Gta v hot coffee: Hot Coffee — GTA5-Mods.com

nkinoman worked on the translation

Waking up, Patrick Wildenborg was disoriented. As the father of a one-year-old son, he was no longer surprised by unexpected noise awakenings in the middle of the night. But this time it was different. It wasn’t the screams of a baby that woke him up, but the shrill ringing of the phone. Eyes half closed, Wildenborg reached for his pipe. “Hello, is that Patrick?” The accent on the other side of the phone was clearly from a native New Yorker. “We’re calling from Rockstar. Game developer. We want to thank you for what you have done.»

July 14, 2004 Sam Houser, CEO and co-founder of Rockstar Games, emailed Jennifer Coleb, CEO of the company. Most other businesses would label the content of this email as “NSFW”

Here are some examples of content that will be displayed graphically :

1) Oral sex
2) Copulation (in various positions)
3) Use of a dildo (including the ability to kill someone with it)
4) Whipping (can be whipped)
5) Masturbation (one of the characters is an avid amateur; we MUST leave this)

All of these items are demonstrated using cat -scenes (video clips during which the gameplay stops), as well as inside the game itself.

He continued: “In GTA: San Andreas, we’re going to include a huge amount of new gameplay elements and environmental interaction. In addition to violence and profanity, we want to add sexual content to the game, which may not be understood by some people, but, in my opinion, is quite natural (more natural than violence), especially since the game is aimed at an adult audience. ”

Indeed, the sexual content described by Houser in the letter has already been made somewhere in the bowels of Rockstar North in Scotland. The team was finalizing an anticipated sequel to the GTA series, set in the fictional US state of San Andreas.

After the hit Vice City, the hype around the upcoming San Andreas was huge, and Rockstar wanted to push the limits of the new game.

Max Clifford, a renowned publicist, called Rockstar’s multimillion-selling TV series «an unbearable child» of the gaming industry. However, the studio’s ambitions were far greater than the «ruler of the media industry» supposed. Their goal was to turn to the «dark side» of modernity, touching on taboo topics that have been explored by cinema for many years: organized crime, public shootings, car theft, drug trafficking, marginal behavior, traffic violations and sex. All of this has been present in past games in the series, including the latest, Vice City. Except maybe sex.

Sex was a taboo subject for video games, even though Hollywood was saturated with it. For years, Houser’s games have forced players to be violent in the virtual world. Now covering the topic of sex was a “natural” step for video games to achieve the same creative freedom that has been present in literature and cinema for many years. Removing sex scenes from San Andreas would be a betrayal of the original idea, a self-restraint that hurt the game, turned it into a repetition of the past.

However, Houser was aware of a fundamental contradiction inherent in Western culture: a tolerant attitude towards violence and rejection of the topic of sex. Sex: A flush of embarrassment on America’s cheeks. Coulb’s response letter could have been a blessing in making a difficult decision, and the burden of responsibility was placed on her shoulders. But it was also a way for Hauser himself to weigh the pros and cons, an attempt to justify his own position. “I know this is a slippery topic,” he wrote at the end, “but I want to find a way to make this idea come true. ”

Patrick Wildenborg was born in 1969 to a simple family in a small town in the east of the Netherlands. In 1984, his parents bought him his first computer, a Commodore 64. Like many teenagers at the time, Wildenborg used it primarily to play games, but soon his interests began to affect the process of creating games. Studying books and magazines, he began writing his first software.

Patrick Wildenborg, better known as PatrickW, is still developing software.

The hobby grew into a passion and then a profession, and in 1995 Wildenborg received a master’s degree in computer science. The Dane met the girl of his dreams, married her, and the couple traveled around the Netherlands while Wildenborg tried his hand as a software developer. In 1999, the family had their first child, and Patrick began to spend more time relaxing with video games.

“I was a casual gamer and never had a particular game or series,” he says today. “I started playing GTA quite late. Some time after the release of Vice City, I took a friend to try it. Maybe it was the setting and the music, or the humor and the action. It doesn’t matter why, but I just fell in love with this game. When I went through the storyline, I did not want to play something else. I went through additional tasks, look for hidden packages and so on. It was the first game that I completed 100%.”

