Apex Legends’ map was leaked 11 months ago—but no one seemed to care

Eleven months ago, Reddit user u/hiticonic posted an image to the Titanfall subreddit of a “rumored Titanfall battle royale game.” Of course, that map turned out to be the one that Apex Legends has, meaning the game’s map was leaked nearly a year ago.

People didn’t really care for it, though. The thread only garnered 14 comments, and even the comments that were on the thread seemed to be pretty sour toward the idea of a Titanfall battle royale game. In fact, the most-upvoted comment in the entire thread was from u/ThaiMylace, who said, “I really hope this doesn’t happen.”

Well, it did happen—and Apex has already established itself as a very popular and well-received game. Many game developers have made attempts at creating a popular game in the battle royale genre, but Respawn Entertainment is one of the few to actually achieve success even close to the likes of Bluehole and Epic Games.

A user posted a new thread on both the Titanfall and Apex subreddits earlier on Thursday, pointing out the original map leak. The Apex thread, which sits at more than 45,000 upvotes, includes u/hiticonic making one of the top comments, “I’ll take my upvotes now.”

Some users have speculated that u/hiticonic, who’s a moderator of the Apex subreddit, is or was a part of the Apex development team. With the accuracy of the post, some believed that u/hiticonic posted the image in an attempt to drum up interest for a battle royale game, but he has since seemed to deny involvement with the development team.

Either way, Respawn probably didn’t expect this kind of reaction for the game when the map was leaked back in March of last year with little fanfare. Now, the game has millions of players trying to achieve victory.