Summary
- GTA Forums user FrankieLiberty has leaked several design documents to the community as a “Christmas gift”.
- These detail the development of a cancelled 2001 GTA Online game, as well as Vice City Stories and San Andreas.
- Oddly enough, there was another huge GTA leak last Christmas, which even included the GTA 5 source code.
For the second year in a row, there has been a huge Grand Theft Auto leak on Christmas.
As reported by GTA Focal, a forums user named FrankieLiberty posted Rockstar Games documents dating back to 2001 in protest of someone known only as “John Doe”, who they accuse of profiting from stolen assets and even game builds.
Why They Leaked The GTA Design Documents
“Select ex-developers have made a killing off his sales while being entirely protected with him acting as a fence,” FrankieLiberty writes. “John Doe has easily made tens of thousands of dollars, often times reselling the same asset priced at e.g. 2k dollars to five different parties.
He still sits on beta builds, production asset discs and a plethora of documents, ranging from design to some signed by company heads.
“That cannot stand AND shouldn’t stand any longer – John Doe has done enough damage, to his buyers, to Rockstar, and to our whole community, by being a greed-driven, deeply irresponsible bad faith actor who thinks of themselves as the Robin Hood of stolen property, giving back to select few from our community”.
The leaked design documents detail the cancelled GTA 3 Online game that was in development between 1999 and 2001 by Barking Dog Studios, with plans to feature character customisation, factions, a skill system, Cops and Crooks, and even the ability to own properties (as broken down by @videotechuk_ on Twitter). Interestingly, the logo looks near-identical to the modern GTA 5 Online one.
The files also detail the development of Vice City Stories and San Andreas. There are even references to Yakuza.
It’s a huge insight into the development of these classic, still-influential games that defined the medium, released as a “Christmas gift” to the community. But what’s especially bizarre about this case is that last year, also on December 25, an early version of GTA 5’s source code was leaked online.
It revealed cancelled games like Bully 2 and GTA Tokyo, as well as a scrapped Liberty City DLC. Reportedly, the information was sold for just $2,000 to a modding group, only to allegedly be leaked by TMP (TickleMePickles) “out of spite”. Sounds eerily similar, eh?
