After a year with no new footage, a Reddit thread offered a photograph of a monitor inside a Rockstar office running Grand Theft Auto VI. The metadata is what made it interesting: it pointed straight at Rockstar San Diego's front door.

What actually leaked

• A phone photo of a monitor showing Lucia in an unidentified part of Leonida, among trees, Quonset huts, containers, a silage bunker and construction plant
• A PlayStation 5 development kit with a controller attached, sitting beside the monitor
• Two videos shot in the same office, one showing an Xbox Scorpio development kit labelled "SAND" and an IP address inside Rockstar San Diego's internal range

Standing: Credible

The photo's EXIF data records 22 June 2021 at 6:59 PM on an iPhone 12 Pro at 2220 Faraday Avenue, Carlsbad, California — the address of Rockstar San Diego. The pillars, strip windows and trees in frame match that building. The internal IP range on the devkit matches ranges exposed in the December 2023 GTA V source code leak. Rockstar has never commented.

What happened next

The Drive folder and the thread were both deleted within hours. Asked in the comments whether the source could lose their job, the poster replied that the person was long gone from Rockstar and from the industry.

Systems traced to this leak

• The state of LeonidaWorld · Verified

Sources