Bully sequel leak ends up being a joke

Polygon let a joke URL into an article, which exploded into a rumored leak for a Bully sequel.

With all of the news surrounding Rockstar Games and the release of The Diamond Casino & Resort in Grand Theft Auto V, most people were focused on the current content that the juggernaut keeps pumping out.

But the question of what game is next up for Rockstar is back and might have an answer after an article on Polygon showed hints at a potential Bully sequel.

Polygon, an entertainment and video game news site, covers almost everything Rockstar does in extreme detail, from the release of the new Casino content back to various easter egg articles when the game released. But an error on the backend of its website might have caused a significant leak of information about Rockstar developing a sequel to the school-based title.

On July 27, Polygon published an article titled “Bully fans think they’ve found secret news of a sequel,” which is nothing outside of an attention-grabbing headline for an article about Reddit theories based on some new decorations in GTA. This should have been a routine post that got some decent traction, but instead, it turned into the start of a new wave of speculation on Rockstar’s future plans.

The reason being, the URL of the site was odd, and instead of being titled something to do with GTA or easter eggs it was an apparent full-on confirmation of the sequel coming out in 2020.

The URL read “/bully-sequel-announced-fall-2020-news-embargoed-do-not-publish,” in the search bar, it even shows that this URL was meant to be embargoed for the near future. This could have been one of the editors accidentally putting that line into the wrong article, the backend of the website mixing things up, or purposeful use of the “mistake” to push the article and draw attention to the site.

In the end, it was the call of one writer at Polygon who wanted to “put a joke URL in this story” that was picked up on very quickly. Polygon acknowledges that it was not a good joke and that the writer of the article is regretful about the situation now.

We put a joke URL in this story, and mea culpa, folks thought it was real. For the record, it was a joke — a bad one — and the writer behind it is feeling very regretful. https://t.co/q8Ys6TTtV2 pic.twitter.com/lyh5udkVlU

— Polygon (@Polygon) July 28, 2019

The URL has since been updater, but the joke URL still appears for some users, so it is unclear if the update has fully taken effect yet. This action took almost 24 hours to correct, which was enough time for fans of Bully to get excited, only for it to end up being attention bait from a gaming website. Not a good joke indeed.