One of the scenes featured in last night's GTA 6: An Extended Look premiere might be very familiar to anyone who caught the massive leaks from four years ago.
Cast your mind back to 2022. Very early GTA 6 leaks are flooding the internet. An unnamed couple breaks into a diner called Hank's Waffles, holds up hostages, and steals what they can before the police have them surrounded. Sure, it looks like another Grand Theft Auto romp, only this time with lighting that makes little real-world sense and would-be waffle-munchers who don't react as you'd expect Rockstar NPCs to.
Now it's 2026. GTA 6: An Extended Look reveals near-final gameplay from the open-world epic for the very first time. Lucia and Jason are again robbing a diner, but wait a second... is that Hank's Waffles again? Those poor waffle makers, this time rendered in almost unbelievable detail - the difference four years made to GTA 6 is both incredible and unsurprising.
I laughed when Rockstar showed off the diner robbery from the original 2022 leaksDefinitely on purpose to show that the early versions are nothing like what they'll be shipping in the final game of GTA 6pic.twitter.com/jzn62XdTUgAugust 27, 2026
Re-introducing one of the very first scenes we ever saw from GTA 6, now in almost complete form, is certainly a flex, especially when the game looks this darn good. Whether Rockstar Games did so intentionally (with tongue in cheek) is anyone's guess, but it's certainly a nice reminder to the internet that leaked in-development footage is never a good indication of what a game will actually look like on launch day.
Of course, those first-round leaks are disconnected from the unofficial clips that have been circulating via CyberLeek this past month. Although, the hacker seems to have now cashed out of the memecoin they were using GTA 6 videos to promote, potentially putting a stop to all the leakage once and for all.
Now that we have a real meaty look at Lucia and Jason's adventure, the public's appetite for leaked footage should calm down, either way. We finally have concrete details, after all. GTA 6 will run at 30fps as Rockstar isn't sure if a 60fps mode will be ready in time. We also know the game doesn't include microtransactions or AI-generated materials, and the Leonida map is apparently three times bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2's.
Check out every GTA 6 version for more information and all of the GTA 6 map that's been pieced together thus far.
