Your portfolio is everything. It showcases your skills, demonstrates your experience, and helps you land your next big opportunity. But sometimes, enthusiasm for showing off your work can clash spectacularly with non-disclosure agreements and corporate secrecy, as happened to this former Rockstar Games animator.
Benjamin Chue, an animator who has worked at Rockstar for approximately 25 years and contributed to multiple beloved titles in the company's catalog, uploaded a demo reel to Vimeo showcasing his work. The compilation included animation clips from various projects he had worked on throughout his career, including Grand Theft Auto 5, Grand Theft Auto 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Max Payne 3.
Two months after uploading the professional showcase, fans scouring the internet for any morsel of information about Grand Theft Auto 6 noticed that the footage, specifically labeled as for an "upcoming game," was actually for the next Grand Theft Auto title.
The leaked footage consisted of three separate animation sequences, each brief and displayed against plain gray backgrounds typical of early development testing environments. The first clip showed a male character interacting with a bicycle rental system, removing a bright yellow bike from a kiosk and then returning it. The bicycle frame prominently displayed the word LomBike, an obvious parody of the real-world micromobility company Lime and its LimeBike rental service.
The other two clips featured a female character, presumably Lucia. These sequences showed her disembarking from a pickup truck in various ways. One animation shows her sitting on the back of the truck before swinging her legs around and hopping off. The second clip was more elaborate, showing her starting on the roof of the vehicle, jumping down into the truck bed, and then finally leaping onto the road beside it. According to the original video description before it was removed, the bike animation was intended for player characters, while the truck animations were designed for non-player characters.
