Take Two Investigated by New York Grand Jury

cjm182 writes "Over a year after the infamous sex minigame (aka Hot Coffee) was found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the New York District Attorney's office has subpoenaed Take Two Interactive and its subsidiary, Rockstar Games. Reuters reports that a grand jury requested documents relating to 'company officers' and directors' knowledge about the creation and inclusion of the 'Hot Coffee' minigame. This marks the first time Take Two has been asked to provide documents directly relating to the incident. Last week, GamePolitics.com ran an editorial calling for the U.S. Congress to subpoena Take Two directly, rather than criticize the FTC and the ESRB over the incident."

Comments

shocker: people knew

[192939495969798999]

Here's another shocker: They probably wanted it to be discovered for the publicity... but they probably figured it would stay an underground thing. They apparently forgot that it's 2006 and people now spend way too much time "thinking of the children". Back in the day, games would have full on hidden swear words, etc. hidden in there, and it never made the news or whatever. Heck, who hasn't been to an arcade and seen some creatively NC-17 vulgarities on the high score boards?

Re:shocker: people knew

[spyrochaete]

Who could have thought anyone would object to clothes-on softcore adult material in a game rated M ("for Mature")?

A few days ago I watched a South Park episode called "Fun With Weapons" where the kids accidentally hurt someone with their real weapons, but get in trouble because one of the appears naked in public.

But hey, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Re:shocker: people knew

[Chazmyrr]

The last time I spent money in a coin-op arcade, they were still using initials on the high score boards. It's pretty hard to fit an NC-17 vulgarity into 3 letters. Of course, that was back in the day. I don't remember any hidden swear words either. Maybe my memory is just going bad in my old age.

Of course all of that is beside the point. What it boils down to is that parents like ratings. It lets them quickly identify products that they do not consider suitable for their children. Even more than parents like ratings, parents like descriptive ratings. They want to know why the game is rated the way it is so they can make better decisions about what they buy for their kids.

The issue here isn't even the rating itself. The game was already rated MA. The problem is that the nudity was not disclosed to the ratings board and therefore was not listed on the game packaging. The parents that don't want their kids exposed to nudity have every reason to be upset. It has nothing to do with "thinking of the children". Whether nudity is as bad as the violence already present in the game is completely beside the point. The violence was disclosed, the nudity was not.

That make things clear enough?

Re:Bravo, I say

[drinkypoo]

The problem I have with your argument is that it would take kids less effort to locate and download some hardcore porn than it does for them to locate, download, and apply this patch. (Not that it's hard, but it's 50% more steps) :) There's no way to unlock this content with any official product/download. If they offered a patch to enable hot coffee, then I'd agree with you. They didn't.

Re:Bravo, I say

[kihjin]

... the potentiality of parents letting their children play.

I would think that this "potentiality" should be very very close to zero anyway.

Then, lo and behold, there's a whole bunch of D and E hidden in the game that was never advertised, and it was pretty simple for their little angel to find that hidden content.

AFAIK, the "hot coffee" content was not so easily enabled. So I highly doubt anyone's "little angel" unknowningly stumbled upon the objectionable content. This is especially true for the PS2 version of the game. Obviously much harder to enable the content for the PS2 than the PC version.

that it isn't just that it was that the game had sex in it, but that there was no warning of any sort.

Granted it was content included on the disk, it was not content included as part of the game. This was not something you'd simply run into while trying to beat this game. Activating the content was something you had to accomplish on your own with some knowledge of what you were attempting to achieve.

Then your kid unlocks the hidden level where Larry has to brutally, visciously, and mercilessly rape and murder all of the women on a particular block. You do object to that and to your child playing that kind of game, and you would have never let him play that kind of game if you had been warned.

The ESRB rating does not provide a list of all possible activities within the game. Your example is flawed because it is too specific. You wouldn't see a game cover that says: Rated M for Mature: Contains sex, slapstick, and brutal rape and murder of women. This is because it is generalized down to "violence and sexual content." I suppose they could prepend "lots of" to that generalization.

The ONLY way a parent can judge whether a game is "safe" or not for his or her children is to play the game. Now, the ESRB rating helps determine how much playing is necessary. An E game would probably be safe to just let the child play. But if you're going to let your 11 year old child play a game rated M, don't complain when he or she sees stuff that might be designed for mature individuals.

Re:Bravo, I say

[vertinox]

Take Two and Rockstar should have known the possible consequences of what they were doing.

Not really. It would be like a construction working putting pin ups of Playboy or Hustler between the drywall and insulation and then you finding it 5 years lader when you are knocking down a wall.

I mean the construction work is at fault, but is the company who did it really to blame? Unless the contractor foreman sat there and watched the guy do it, then you can't really blame the company with anything other than poor managment.

Its not like it is company policy or a design issue to do these things.

It may have been an oversite... Like during construction one of the workers was making obscene woodcarvings in the studs of the house (no pun intended) and the foreman comes over and says "Hey you can't put that there! Get rid of it!" and instead of removing the studs with the obscene word carvings, the construction worker puts drywall over it to save himself time.

That is most likley what happened with hot coffee. The programmers put it in there thinking it would be cool and the manager says "Guys we can't have this in game! we'll get an AO rating!" and the programmers just wall it up like the lazy construction worker since it would require more effort to hunt down and remove all the code than just remove its accessbility.

Still... We shouldn't be wasting tax money over this issue in persuing selective morality in the courts. We want ethics in our courts so it would be best suited to going after Take Two's alledged fraud.

The dumb thing is....

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupid thing is that the ESRB's M rating is supposed to be equivalent to the MPAA's R rating. The AO rating is supposed to be equivalent to an NC-17 (or worse) rating.

The Hot Coffee scenes are not NC-17 material, they're R material. There's no wang, there's low quality pixelated boobs, etc. If you've seen any good sex/violence R movies, you've seen worse than Hot Coffee. So either the rating system needs to be addressed or there's a double standard between video games and movies.

I'm all for Take Two getting in trouble for not removing unused questionable content, however crucifying them for what should be a rerating from M to M is getting out of hand. Of course, the ESRB went with the flow and rerated the game to AO.