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."

Comments

the only one?

[X0563511]

Am I the only one around here who is so SICK of hearing about this it makes you want to break stuff?

I wonder why a bunch of others are not on this.

[Avillia]

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.

Re:I wonder why a bunch of others are not on this.

[malsdavis]

Its because the majority of commentators and politicians were ranting on about something they have not actually played and know absolutly nothing about (I can really see Hillary Clinton downloading the millions of various add-ons and hacks to popular games).

The whole event reminded me of a TV programme which aired here in the UK about 4 years. The TV programme was a satire on the way the media love to really overdo stories on phedophilia. While not actually condoning it at all, it was immediatly blastered into the ground by various commentators, politicians and "concerned parents" as "disgraceful", "disgusting" and "going way to far" - just like GTA was last year.

It later turned out that the vast majority of the politicians and people commenting on the show had not actually even watched it, but still they felt justified in condemning the show outright.

Its the same for GTA, none of the commentators actually play games and so do not realise that there are sexual orientated add-ons (and Hot-coffee was for all intents and purposes a downloaded add-on) for all games. They hear a brief clip of the situation and thereby feel warranted to give the world their uninformed opinion dressed up as if they actually know what their talking about. ...kind of like some slashdot posters do.

Re:I wonder why a bunch of others are not on this.

[Feanturi]

Actually I did read someone somewhere, might have been Jack Thompson, ranting that The Sims was a tool for pedophiles to practice seduction techniques on kids. They stated it was made even worse by the nudity patch, which the author of course had an enourmous problem with, however the article had strongly emphasized that the game was pedophilic enough without mentioning the patch.

I think that for somebody to come up with that suspicion, they've got to have some issues. It takes one to know one...

Tom Lehrer knew this:

"Old books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder.
For filth, I'm glad to say,
Is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I can tell ya things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz - there's a dirty old man!"

Re:I wonder why a bunch of others are not on this.

[kleptonin]

You're thinking of the Brass Eye special on paedophilia, which was created by Christopher Morris. My girlfriend and I are currently halfway through watching the original series (we are on a kind of Chris Morris binge) on DVD, which includes the special. They're very, very funny. Especially the way they got celebrities of the time to talk about complete rubbish (such as the dangers of a made-up drug called "Cake").

Strange

[Eightyford]

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).

Re:Strange

[NetRAVEN5000]

Normally you might be right, but in this case the rating got bumped up to "AO"("Adults Only") causing Wal-Mart and other stores to take it off the shelves.

best one

[corbettw]

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?

<Jack Thompson>

[idonthack]

it makes you want to break stuff

Obviously, the effects of this extremely violent and sexually explicit game have taken their toll on you.</Jack Thompson>

Something Even Dumber

[mikeswi]

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?

Maybe for them

[FidelCatsro]

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 .
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 ,such as Satanic Ritual abuse scare.. but that would be too long.
Perhaps we could call it a Hot Coffee : A moral panic surround Games

Re:Maybe for them

[Feanturi]

Let me try it on...

"Wow, those guys really pulled a Hot Coffee."

"Watch the content Bob, we don't want a Hot Coffee on our hands."

"Miss Smith, can you please give me a Hot Coffee? What? Harrassment suit? Why?"

Hell, two out of three aint bad, let's use it.

It is completely different.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't you find it strange

[MrJynxx]

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" ??

Re:Don't you find it strange

[NetRAVEN5000]

Perhaps you could explain, then. Why is killing less "dangerous to impressionable young people" than sex?

Sex is a perfectly normal thing. Everyone at least thinks about it at some point in their life. Killing? Not so normal.

"Business Moment"

[MoogMan]

Hot Coffee Makes List of Dumbest Business Moments

It wasn't a business decision (read: not their choice, they probably were oblivious to it)