with this—and sorry to be a bummer—is that, yes, there are still gang wars happening and flying cars loose from the surly bonds of Earth. So sometimes, ah, well, look: sometimes bad things happen to the animals. You have to try to walk them out in nature. It's where they belong, I suppose.

Watching videogame studios try and bob and weave around Grand Theft Auto 6's launch—especially when it was up in the air when exactly it'd come out—is a little like watching a flock of Marios (is that the correct plural noun? A mama mia of Marios?) all trying to dodge the same whomp.

As was the case with the new Fable game, which got punted over into 2027 to avoid debuting among an absolutely rammed lineup. And while Xbox was playing coy about which game it was trying to avoid back then, we've now got some soft, tongue-in-cheek confirmation that it probably was Grand Theft Auto 6, yeah.

Speaking to IGN at Gamescom 2026, Fable's director Ralph Fulton says: "I think the rationale behind moving us out of October, the date that we were in previously, is pretty apparent to everybody. I feel great about that. I mean, I was really looking forward to shipping this game this year. I didn't want to have to do another January 1 speech to the team about ‘this is the year we ship Fable,’ which I'm now going to have to do.

"But the rationale for it is absolutely sound. I'm glad that we're avoiding that chaotic window.” For what it's worth, the window itself includes a ton of non-GTA stuff. This summer's been a touch dry on big new releases, but in the wider videogame industry you've got Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Blood of Dawnwalker, two Star Wars games, Marvel's Wolverine, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and Phantom Blade Zero all before the year's even out.

But even Fulton cops that, yeah, the big one's the main reason: "We don't run scared of other big games. We're a big game ourselves. We hold ourselves to high standards. I'm happy to go toe-to-toe with a bunch of other games. There's just one that I'm happy to avoid entirely." Fair enough.

One of the more confusing elements of the Grand Theft Auto 6 extended look is the fact that it debuted on Netflix, of all sites. Why? While it's harder to pin down the reasons Take-Two went for it, I can at least suss out that Netflix is probably feeling very happy with its end of the bargain.

That's per GamesBeat, which pulled the numbers from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. According to them, the average user count on mobile increased by 50% when compared to the past 12 Thursdays—meanwhile, the average web user count went up a stonking 125%.

This was enough of a bump to cause issues for some viewers, though Netflix otherwise held up reasonably well. That's great news for the streaming platform, which has presumably been struggling to keep up with that ever-enshittifying perpetual growth mindset—introducing ads over the past few years, ramping up prices, and toying with generative AI to make those aforementioned ads even more annoying. We can, sadly, expect more of this in the future.

As for what Take-Two got out of it, it's hard to say, given CEO Strauss Zelnick has been tight-lipped on the particulars. It could be Netflix paid a lump sum to the publisher as part of the temporary exclusivity deal, though the kind of payout they'd have to offer Take-Two to get Zelnick interested would be pretty major, given Take-Two's worth an eye-watering $43.5 billion at the time of writing.

Then again, the preview was only Netflix-exclusive for six whole hours, meaning you'd likely only shell out for a new subscription if you were ravenous for more news—or just didn't want to spend an evening dodging spoilers before you sat down and watched the thing yourself. It is, after all, already on YouTube.

Which means that Take-Two had very little to lose by saying "yes" other than consumer goodwill. And given the self-styled "Robin Hood" of gaming (these airquotes are so heavy), Cyberleek, has seemingly grabbed the bag and ran? I'm not sure the front against GTA 6 is particularly unified. Chances are that folks are going to buy this game regardless of what Take-Two does.

Men. What is wrong with them and how can they be fixed?

Philosophers and scientists have asked this for generations, but the problem has only become understandable—and tractable—with the advent of modern technology. They are lonely. Contrary to the popular aphorism, all men are islands, struggling to exist in tempest-tossed seas. I have tried to solve this before, at least for Franklin, Trevor, and Michael, by introducing Pokémon to Los Santos. This did not work, and only resulted in me beating Charmander to death in the street.

The gentlemen of GTA require human companionship, not magical pets. They must find in others what is missing in themselves. They must use the 2gether mod for GTA 5, which allows you to approach random NPCs and adorn yourself with them like they are some kind of boa or backpack. This is what friendship is all about.

The good news is: the people of Los Santos are remarkably pliable. No one objects to hopping on your back, or assuming the lotus position in your cupped hands, and they are utterly unfazed by the chaos unleashed by all the mods I have previously installed: flying cars, ongoing gang warfare, and so on.

