7 Video Game Stories That Were Spoiled Before Release

5. Kingdom Hearts III

KINGDOM HEARTS 3
Square Enix

While a lot of video game leaks happen during the development period, others can occur after the game has gone gold, when finished copies somehow manage to sneak out ahead of time.

This is precisely what happened to Square Enix's hotly-anticipated Kingdom Hearts III, which suffered a massive story leak roughly one month before it launched.

In December 2018, several copies of the game - supposedly snagged during the disc-printing process - hit the streets, and as you'd expect, this resulted in videos and screenshots of the game's plot flooding certain corners of the web. Annoyingly, this then meant that fans had to tread extremely carefully for the following few weeks if they hoped to avoid spoilers, which is tough to do when trolls can easily post comments in random and unexpected places.

Responding to the leak, director Tetsuya Nomura posted a statement on social media, imploring people to not spread spoilers.

On the plus side, the game's "biggest spoilers" - namely, its epilogue and secret movie - didn't leak, but still, there was enough information lurking online to potentially ruin the entire game for excited Kingdom Hearts fans.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!