Image: Coffee Stain North
Those GTA 6 leaks have resurfaced in the weirdest way possible.
Developer Coffee Stain North has been issued a takedown notice by Rockstar Games over a Goat Simulator 3 ad. The ad went live earlier this week, featuring footage from the widely-reported GTA leak from back in September. Clearly, Rockstar hadn’t signed off on the use of that stolen footage.
You can watch the ad below:
The ad in question is filmed like a mockumentary-style interview with an NPC named Shaun, breaking the fourth wall to talk about his time working on Goat Simulator 3. At one point, Shaun talks about other projects he’s involved in, and the ad shows us the infamous leaked diner robbery clip from GTA 6 with him edited into the background. It’s just a tongue-in-cheek reference of course, but obviously not the kind that Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive was going to take lying down.
Take-Two very quickly issued a takedown notice to the ad on Coffee Stain’s YouTube channel, and the video has since disappeared from the developer’s social media channels everywhere. Stolen footage from GTA 6 has been floating around on the internet for months now, and Take-Two has been merciless in taking them down wherever they pop up. Coffee Stain must’ve known that their ad wouldn’t stay up for long, but it was funny while it lasted.
The GTA 6 leak first kicked into high gear in September, when a 17-year-old teenager allegedly associated with a hacking group called Lapsus$ stole 90 early gameplay videos from Rockstar’s Slack boards. The teenage hacker has since been charged with two computer crimes and two counts of violating his bail. Rockstar went on the record to say that it was disappointed about the leak, but it wouldn’t affect development of the game in the long-term.
Goat Simulator 3, on the other hand, is Coffee Stain’s sequel to the notoriously broken Goat Simulator, a game that put players in the hooves of an unhinged goat hellbent on licking everything and causing chaos. In case you’re wondering, there was no Goat Simulator 2. The series skipped straight to 3, which goes to show you how seriously Coffee Stain takes this franchise.