To test their quietude, I asked a hiker to nestle himself in my hands as I attempted to sprint through an intersection. He was utterly placid as we were struck by three cars in a row, his murmured 'om mani padmi hum'* unbroken as an expensive German car used our combined mass as a ramp by which it could enter heaven.

It was a true friendship, but it had to end eventually. Satisfied by his invincible tranquillity, I returned him to the nature spot in which I found him. Setting him down, he wandered off into a bush. In the distance, a Winnebago caught the sun as it drifted into the sky.

*He didn't actually say this, but I like to imagine he did.

It's kind of strange that the state monopoly on violence is the only gang you can start an even slightly lasting beef with in Grand Theft Auto 5. Real-life gangs aren't known for their live-and-let-live attitude, and yet if you stroll around town shooting Ballas and Cartel members, they will adopt a stance of Christ-like forgiveness the second you're out of eyesight. The cops at least will spend a little time hunting you before they give up.

This is what I aimed to fix when I installed Gang Notoriety into my tottering Jenga tower of GTA 5 mods. The pitch is simple: gangs will get sustainably angry with you now, accruing wanted stars much like the cops do until you manage to lose the heat.

To test this new facet of GTA 5's rich simulation, I teleported (I can teleport now) to Grove Street and began shooting.

It sort of worked? The minimap blossomed with a thousand red and orange rings—each denoting a gang member who was very cross with me and ready to do something about it. I got a wanted star, too. Whether that was the gang's wanted star or just regular cops being upset about me shooting people in the street? Hard to say.

But things quickly got weird. Before too long, the assembled Ballas of Grove Street started to lose interest in me and started to gain interest in… each other? They ducked behind cover and started attacking each other, and at some point one loosed a rottweiler, which just seemed rather confused by the entire situation. Meanwhile, the frictionless vehicles of Los Santos continued to wheel all about us, including in the sky.

Though my minimap was still red, everyone had lost interest in me. The Ballas seemed to have become notorious among the Ballas. They all eventually took care of themselves, save the sole survivor, who had quite the wanted level himself, thanks to a previous mod.

I will get back to you when I figure out the moral of this story.

The news cycle this past week has been dominated with Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks, and for good reason, Rockstar studios has sprung a big one, with the self-ordained "Cyberleek" drumming up attention with waves of public manifestos, statements, and a little crypto farming on the side.

In preparation for its somewhat-confusing Netflix-exclusive gameplay reveal tomorrow, Rockstar's finally acknowledged the leaks. Both confirming that they're real beyond a shadow of a doubt (not that there was much doubt to begin with), and trying to salvage some hype.

"We know that many of you have been waiting to hear from us regarding the events of the past week," reads a post to Rockstar's Instagram. "It would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay leak in this way has been heartbreaking for our team, and this is obviously not how we intended for you to see the game after all this time.

"We are very sorry that everything has taken as long as it has—from getting the game finished (nearly there!) to sharing more details and official gameplay, and providing the community with everything you want to know."

I'm not sure Rockstar needs to apologise for a videogame taking a long time to make, especially when 13 years have already passed since the last, but I'm a little old-fashioned in that I don't think players are owed much of anything beyond fair consumer practices and, like, maybe getting to actually own the things they buy. It is, however, intriguing that the studio's apologising for that given the whole Netflix thing which, speaking cynically, is essentially a six-hour early access gated behind a streaming service subscription.

I do feel bad for the developers, though—especially given that even those who were unceremoniously fired (in such a dramatic fashion that the then-UK Prime Minister commented on it) still want people to see the fruits of their labour. Take-Two's bottom line has likely barely been dented by the leaks, but if I were a person working on a videogame for years, I'd be pretty exhausted by someone making a circus out of it.

"We are very excited for everyone to see the extended look tomorrow. It has taken longer than we wanted to get it ready, but as with everything we do, we know we need to exceed your expectations, and we are determined to deliver at the level you expect and deserve. While it is unfortunate that the intended game experience may now be impacted by some spoilers, we hope that everyone will wait a bit longer to experience the game for themselves on November 19."

Rockstar ends the letter with a show of thanks: "We want to thank everyone in the community who has reached out with messages of support this past week—your words have meant more to this team than you can imagine. Ultimately, we are making this game for you, and without you, we would not have the privilege of making games."

If you remember, uh, yesterday, then you'll remember how I have recently modded GTA 5 to essentially deactivate friction on all NPC cars. Also, all NPC cars are perpetually, unstoppably in motion. Long story short: they keep accidentally flying and/or exploding.

