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Hot Coffee Makes List of Dumbest Business Moments
Via Next Generation a list of 2005's Dumbest Business Moments, which rightly lists the Hot Coffee debacle as one of those ignoble icons. From the article: "In June a Dutch programmer releases software that lets players of Take-Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas access sexually explicit content left in the game's source code by its developers. Already marked 'Mature' for 'blood and gore, intense violence, strong language, strong sexual content, and use of drugs,' the game gets rerated 'Adults Only,' causing Target and Wal-Mart to pull it from stores. Take-Two's quarterly revenues fall $40 million short of projections."
Screenshots, anyone?
Am I the only one around here who is so SICK of hearing about this it makes you want to break stuff?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
No matter how dumb it is, it makes media taking about it over and over again.
Uncensored Google results requested and delivered by email
The Sims, World of Warcraft, and a thousand others who display at least partial/censored nudity which have third-party modifications which show full nudity of characters.
I find this surprising. I would have guessed that all of the publicity would have actually helped the game, and I wouldn't have been surprised if Take-Two let the Hot Coffee easter egg out on purpose. Usually bad publicity is good publicity (Public Enemy, 2 Live Crew).
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
20. He's a perfect 10 -- a 1, plus 9 glasses of sparkling Lambrini!
Having barred alcohol marketing that associates drinking with sex, British regulators block an ad that shows women imbibing Lambrini sparkling wine while using a fishing pole to hook a hunky guy. The Advertising Standards Authority says the ad violates its guidelines because the guy "looks quite attractive and desirable to the girls." It would pass muster if only he were "overweight, middle-aged, balding, etc." The company then runs a version of the ad using a paunchy, chrome-domed model.
Yeah, cause showing a bunch of drunk women getting so horny that even a fat bald guy looks good doesn't violate any standards linking sex and alcohol, does it?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
It was absolute stupidity to leave the sex stuff in the game, but they followed it up with something even more stupid. The second release version of GTA:SA is completely incompatible with the first.
Save files will not work between versions, so if you went to a message board and asked someone to play a mission you can't get past, it wouldn't work. The people who take the time to help people in this way all run the first release. Anyone needing help at this point are people who have recently bought the game, meaning they have the second release.
Someone has hacked around this now. You have exchange script files from the two versions, play the game and save it, then run another script to fully convert it to the other version.
But wait! There's more!
The second release cannot be modded. At all.
The new executable looks for a checksum value in the script files. If they've been modded, the game crashes out. The majority of people who buy it on PC already have it on PS2. They bought the PC version ONLY because they wanted to install or create mods. And they go and remove all mods, because someone discovered Rockstar's stupidity of leaving a sex mission in the game.
This may have changed by now, but Rockstar continued to advertise it as having support for mods, so that you can change the game as you wished. False advertising anyone? That's a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act, right?
Only on
Stupid for take 2 perhaps , although like the first utterance of "Fuck" on TV in the 1960 , they may have pushed the boundaries that little bit further .. not intentionally mind you and they were the victims of a witch hunt* because of it . I think though that in the long run we may all benefit , perhaps it looks a little grim right now with all the Vote currying , but after this dies down and is forgotten then we may notice the changed landscape and what is acceptable .
,such as Satanic Ritual abuse scare.. but that would be too long.
Parents may also for once take an interest in what their child is playing and deem for themselves if it acceptable or not , but that is just a pipe dream
*Wondering If I should replace Witch hunt with a more modern but relevant term
Perhaps we could call it a Hot Coffee : A moral panic surround Games
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
As far as I know, San Andreas is the only game where the binary already contains the explicit material. I.e. for the Sims, WoW, and other games, the nude patches and what-not are generated in their entirety by third-party modifications. Or to really dumb it down, the "bad stuff" is (was) ON THE SAN ANDREAS RETAIL DVD. You just download a patch that unlocks it (or you can just use a hex editor). The "bad stuff" for the Sims, etc, are full-blown modifications containing skins, models, textures, etc, that must be downloaded and are NOT ON THE RETAIL CDs/DVDs. There is a difference between having the sex mini-games ON THE RETAIL DVD BUT DISABLED and having to download the sex mini-games DEVELOPED ENTIRELY BY THIRD PARTIES.
