Report ID: 0122 Category: 02_development Topic: The Know / Inside Gaming Reports on GTA VI Date compiled: 14 May 2026 Language: British English Referencing style: Harvard
Long before Grand Theft Auto VI was confirmed as a Rockstar Games project, the most consequential early leak in the title's history did not originate from a leaked Slack channel or a hacked Confluence wiki, but from a comparatively modest YouTube video published by Rooster Teeth's gaming news channel The Know on 6 March 2018 (Trueman, 2024; gtaforums, 2018). Hosted by Brian Gaar and edited by a small team that would, within a year, be rebranded under the name Inside Gaming, the segment claimed — on the basis of a single anonymous source close to Rockstar — that the next Grand Theft Auto was being developed under the internal codename "Project Americas", that it would be set in a modernised Vice City with playable excursions to South America, that it would feature a female playable protagonist for the first time in the mainline series, and that Rockstar was aiming, at that early stage, for a release window of around 2021 or 2022 (Trueman, 2024; Wikipedia, 2026).
This report reconstructs The Know / Inside Gaming reporting on Grand Theft Auto VI over the period 2018–2024, situates that reporting within the broader leak ecology that subsequently grew up around the game, and assesses the extent to which the original 2018 claims were vindicated by the September 2022 "teapotuberhacker" leak, the December 2023 official reveal and the May 2025 second trailer. Three principal sources are drawn upon — RockstarINTEL (Trueman, 2024), the original GTAForums thread documenting the leak in real time (gtaforums, 2018) and the English Wikipedia article on Grand Theft Auto VI (Wikipedia, 2026) — supplemented by Reddit community archives and GTABase retrospectives. The analysis is written in British English and uses Harvard referencing throughout.
The Know was launched in 2014 by Rooster Teeth as a daily gaming and pop-culture news segment, modelled on traditional broadcast bulletins but optimised for YouTube's algorithm. Its editorial line was supplied largely by former Machinima and Inside Gaming staff whom Rooster Teeth had absorbed in the consolidation of independent gaming media that followed the 2014–2015 contraction of the YouTube gaming-news ecosystem. By early 2018, Brian Gaar — a comedian and games journalist — had become one of The Know's principal on-screen presenters for news segments, and it was Gaar who fronted the 6 March 2018 GTA VI video that would, six years later, be retrospectively identified as the earliest substantiated public report on the game (Trueman, 2024).
In 2019, The Know was rebranded under the historically resonant Inside Gaming name, a title previously associated with the Machinima-era show that several of its staff had originally worked on. Throughout this transition, the editorial team and the underlying YouTube channel remained the same — a continuity that explains why the 2018 report is variously cited in later coverage as having come from "The Know" (Wikipedia, 2026), "Inside Gaming" (Reddit, 2020) or "Inside Gaming (formerly The Know)" (Trueman, 2024). The channel and its parent company Rooster Teeth were ultimately shut down by Warner Bros. Discovery on 6 March 2024 — precisely six years to the day after the GTA VI report had aired — prompting Gaar's first detailed public discussion of how the original story had been sourced (Trueman, 2024).
The substance of The Know's 6 March 2018 video, as preserved in contemporaneous GTAForums and Reddit discussions and re-summarised by Gaar himself in 2024, comprised five distinct claims (gtaforums, 2018; Trueman, 2024):
The Know's presentation was unusually transparent about the limits of its evidence. Gaar and his co-hosts noted on-screen that their industry sources had previously been "right about 50% of the time" and described their confidence in the GTA VI tip as elevated rather than absolute (gtaforums, 2018). The community response, captured in real time on GTAForums, was sceptical but not dismissive: several long-standing posters noted that the Vice-City-plus-South-America configuration matched then-circulating rumours from other low-profile sources, and that the "Sicario"-like tone implied by cross-border drug missions was consistent with Rockstar's evolving narrative interests (gtaforums, 2018).
The clearest evidence that The Know's 2018 report was substantively accurate emerged only after Rooster Teeth's closure, when Gaar appeared on the Inside Games Podcast run by former Inside Gaming staff and described Rockstar's internal reaction to the broadcast (Trueman, 2024). According to Gaar, Rockstar "flipped out" upon publication of the video and "locked down the studio to find the leaker"; subsequently, a vice president at Rockstar Games telephoned Gaar personally — politely but firmly — and asked him to identify the source. Gaar declined, citing standard journalistic protections, and the conversation ended with the Rockstar VP conceding that, in Gaar's paraphrase, "you didn't get everything right but you got a lot of it" (Trueman, 2024).
That admission, made privately in 2018 and disclosed publicly only in 2024, constitutes one of the very few documented cases in which a senior Rockstar executive has confirmed — even partially — the accuracy of an unauthorised report on Grand Theft Auto VI. It also illustrates the seriousness with which Rockstar treated leaks at this early stage of development: a single anonymous tip to a mid-tier YouTube news channel was sufficient to trigger a studio-wide lockdown and direct executive engagement with the journalist concerned (Trueman, 2024).
Each of The Know's five 2018 claims can now be assessed against subsequent evidence.
The "Project Americas" codename. The September 2022 "teapotuberhacker" leak — in which roughly 90 videos of in-development GTA VI footage were posted to GTAForums by a member of the Lapsus$ hacking collective — included video clips and file names containing the string "Project Americas", directly corroborating the codename element of the 2018 report (Trueman, 2024; Wikipedia, 2026). This is the single most decisive vindication of The Know's reporting, since the codename was never officially confirmed by Rockstar and is therefore unlikely to have been guessed.
