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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."
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?
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If I'm reading that right, I think the Hot Coffee mod should be the least of their worries. The mod may not be a good thing, but the other stuff looks like it has the potential for worse legal repercussions.
Slackware
The documents Take Two hands over will have pictures of supreme court judges fornicating on every page, drawn in invisible ink on top of the boring Memos.
What?
Take Two and Rockstar should have known the possible consequences of what they were doing. It was just plain stupid to include the "hot coffee" bit in the game and not think that, if it were known that it was in there, it wouldn't affect the game's ESRB rating or the potentiality of parents letting their children play.
/.ers think "if parents don't want their kids exposed to this stuff, they need to pay attention to their kids and what they are doing and the games they are playing." That is true, and I agree. However, what Rockstar did was sell a game that contained objectionable content A, B C, D, and E, but only told people it contained A, B, and C. Now some parents (and think of them whatever you will) might be fine with their child playing a game filled with A, B, and C, but draw the line at D or E. They buy this game that warns that it contains A, B, and C, and they think, "that's fine. my little angel can handle that kind of imagery and it won't hurt him." they give him the game and they think that he's fine playing it by himself in his room, because they already know (or at least, they think they do) what content is in the game. 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.
Now, I know a lot of
Now, hopefully, my slightly abstracted example will make it clear to everyone that it isn't just that it was that the game had sex in it, but that there was no warning of any sort. Imagine, for a minute, that you are ok with your kids playing a Leisure Suit Larry game. "It's just a bunch of sex and slapstick," you think to yourself, "no harm in that." 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.
That is the problem here. Had Rockstar simply played by the rules and told the ESRB what was in the game (and risk getting the AO rating at the outset), there wouldn't be any issue at all now. They were deceiving consumers and trying to game the rating system so that they could sell a few more units to the under 18 crowd.
my pet machine
I highly doubt the Directors or Officers of Take Two said "Gee lets insert some Sex Scenes in the game !!"
Then again with how hard the programmers are usually pushed for deadlines, when would they have time on their own to insert a "side quest" ?
far...out
Seriously. Can we please Stop Hiding profanity In These things and start protecting our children from these Fokkers?
I'm also sure that this coming within meer months of an election is purely coincidental...nothing like a good porn in otherwise respectable video games story to bring out the best in people.
Remember, not only do we "Think of the Children"(TM), we remind you early and often!
(Sure, district attorneys are appointed, but someone's going to pull this out in a commercial plug...)
It's entirely possible it was left in accidently, people with hex editors find stuff left over from earlier builds all the time in games. For example, Bioware got criticism for Kotor II when people found dialogue from a more elaborate ending left in the game (suggesting the game was rushed) and a Japanese preview demo for the game Xenosaga III accidently included all the dialogue for the game. Those weren't Easter Eggs, that was stuff that the companies wished they hadn't released.
On a related note, I read an interview with the people behind Indigo Prophecy were they said they had to take extra care to make sure none of the code for the uncensored European release was in the American version. Normally you would could REM out some code but because of the Hot Coffee incident they had to make a more thorough audit of the code.
Even though I think this got blown way out of proportion, I'm very curious to what really happened.
Should they get in trouble too?
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.
the alleged content is totally age-inappropriate and should not be in the consumer package. they can put all the hacksmut they want on the development server hidden deep in the bowels of the office, but if any of it gets out on releases, it should be declared.
the way to settle this for ever is the ratings outfits to actually review the stuff they shuffle papers over, and employ a few of the 1337 to search for easter eggs... or in this case, perhaps, easter pornos... and if any are found, the product will remain unrated forevermore.
which keeps it out of the mass merchandisers' hands.
oops, almost forgot... the "ratings outfits" are shills and fronts that nod their head and say, yes, everything is wholesome family entertainment, don't bother us any more.
sorry. my bad.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
where one of the judges recently got tagged and is under trial for meddling with a penis pump during trial of actual cases at the bench.
he may not know pornography, but he'll know what he likes.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
ESRB originally wrote GTA:SA up for six objectionable "Content Descriptors." But "Strong Lyrics" wasn't one of them, even though there are F-bombs on half the channels. Then in the Second Edition they added a "Nudity" descriptor, even though there was no nudity found.
How careful are these "ratings experts" anyway?
The game had the appropriate rating of "Mature" from the very beginning. The hot coffee mod should not have changed that. Yes, they may have witheld hidden game content from the ESRB, but it was not content that was a) accessible through normal play b) content that would make it an AO game. I'm not a lawyer, but I think rationally. I wish these people would too.
Not to mention that there was no lawsuit when the rest of the game involves shooting, beating, and killing other people using numerous methods. Rewarding illegal activity and portraying violence with utmost graphical exuberance.
But why is the government involved?
Because Take Two is a publicly traded company. It is not just the ESRB and game buyers who may have been defrauded. The Take Two *investors* may have been defrauded as well, they were not aware of all risks that the company was taking. Assuming of course the scene was left in intentionally.
The rules are very different when you have the public finance your business.
I don't see the problem ...
m &q=l&c=
The real problem here is that Take Two is a publicly traded company.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=TTWO&t=2y&l=on&z=
The rules are very different when you have the public finance your business. You are legally obligated to inform investors of risks. With this in mind it is entirely reasonable to investigate whether the scene was an accident or a marketing gimmick.
From my experience in the dev world, easter eggs are usually created near the end of the development cycle. This is when you've had an entire team coding like mad for months, then tell all but five (or two) of them to stop as (nearly) all the features are in and a few critical bugs need to be taken care of. The managers are still to busy with the current release to give a new project to the programmers waiting in the wings, and with their boredom they start coding... easter eggs.
Ok.
Let's say you buy a car. A domestic car.
It's a good car, does what it's advertised, etc. You don't have any complaints.
But then you get on the intarweb, and you find out that inside the door is a bunch of pornography. And that you need a special screwdriver to open the door to find out that the inside of the door is a bunch of low-resolution pornography. You can't get to it, unless you take apart the door with a special tool that's not commonly available, but is easily created/duplicated once discovered.
Did the car company do anything wrong?
Answer that question, and the Take-Two issue becomes more clear.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Having not seen the cheat in action, I cannot be certain.
I would guess that the sex game was a full feature for quite a while that was essentially cut do to legal liability. It is very possible that it was cut very late in development. Plenty of games ship with assets on the install disks that are not used by the final product.
This in turn would mean that the feature probably shows up as a feature in a design document somewhere. Take 2, being the publisher, probably has internal documentation debating keeping or cutting the feature, and quite possible a document that ultimately telling the developers to cut it.
Being late in development, the hooks to trigger the missions were probably just removed at a script level. And that would result in the possibility of someone restoring a few lines of game script to re-enable the code.
In any event, I dont see the big deal about this.
END COMMUNICATION
As a former Lead artist (hacking all the way back to 1988), one of our favourite tricks was to write defamatory messages (usually about a producer), using an RGB color value of 001 on a 000 (black) background. No-one ever noticed.