While Electronic Arts’ surprise announcement of Apex Legends may have been a shock to most of us, it turns out a Reddit user leaked the game 11 months ago… and no-one believed them.
In a thread called “Alleged Minimap for Rumored Titanfall Battle Royal game” (thanks, Polygon), Redditor hiticonic was unceremoniously downvoted when they speculated that a Titanfall battle royale game was in the works, complete with map, last April. The fact they didn’t add any further context might not have helped the case – posting a map, a headline and nothing more was unlikely to convince many.
“I really hope this doesn’t happen,” one commenter said (they later apologised and added: “I have put too much time into this game so far, my prejudice was very wrong”), whilst another insisted: “IT’S NOT REAL”.
“Haha I remember this! It was a relief to see folks blow it off and I was thinking, ‘well, he’ll be able to say I was right when next year comes along’,” said Respawn community manager, JayFresh_Respawn. “I’ll take my upvotes now :P” OP hiticonic said, before editing his post to beg people to stop awarding them Reddit Gold.
Of course, now the conspiracy theories have moved on to intimate that the leak was intentional all along…
“/u/hiticonic is a mod here,” said Awoo– in r/apexlegends. “HMMMMMMMM. I smell intentional leaks from the dev team. I’m onto you.”
To get the edge in Apex Legends, here’s our complete guide to the characters, classes, and abilities.