Vice City. The 2022 leak confirmed a modern-day Vice City setting, as did Rockstar's first official trailer of 5 December 2023 and the second trailer of 6 May 2025, which together established that the entire game is set within the fictional US state of Leonida, with Vice City as its principal urban centre (Wikipedia, 2026).
South America. This element was not vindicated. Bloomberg reporting by Jason Schreier in 2022 indicated that the Latin American portion of the map had been cut during the descoping of the project, with Rockstar concentrating resources on Vice City and the surrounding state of Leonida instead (Trueman, 2024; Wikipedia, 2026). The 2018 report was therefore accurate at the time as a description of the original design ambition, but the South American component had been removed by the time of the 2023 reveal.
A female protagonist. Fully vindicated. The 2022 leak revealed both Jason and Lucia as the playable duo, and Rockstar's 2023 trailer confirmed Lucia as the series's first non-optional female mainline protagonist (Wikipedia, 2026).
Release window 2021–2022. Inaccurate. The actual release was repeatedly delayed and is currently scheduled for 19 November 2026, approximately four to five years later than the 2018 internal target communicated to The Know (Wikipedia, 2026). However, as Trueman (2024) notes, this discrepancy partly reflects the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Rockstar's pipeline and partly the well-documented descoping and rescoping of the project following the disruption to Red Dead Online development.
On the original five claims, then, The Know's 2018 reporting was substantively correct on three (codename, Vice City, female protagonist), partially correct on one (South America, as a former design element since cut) and incorrect on one (release window). For a single-source tip published three and a half years before Rockstar officially confirmed development and nearly six years before the first trailer, this is a remarkable hit rate (Trueman, 2024).
After the initial 2018 report, The Know / Inside Gaming returned periodically to GTA VI but never again broke comparably significant news. The channel's later coverage tended to aggregate and analyse leaks from other sources — most prominently Tom Henderson's 2021 claims that the GTA VI map could evolve dynamically akin to Fortnite (Wikipedia, 2026), the December 2019 TezFunz2 tweets that appeared to corroborate elements of the original Project Americas tip (GTABase, n.d.), and various lower-credibility rumours that piggybacked on the "Project Americas" codename to lend themselves spurious legitimacy (Reddit, 2024).
A 2020 retrospective post on the r/GTA6 subreddit explicitly identified the March 2018 Inside Gaming / The Know video as "the actual Project Americas leak", distinguishing it from the wave of derivative fakes that proliferated during 2019 and 2020 (Reddit, 2020). This distinction matters: a substantial portion of the GTA VI leak ecosystem that grew up between 2019 and 2022 was demonstrably built on the foundation of The Know's original tip, with later "leakers" simply repackaging its claims, occasionally with embellishments that turned out to be false (Reddit, 2024). In this sense, Inside Gaming's 2018 report functioned not only as the earliest substantiated public account of GTA VI but also as the seed text for almost every subsequent rumour cycle.
Following the September 2022 hack and the December 2023 reveal, Inside Gaming's coverage shifted into more conventional reaction-and-analysis territory, with no further proprietary leaks of the magnitude of the 2018 segment. The channel's closure with Rooster Teeth in March 2024 brought its GTA VI reporting to a definitive close, but the long-delayed disclosure of Rockstar's behind-the-scenes reaction in Gaar's Inside Games Podcast appearance provided a fitting epilogue (Trueman, 2024).
The Know's 2018 report on Grand Theft Auto VI is significant for at least three reasons. First, it established a substantial portion of what is now the public-domain understanding of the game's original design intent — particularly the South American component that was subsequently cut — three and a half years before Rockstar officially confirmed that development was underway in February 2022 (Wikipedia, 2026). Second, it provides a rare documented case in which Rockstar's internal security response to a leak — studio lockdown, executive outreach to the journalist concerned — has been described in detail by a participant, illuminating the secrecy culture that surrounds the company's flagship franchise (Trueman, 2024). Third, it set the template for the ensuing eight years of GTA VI leak journalism, in which trusted independent sources (Schreier, Henderson, TezFunz2 and others) gradually accreted detail around the original Project Americas framework until the 2022 hack and 2023 reveal made further leak journalism largely redundant (Wikipedia, 2026).
Taken as a whole, The Know / Inside Gaming's contribution to the historical record of Grand Theft Auto VI's development is disproportionate to the channel's size and the brevity of its principal report. A single eight-minute video, broadcast more than five and a half years before the official reveal, captured the bulk of the game's eventual identity — and triggered an internal Rockstar response that, in retrospect, was a near-confirmation of that identity all along.
GTABase (n.d.) GTA VI: What a 1980's Vice City Story Could Look Like. Available at: https://www.gtabase.com/news/grand-theft-auto-6/gta-vi-what-a-1980-s-vice-city-story-could-look-like (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
gtaforums (2018) The Know: GTA 6 codenamed "Americas", Details Inside. Available at: https://gtaforums.com/topic/906620-the-know-gta-6-codenamed-americas-details-inside/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Reddit (2020) The real Project Americas leak, r/GTA6. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/GTA6/comments/kfns1m/the_real_project_americas_leak/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Reddit (2024) How Rockstar responded to the initial "Project Americas" leak, r/GTA6. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/GTA6/comments/1bef82t/how_rockstar_responded_to_the_initial_project/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Trueman, A. (2024) 'This GTA 6 Leak Was Real And Rockstar Wanted To Know Who Leaked It', RockstarINTEL, 16 March. Available at: https://rockstarintel.com/this-gta-6-leak-was-real-and-rockstar-wanted-to-know-who-leaked-it/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).