Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yeah, I think Wikipedia already has them :-)
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
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