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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."
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
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.