So I thought what I could do today would be to try to become a professional driver in that world.

I have installed The Getaway (Driver Missions), a mod which lets you dial a new number in your phone in order to undertake road quests. In practice, that means driving to a place, picking a guy up, then driving that guy to another place. At some point in this process you lose the cops.

All well and good, but not overly dramatic. What makes it a lot more hair-raising is every other driver on Los Santos' roads no longer obeys the laws of physics. Even driverless cars are irrepressibly compelled forwards, making it damn-near impossible to actually acquire a car to undertake these missions.

Fortunately, I am a lateral thinker. I simply used my car gun to summon a car directly into a wall. As the unstoppable force met the immoveable object, I was able to get in and go about my business. Sort of. When every car in the game is incapable of stopping but perfectly capable of murder, every single intersection in Los Santos becomes a dance with death.

Even picking up my fare was dicey—as he attempted to get into my car (which was, for whatever reason, an inexplicably snow-covered North Yankton police truck), a taxi cab floated nearby like a leaf on the wind, pancaking a separate pedestrian mere inches from my passenger.

I guess what I'm saying is: walkable urban spaces now.

Take-Two's legal teams seem to be scouring the digital landscape for the identity of one Cyberleek—a leaker that's been making cryptocurrency bank from a copy of Grand Theft Auto 6, releasing footage of a development build to the internet and sticking their tongue out at Strauss Zelnick.

It's been a chaotic mess, and one Take-Two is keen to rectify. The publisher has requested subpoenas from both Microsoft and Discord, the scope of which has some players concerned about the privacy of their accounts.

Specifically in this document, obtained by The Verge, wherein Take-Two is requesting "all identifying information associated with all user accounts that are/were members communicating with the Discord server(s) listed below during the time period from June 1, 2026 to present."

The information includes "the account ID, registration email, registration and last-login IP addresses, phone number, linked connections (Google/Xbox/etc.), any associated device identifiers (MachineGuid/MSA), and content related to Grand Theft Auto ('GTA'), Rockstar or Cyberleek from their OneDrive account."

While I'm not exactly shocked that Take-Two is scouring the internet for the leaker, this does seem like a grim reminder that absolutely nothing you do on the world wide web is anonymous—and if the subpoena goes through, Take-Two could be handed the personal information of thousands.

At the time of writing, the Discord server ! Odyssey has around 5,600 members, while DarkViperAU, a content creator, has over 100,000 members. None of which I would blame for being uncomfortable about Take-Two getting their hands on their personal information, regardless of whether they're in the wrong or not.

Discord's responded to try and assuage those fears for the time being, with marketing director Ryan K. Rigney writing on X: "I can share an update on this: Discord has not yet been served with a subpoena from Take Two. When we do, we'll evaluate the validity and scope before responding."

The subpoena has been approved, just not yet served, as of August 21.

Sometimes happiness isn't a new thing, you know? Sometimes it's about wringing novelty out of what you've already got, finding a new perspective on old things and enjoying them to their fullest.

It is in this spirit that I have not installed a new mod in GTA 5 this week, but used an old one to set a constant and unstoppable momentum on every NPC car in the game. Also, I turned friction off. Specifically, I used the Enhanced Native Trainer that I installed in order to spawn the anti-air truck from the very first mod I put into GTA 5. Turns out there's a whole bunch of stuff in here!

It's really quite wonderful. Los Santos has gone from a humdrum facsimile of Los Angeles to an unforeseeable carnival of movement. Vehicles, newly loosed from their obligations to the ground, now waft lazily through the air. Standing on the balcony of Franklin's home, you can watch them gyrate on the skyline like lightning bugs.

Sometimes you try to cross the road and get vaporised by a transit van travelling at a fraction of the speed of the light. That does also happen sometimes.

It's great fun, though. But I have a confession: originally, I set every car to travel at maximum speed, a setting which was great laughs but made the game functionally unplayable. I have since set them to around 15. I don't know 15 of what, but the setting is 15. The maximum setting was 100, so it's quite a bit lower. It just means all the same chaos that was happening at max speed still happens, just in a way that you stand a hope in hell of navigating.

Welcome to Los Santos, the most airborne little city on Earth.

You might think that Grand Theft Auto 6 leaker Cyberleek, who is currently the target of what I'm sure is a five-alarm manhunt now being conducted by Take-Two and Rockstar, might want to step back into the shadows a bit—keep their head down and hope it all blows over, and all that. But no. In fact, they seem to be taking the opposite approach to their newfound notoriety, because they are now selling ads.

