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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?
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
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...)
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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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.
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.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
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.
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