It is really a dumb and costly mistake. It would have been trivial, or at least fairly easy, to just get rid of the source code for the sex game altogether. Istead, they were just lazy or didn't want to chance fucking the game up anymore (that fucking gym/basketball bug comes to mind). They were probably in the late stages of finalizing the game and decided at the last minute to take the sex game out just to be sure they could avoid the dreaded AO rating. So they just set some global variable to false or whatever, leaving the code to be compiled for the final product.
...that journalists are frequently wrong.
"...access sexually explicit content left in the game's source code by its developers..."
While I'm sure that Hot Coffee was in GTA's source code, that's not how it was found by the outside world. Source code means the code in C++ or whatever they used to program the game. Where they found the content was in the game's binary. This is pretty damn basic distinction, yet the journalist didn't get it. Once you start looking around, you'll notice these kinds of small errors every damn place. It's really annoying that the people writing about things usually don't know anything about them.
Is this even worth mentioning anymore?
Oh the woes for the parents who bought the murder and theft sim! It has crudely animated sex scenes that you have to search for and download modifications for the game to EVEN SEE! OH TEH NO! WOE IS THEM! WAH WAH FUCKING WAH.
You know, never mind it's already rated M for motherfucking Mature!
GAH! My head is going to implode.
that something such as sex. . . which is an act that creates life causes more of an uproar than an act which takes a life.. So GTA:SA you run around senselessly killing and destroying property, but when they throw in some scene where you have to do some crazy process to get this small glimpse of sex the game is pulled from the shelves. seems backwards don't ya think :)
Isn't it easier to just google the word "sex" ??
Wouldn't it have had to be in the source code in order to appear in the binary?
www.linuxpenguin.net
ok - this has to be added to the 'dumb business moments'...
saw this on stupidvideos or one of those.
http://www.stationaryisbad.com/rubberband
(btw - when you first see the video what you don't figure is that its actually an msft ad)
Anybody else noticed that tfa points to page 1 but starts at number 11?? Here's the first page.
Haydn.
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Hot Coffee Makes List of Dumbest Business Moments
It wasn't a business decision (read: not their choice, they probably were oblivious to it)
I know at least a dozen people off the top of my head who went out and got GTA: San Andreas just because of the whole Hot Coffee thing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the whole ESRB fiasco was expected by Rockstar. Who wouldn't take a bit of a hit to increase sales in the long run? I would guess that the majority (if not all) of the type of people who play GTA: SA are the types of people who will want to see the mod. Murder and violence in the game, but no sex? C'mon now, what kinda thinking is that?
And they said zombies weren't real!
Yeah I'm sick of hearing about this too.
If your kid has Internet access, yes he can download the Hot Coffee mod. It takes a deliberate action though. It's not something that gets accidentally enabled. It's something that Rockstar was working on but didn't become part of the final game. I don't see this as much differnet than buying a car with the build sheet left under the carpet.
But hell if he can download Hot Coffee, he can download tons of mods/skins/pictures/dirty stories/whatever. Nude skins for Lara Croft. Nude skins for The Sims. Just because part of Hot Coffee was already buried in the game, the distinction is minor when you can download tons of sex/nudity from the Internet.
71. Phantom menace
:D
In October the board of Infinium Labs reveals that chairman Timothy Roberts is under investigation by the SEC for allegedly sending junk faxes touting penny stocks -- including shares of Infinium, maker of the little-known Phantom game console. The board also announces that financial reports prepared by Roberts, the company's CEO before he resigned in August, should not be relied on. A month later the company's new CEO, Kevin Bachus, also resigns. The board -- which still includes Roberts -- manages to tempt consultant Greg Koler into the CEO hot seat with the tantalizing prize of 4 million shares of Infinium stock, currently worth $68,000.
When that man took the suicide of a young person as an opportunity to blast a gaming community, he stopped being funny.
He's a disgusting human being who will piss on someones grave to get his point across. It's a disservice that we can't legally shut him up.
It's been a long time.