A new "contact" tab on the Cyberleek website says the leaker is "raising funds through community support and strategic partnerships." But not through a typical ransom demand, as is sometimes seen in these sorts of things: "Instead, Cyberleek offers premium advertising space and exclusive content opportunities."

From the website: "Sending a Monero payment enables secure contact via Session messenger for deal negotiations. Options include purchasing ad placements (such as video watermarks) or requesting custom-made gameplay footage tailored to specific brands (including sexual content). All pricing, terms, and deliverables are discussed privately over Session."

Credit to Cyberleek for having a pair, I guess, but this seems like a bad idea (for them) from at least a few angles. First, who's going to take them up on the offer? Slapping your product name on the next Grand Theft Auto 6 video leak is the equivalent of painting a shiny red target on your forehead: I am not a lawyer but there is zero doubt in my mind that people who are—and especially those who are the expensive sort of lawyer that Take-Two has on speed dial, in great numbers—could find a multitude of ways to turn that into some sort of accessory culpability. I can't imagine a faster or more effective way to turn your brand untouchably toxic than by connecting it to this gong show.

The price of the program is also astonishing. It costs a "donation" of 400 Monero XMR, which currently converts to, roughly, $164,730. That's right, one hundred sixty-four thousand, seven-hundred thirty dollars. And for that, you get not an ad, but a message from Cyberleek, which is presumably when the ad buy negotiation actually begins.

That really makes the whole thing feel like a lark, but as the saying goes, it's a crazy ol' world. If even one person decides they want to give this a shot, that's a pretty sweet payday.

On top of all that ridiculousness, this is also just a tremendously risky move for Cyberleek. Opening the door to external contact is begging for trouble. Remember when Valve tried to nail the hacker who made off with a pre-release copy by offering him a job? Selling ads is an invitation to exactly that sort of action on the part of Take-Two and/or any number of US law enforcement agencies, and while I'm sure Cyberleek thinks they're too smart to fall for that sort of thing, that's exactly what everyone thinks before they fall for it.

Not that I'm concerned about Cyberleek's welfare here. If anything, I'm fascinated by the sheer brashness of a guy who's going out of his way to rub his stuff in the face of one of the most powerful game publishers in the world, on the eve of its greatest triumph. I just feel compelled to say it as a matter of principle: This is a bad idea. But hey, if Cyberleek ends up getting busted because of it? I'm not gonna lie, it'll be pretty funny, too.

As the Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks continue to flow, Take-Two Interactive has begun the hunt for the people behind them. A Kotaku report says the GTA publisher has filed subpoenas with Microsoft and Discord, requesting user data and records of accounts that were involved in sharing the leaks.

Take-Two "has submitted a sworn declaration confirming that the purpose for which the DMCA subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers," the filing states.

Both Microsoft and Discord have until September 4 to provide data including "business records and investigative records associated with Microsoft’s internal investigation of the ‘cyberleek’ persona sufficient to identify the user(s)," and on the Discord side, "all identifying information associated with all user accounts that are/were members communicating with the Discord server(s)" connected to the leaks.

Well, it was bound to happen. It's all fun and games until the lawyers show up, as the saying goes, and there was never any question that Take-Two was going to unleash its full range of resources on tracking down the leakers and inflicting whatever punishments our shareholder value-driven society will allow.

Leaking short bits of video from a game we all know is happening might seem like small potatoes compared to all the actual crimes that are happening around us every day, but have no doubt, this is serious. To paraphrase a well-known line from a popular show, you never mess with the money: Nintendo destroyed a man's life because he sold ROMs for the Switch, and it's reasonable to assume Take-Two will be at least that aggressive in protecting GTA 6. It does have a history of that sort of thing, after all.

I think the great likelihood is that Cyberleek's days of anonymity are numbered. PC Gamer editor Tyler Wilde dug up some clues about the leaker's identity shortly after the leaks began, and that's entirely without the weight of an expensive legal team and the US justice system behind him. Given the resources Take-Two can bring to bear, and the seeming brashness of the leaker, I wouldn't be surprised if this one is wrapped up relatively quickly.

For now, though, Cyberleek is still doing their thing. The latest GTA 6 leak landed earlier today, dispelling speculation that the leaker had already been caught and giving us two minutes of a supercar driving through the streets of Vice City. It's extremely impressive visually, but in terms of gameplay, well, it's definitely GTA.

Take-Two's market cap also took a $2.8 billion hit in the wake of the leaks, which sounds like a lot but really isn't: The company's total market cap currently sits around $45 billion, and the share price has bounced back to roughly where it was when all this started.

