RSSGame Maker: Sex Mod Not Our Fault
By Ed Oswald | Published July 13, 2005, 2:44 PM
After staying silent for several days following the discovery of a modification in one of its games that allowed the main character to engage in sexual acts, Rockstar Games said that the modification to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is simply not its fault and should be blamed on "hackers."
The modification, known as "Hot Coffee," does not actually modify the game, according to one of the people behind it. Patrick Wildenborg says that "all the contents of this mod was already available on the original disks. Therefore the scriptcode, the models, the animations and the dialogs by the original voice-actors were all created by RockStar."
When speaking to the Boston Globe, Wildenborg said the sex scenes were an "easter egg," or a portion of the program that takes some kind of action to change it. All that had to be done was removing something called a censor flag from the source code of the program.
"If the censor flag is set, all the sexually explicit scenes are blocked from the normal flow of events," he said.
Later, in a statement on his Web site Wildenborg nearly reversed those initial comments. "All this material is completely inaccessible in an unmodded version of the game. It can therefore not be considered a cheat, easter-egg or hidden feature," the notice reads.
Several people who have viewed the scene in question support Wildenborg's claims, as it appears that the scene is professionally crafted and fits within the normal realm of gameplay.
However, in a statement released Wednesday, Rockstar denied any involvement. "So far we have learned that the 'hot coffee' modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game," the company said.
"Since the 'hot coffee' scenes cannot be created without intentional and significant technical modifications and reverse engineering of the game's source code, we are currently investigating ways that we can increase the security protection of the source code and prevent the game from being altered by the 'hot coffee' modification."
Mmmm! Hot Coffee sounds good right now. Anyone up for a round of animated porn?
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|Rockstar denies something that is evident. The hack modifies only the pointer flag in the save-game file, thus allowing the game itself to show those scenes.
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|You know.. thats like saying computer's should be 18+. While they don't come with porn as the background, you can use them to access the internet and GET porn. Just raise the rating of the game.
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|The game is rated 18+ for a reason people.
It's not the game developers fault that kids have this game and have added the Hot coffee patch. It's the parents for buying the kids this game. [/discussion]
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|Seeing how it DOESN'T have a rating of 18+ I think everyone should check this out. http://www.esrb.org/esrbratings_guide.asp
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|All I can think is... big freaking deal...
Rockstar locked the content away in the release.
Someone found a way around the locks for the PC version.
Is the original game changed? No. Only those whose owners have applied the Hot Coffee mod and only the PC version of the game (give it time for the PS2 version).
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|All I have to say is I want this mod on PS2!! You know, if sex is so bad, why doesn't someone go after the porn industry? Doesn't everyone know how much easier for little 10-year-olds to find porn online than it is for them to mod their GTA to see animated sex? Boo hoo.
Oh, and I just researched it...it's not just a cut-scene or anything like that. It's a full minigame!! You have to push buttons and what not to maintain rhythm! What a great idea!
And now I'm going to get flamed...
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|Counter Strike was a mod made by hackers too... terrorist hackers :P
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|True, true...
Maybe someone should make a mod for San Andreas that allows the player to walk around the streets humping everyone.
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|game maker : ok, lets settle this in a decent way....since this all about money, you pay me good, and I'll confess being the author of this mod you deny knowing. and since this mod already was implemented from the very beginning, you will have to pay me handsomely for me not to expose your lying and cheating miserable attitude. you will make much more money with this free publicity, so stop your pathetic act and pay up ! everybody happy !!!
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|So what? It's an M rated game. So you modify an M rated game - who would actually believe that a mod would make that game kinder & gentler? Who cares? So what if Grove St. can get their schwerve on! It doesn't matter. If video game sex is so bad, why is pr0n even legal? It's a PR problem, but frankly, this is a MEDIA-GENERATED story.
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|Even if such a hack exists, how would one go about installing it? They see on some message board that there is a "mod" available for the game to allow it to show Johnny getting his 5th gear waxed. So what? Someone had to go looking for it to activate it. It doesn't just magically appear in the game. You had to modify the original content of the game, it was not shipped with the game, that's why its called a MOD!!
Why do people insist on blaming everyone else for their problems? You install it, you modified *YOUR* game, who else does that affect? No one? So what's the big deal?
Its parents trying to find blame in a game so they can point fingers at someone, because their little "innocent" just can't do this on their own. Give me a Break!
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|I agree...in part.
I don't really think it's a PR "problem" for Rockstar - more of a PR stunt. Given the nature of the game and the average audience, it's hard to say that this is 'bad' PR, after all. I was pretty happy to hear about Hot Coffee.
I'm sure we all remember the puritanic weirdness that beset 'GTA: Vice City' - banned in Australia why? Because you can blow old ladies' heads off with a high calibre sniper rifle and cruise off in a stolen Hummer with a big dumb grin on your face? No... It was because there was a sequence in which you needed to solicit sex (gasp!) That says a lot more about the purveyors of standards and censorship than it says about the games IMO.
Rockstar certainly intended for this mod to be easy to make - I'm sure they would have included the sex scenes as a part of the game proper, if they thought they wouldn't have to go through the same slavish b*lls*** for the right to publish their games in the face of such immature backwater censorship laws.
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|Hey! This is America! No one takes responsibility for their own actions...it's just not the American way! You have to find someone else to blame.
I have to laugh at "protecting" all these 16 and 17 year old kids. At 17, I was in the military...a launch control operator on a nuclear missile site (yeah...okay, that was in 1962)...and not long after that, 17 year old kids were getting their butts shot off in Vietnam. I don't think sex would have sent any of us for psychological counseling. Now, it seems, we have people living in a fantasy world, where their 16 and 17 year olds are supposed to be walking around carrying teddy bears and living the "innocent" life. These parents would probably be shocked to death if they had a clue what their kids knew.
