It’s a classic move: A villain, or sometimes a hero, inserts himself into a seemingly inescapable situation. Danger everywhere—no way out! But just as the good guys (or bad guys) are about to pounce, he holds up the pin he’s pulled from the grenade under his coat, forcing everyone to back off! Escape is at hand!
That seems to be the strategy now adopted by notorious Grand Theft Auto 6 leaker Cyberleek, and by “seems to be,” I mean they stated it outright. In a message posted to their now-defunct website but preserved by GTA VI News on X, Cyberleek committed to not releasing anything more about GTA 6—including its ending, which at this point remains unknown—as long as Take-Two lets everything slide.
“CL has the ending. It was considered,” the message states. “It would punish Take-Two greatly—but ruin the experience for the gamers, who did nothing wrong. Take-Two would show CL no mercy—why should CL show any to them? Still: Take-Two was punished enough.
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“The ending stays unpublished. Proof: the latest leek—clips from the final missions, out of context, revealing nothing. The dead man’s switch is active—story spoilers only. Left alone, it never fires. Whoever removes CL chooses it.”
(Image credit: Cyberleek)
A dead man’s switch, generally speaking, is a switch built to be triggered if its operator is incapacitated. Miles Dyson, for instance, blew up Cyberdyne Systems with an improvised dead man’s switch in Terminator 2 (not that it did much good) and Roger Murtaugh did the literal grenade-pin thing in Lethal Weapon while trying to save his daughter from Shadow Company goons. There are variants—in Point Break, for instance, Rosie was ordered to kill Johnny Utah’s girlfriend if Bodhi didn’t check in by 3, to ensure Johnny’s participation in a bank robbery.
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My own personal favorite dead man’s switch comes from Hawk the Slayer:
That particular variation on the theme notwithstanding, dead man’s switches are meant as last-ditch failsafes: If something bad happens to me, something much worse will happen to you.
It makes me wonder if Cyberleek’s sudden withdrawal and proposed détente with Take-Two means that they’re starting to feel the heat. Take-Two takes this sort of thing seriously as a matter of course, and you can bet it’s going to go extra-hardass on anyone who messes with its biggest game ever, which GTA 6 unquestionably is. I have no doubt that life for Cyberleek will become very unpleasant, very quickly, if and when they’re ever caught.
The problem Cyberleek faces, of course, is that their leverage—assuming it’s real in the first place—has a very short shelf life. In six weeks at most, the GTA 6 ending will be out there, at which point there will be no shot left to shoot.
At best, then, this threat grants Cyberleek an extra month to find a deeper hole to hide in. And even that is wildly optimistic: Take-Two might be operating quietly, but I have no doubt that it’s also operating furiously, and that there’s not much of a mood to play ‘I won’t if you won’t’ games.
Cyberleek also defended their cryptocurrency ask, saying it “was always a donation, never an investment,” and denying that a rugpull happened; they also said they wouldn’t release the full build of GTA 6, with “full story mode, played to the end,” because their memecoin market cap didn’t hit $30 million.