Another day has dawned, and the mutual embarrassment of the games industry and gameplaying public continues: The enigmatic Cyberleek has uploaded yet another short video of leaked GTA 6 gameplay, marking the fourth consecutive day of GTA 6 leak releases. And based on their latest threat, the cryptopeddling leaker intends to keep that streak going.

As for what the latest gameplay leak reveals: Well, it looks like Grand Theft Auto. Titled "hypercar.mp4," the video—which we won't be sharing, but can be sought out without much effort—consists of GTA 6 protagonist Jason jacking a high performance sports car and driving at high speeds along Vice City's surrounding highways for roughly two minutes.

The footage is fairly thin on new mechanical revelations: While carjacking, it seems like Jason has the ability to mash a button to more quickly and forcefully pull the driver from the vehicle in exchange for stamina—and, presumably, a higher chance of the crime being noticed. We also see further evidence of the visual ID mechanics present in earlier leaks, as icons appeared to indicate both the stolen vehicle and Jason's appearance were tied to his wanted level once the crime was reported.

Additionally, after escaping the wanted level he accrued with the car theft, we see a reappearance of a blue police awareness indicator as Jason passes a patrol car while speeding through traffic on the opposite side of the highway, reinforcing the sense that the player will more easily draw police attention based on how conspicuous their actions are.

Shortly afterwards, Jason drives through an area that's outlined with a red border on the minimap, immediately gaining a two-star wanted level. It's not clear why, and the wanted level drops as soon as he drives back out of it. We can only speculate, but it's possible the highway passed over some sort of high security area.

Otherwise, the footage isn't particularly remarkable. The driving physics seem like they'd be familiar to anyone who's spent time driving in GTA 5, though it's still not clear how recent of a game build these leaks are being captured from. The most striking thing on display is its demonstration of GTA 6's lighting tech: Throughout the video, the light cast by the hypercar's headlights reflects believably off puddles, roadsigns, and reflective markers, providing impressive contrast and visual texture as the landscape blurs by.

And, as we've come to expect, the video is also a vehicle for Cyberleek's cryptocurrency push, urging viewers to "show support" by buying their bespoke gamer currency. It remains unclear how, exactly, we're meant to believe that buying cryptocurrency empowers the fight for gamers' rights, but you can put whatever text on the internet you want, I suppose.

What is clear is that Cyberleek doesn't intend to stop: The trademark globs of roaming watermark text, URLs, and QR code that have graced each of these leaked videos now features the threat "HIGHER MARKETCAP = MORE LEEKS." While that's in line with the thin anti-corporate veneer that's accompanied Cyberleek's previous works, it's worth noting that Take-Two has actually lost roughly $2.8 billion in market cap this week as its share price has fallen over the last few days. Whatever gets more people looking at your coolguy onion mascot, I guess.

One of the biggest stories this week has been of the enigmatic, self-described consumer hero Cyberleek, who's also using this whole debacle as a way to advertise and pay for their cryptocurrency. Which is probably fine and normal and not at all a concerning spectre lingering around one of the biggest games of the year.

Anyway, you'd think Take-Two and Strauss Zelnick might be feeling hot under the collar about all of this, and you'd be partially right. As spotted by Insider Gaming, Take-Two's market price (the price of one share) was around $248 before the leaks. Fast-forward a couple of days, and that same market price dropped to a low of $233.

This hit Take-Two's market cap (share price, times the amount of shares) to the tune of billions—around $2.83 billion in two days. An astronomical amount of money by any stretch of the imagination, a huge devaluation that's… actually not even much of a sweat, really.

See, Take-Two's overall market cap was still over $43 billion and, by virtue of how stock markets tend to shift and fluctuate, not even that much of a rare occurrence. On August 6, the market price dropped to a measly $229, for instance, before spiking back up to $242 the next day.

And while the overall market price between August 18 and 20 does trend downwards, it's already rising back up. At the time of writing, said market price has recovered to $241, with the market cap rising from that $43 billion total to almost $44.9 billion—just $1 billion within its previous number.

Look, while I don't think anyone at Take-Two's exactly happy to be losing a couple billion dollars in market cap to some guy peddling cryptocurrency with a full copy of their next big thing, what feels more noteworthy is the fact that a leak of this scale has mostly just pinged off the videogame giant's armour.

It's a humbling reminder of the sheer amount of money that gets poured into videogames at this scale—humbling or perhaps distressing, given the size of the industry tracks precious little to its security.