Overview

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Leak refers to the dissemination of screenshots, facts and gameplay about Tears of the Kingdom roughly two weeks before its mid-May 2023 release. The leaks spread rampantly through 4chan, Discord and Reddit, with some streamers attempting to livestream the game on Twitch but having their streams removed from the platform.

Background

On May 1st, 2023, Redditor ajxtt of /r/GamingLeaksandRumours^[1] posted news that a 10-second gameplay leak from Tears of the Kingdom that had purportedly leaked on 4chan, gaining over 350 points in one day. The clip shows no relevant plot or gameplay spoilers and was posted to Imgur that day, receiving over 18,000 views in roughly 24 hours (shown below).

Over the course of the day, the post was updated to include a cutscene and gameplay leak, a stream of a Discord user playing the game on an emulator and some lore from the game.

Developments

Hours later on May 1st, 2023, Redditor Jesus10101 posted a megathread to the /r/GamingLeaksandRumours^[2] subreddit for all of the leaks from Tears of the Kingdom. According to their post, the leak appears to have come from someone who had a copy of the physical game.

From there, a Discord user was able to emulate the game on PC to begin streaming it to their server. Video of this stream was then uploaded to file-sharing websites. The thread included links to leaked pictures and videos from Tears of the Kingdom (example shown below).

Several streamers attempted to stream the game on Twitch,^[3] but their streams were quickly taken down. According to Kotaku,^[4] viewers of the stream started a copypasta in an attempt to ward off future investigators, writing, "In case of an investigation by any federal entity or similar, I do not have any involvement with this group or with the people in it, I do not know how I am here, probably added by a third party, I do not support any actions by members of this group."

Search interest

External References