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|lol
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|Of course...hackers managed to break into security and every copy of the game managed to slip through without one genius programmer noticing the thousands of extra lines of assembly language in it. EASTER EGGS ARE ON PURPOSE. Almost everything has easter eggs, if it's there they can be sued. Blaming this on hackers is probably the biggest stretch I've ever heard. It's downright funny.
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|they are still just using this as ANOTHER excuse to throw dung at rockstar and the GTA games. Its a witchhunt and its bulls***
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|Yeah, maybe, but Rockstar is sure giving a pretty stupid excuse, and for a game that already has--"scenes", Rockstar is sure trying hard to deny any involvement...
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|What a joke.
RockStar is for sure behind this. It is an easter egg. It's already there but it just took a bit of nagging to get to it.
I like how they try to blame it on the "hackers".
RockStar is a joke and so are those games.
Get a life.
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|So the hell what if rockstar put an easter egg in the game... whether it was residual or intentional... it took a HACKER to unlock it so why the hell should they be blamed?
furthermore, wtf is the difference between a M+ rating and an adults only rating? the first u have to be 17 and the second u have to be 18.... who the hell cares?
so why are they a joke? and why are the games a joke? sounds like hatin to me
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|Rockstar clearly put the sex in at some point in the games development and the causes of why it was removed are realy unknown. Being that it has no way of being opened via codes or doing any kind of task withen an un moded game it clearly is not a secret or an easter egg either.
I think it can be debated that rockstar disabled it in such an easy way so hackers would notice and un lock it so the game would have there intended sex, but without them having to claim responsibility for it though.
I also think a bunch of diffrent hacks ar being mixed up on this as well as theres several mods to open this. Some are simple and only unlock what rockstar made and others are higly advanced and required major moding to graphics to make the charectors nude.
Myself, I coudlent care less what the truth is as it's just not that big of a deal.
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|i think its widely believed and accepted that YES ROCKSTAR DID PUT THIS STUFF IN THE GAME.
theres no disputing that...
the issue now is whether its a BIG ENOUGH deal to warrant an investigation. even if they DO find rockstar at fault... what are they going to do? order everyone to take their games back? please, the damage is DONE... the game was fun already without the hack so in the future, they wont be allowed to put that kind of stuff in the game and nothing will change...
people are getting their panties in a bunch for no reason.
just relax (to those who would have a cow about this)
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|"even if they DO find rockstar at fault... what are they going to do?"
Probably TRY to sue their A$$es off. All about money. Still, I DO blame Rockstar for this, and their excuse makes them look pretty stupid. Really...hackers found the original actor and added content to the game? Yeah those darn hackers, ruining a perfectly harmless game (sigh).
"i think its widely believed and accepted that YES ROCKSTAR DID PUT THIS STUFF IN THE GAME.
theres no disputing that..."
Again the mod doesn't exploit anything much worse than what's in the game already (from what I hear--I have no desire to play a game like this). The bad part is that Rockstar is acting so stupid about the accusations, and IS DENYING it was in the game. Still its not much worse than the material already in it I'm surprised they're so determined to deny it was in there...
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|"The bad part is that Rockstar is acting so stupid about the accusations, and IS DENYING it was in the game."
-agreed... they changed their story.
they would have done better to just acknowledge it was there and that it was unintentional for it to have gotten revealed instead of denying they put it there in the first place, lol
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|diff is it's illegal for a 17 year old to look at porn while 18 is sufficient in most states
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|Fortunately, it's perfectly acceptable for a 17 year old to look at car theft, murder, mayhem, drug use, highjacking, assault and whatever else a video game may offer....but heaven forbid that their "innocent little 17 year old minds" encounter consensual sex.
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|look, lets face it, censorship is very hard, some countries allow certain things that other contries consider out of order,
yes it's safe to assume that this material was intended, and further more rockstar wanted this material to be unlocked, so the person playing it can have the full realism that is out there on the streets people. no more differnet then having the director's cut on DVD,
i personally think that considering the game content and theme, this material is needed, as with all what goes on in this game it's just a missing real life element tacken from the game,
i have to say my hat goes of to rockstar for waying up the morals and using the posistion of applusable deniability and hope that they continue to do such things on games in this genre in the future, because lets be honest, if parents have got such debates about these sex scenes, how can they stand there and say "but the rest is ok" it's a game based on real life events, but just turned up a few gears a bit like james bond films,
and lets at least respect that these few thousand line of code took a long time to produce and was more and likely done from one of the sole programmers and was not done as a team decission, but i still have to say, as a parent, that i would not let my child play this sort of game anyway, in fact considering some of the other content i've seen in the game, SEX is not the problem at all, it's the parents buying the games for there children at xmas, or birthday, now that is the real problem what lays underneath this situation.
i can't believe all the things this game offers, and it's SEX what brings people shouting out, the one natrual and very real life element which is the thing whats slated the most, i suppose theft, killing, weapons, and blowing up every emergancy service there is is considered ok. go firgure???
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|Sen. Hillary Clinton is now taking this to the FTC in a move some perceive as a ploy to get Democrats viewed as in synch with family values.
Rockstar cannot plead guileless ignorance of what they place in code any more than of what they put in the story line.
The opening story intro was surely created to get the likes of Rev. Al Sharpton aligned as allies.
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|NOW THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!! Hillary Clinton interested in Family Values!!! WHOOOOOT
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|my question is, why is H. Clinton playing GTA:SA and why is she installing Coffee Mod .. Seems shes a bit of a pervert like the sum of us lol
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