A lot of time passed in the hunt for the secrets of Vice City before Wildenborg joined the community of players. “In the course of searching for all the secrets in the game, I searched the Web for information and met members of the online fan community,” he writes. “They had all the information they needed, and more than that, they were obsessed with the game that I loved so much.” As he interacted with people from the fan clubs, he found a way to combine his love for the game and a longtime passion. “I found out that people create mods for GTA. Given my experience as a developer, I was fascinated by mods that added new features to the game. So I started experimenting with it myself.”

Wildenborg’s first mod got rid of one of the little things that annoyed him — the inability to store more than four cars in the garage. In a game full of fancy cars, this seemed like a cruel limitation for a novice modder. His «Marine Car Park Mod» allowed 40 cars to be stored in a garage, creating a parking lot for players to store their treasures. His work was successful and promoted him in the hierarchy of the community. He was among the best developers, those who could not wait for the release of San Andreas and were already discussing what could be improved in the new product.
“There are definitely two issues that need to be sorted out…”

Jennifer Coleb’s response to the list of sexual acts that Sam Houser hoped to include in GTA: San Andreas was strictly to the point. “First is the ESRB and how much we can afford before we go from Mature to Strictly Mature, which takes away 80 percent of our distribution channels. Secondly, this is retail and how we can bring content to a new level of frankness, show everything at the same time clearly and vaguely, respecting the boundaries set by conservative retail chains.” Seems like sex sells everything except video games.

Coulb made it clear that the addition of mini-games with sex acts could result in a hard rating for the game, which would put off most of the American networks that sell the games. This left Houser in a dilemma: should he cut the sex or let the company lose a lot of money.

On August 17, 2004, only eight weeks before the scheduled release date, Houser wrote a message to the staff: “Sex graphics cannot be shown in the game with the age rating we are targeting. The scenes that we are going to include in the game will definitely be considered prohibited.”

Coulb provided a list of corrections that were required to achieve the «Mature» rating. Houser replied, “It’s STRONG, STRONG more than I expected. It’s not just crazy to cut so much — look at the films and everything — it will take a lot of time and the quality of everything else may suffer from this . ..

Is this really the limit of our capabilities? I just can’t believe. Such large-scale changes will definitely affect the development time. Tell me if this is really your final position.”

Still painfully aware of the unfairness of the situation, Houser wrote in another letter:
“Are we sure these are necessary changes? As I told Terry (Donovan, head of Rockstar Games at the time), I was blown away by the amount of fixes needed. Editing is just needed everywhere, and we clearly haven’t crossed the line yet. Why stress? I really, absolutely would not want to change that. These orders from nutty, capitalistic Mormon retailers seem SO wrong to me.”
However, the financial cost that such a decision would have caused was obvious: failure to fix controversial issues deprived the game of a large part of the audience. Now the main problem was to understand how to remove inappropriate material from the game without spoiling its functionality in such a short time before release. The company needed an emergency management meeting where managers could discuss the situation. During the meeting, Houser explained: “You can’t just cut something out of the game.”

He insisted on an alternative solution to the problem: instead of removing the content, the team could «mask» the sexual scenes so that the code with them would remain on disk, but would not be available to the players.

As he subsequently wrote in internal correspondence: “We blocked this content because there was no other way to do it in the allotted time without creating bugs and problems. The parts of the engine are very tightly integrated, and every detail reacts to absolutely everything. The consequences of simply taking something out scared us.”

The decision has been made. Sex remained, but it remained hidden. To the dismay of the modding community, Rockstar decided to launch the Playstation 2 version first and then the PC version. The reason was that the console code was harder to crack and modify.
“Of course I was wildly excited to see a new game back then and got more and more excited as the hype on the Web grew,” says Wildenborg. He didn’t have a PS2 himself, but he could play it at a friend’s house. The very first minutes of the game convinced Patrick to get a console. “It was just amazing — a huge map with many locations, a magnificent soundtrack and exciting missions. In parallel, I began to study the game from a modding point of view. We couldn’t create mods for PS2, but we wanted to learn the file formats beforehand so we could be ready for the PC release.»
Code analysis of the game began in December 2004, a month after the Playstation 2 release. However, for the first month, most of the modders were active players themselves. After we got to the source, we found that several animation files had names associated with sexual acts. It didn’t catch our eye at first because there were nightclubs and prostitutes in the game, as well as sex in the background in some of the cutscenes. » File names included ‘SEX’, ‘KISSING’, ‘SNM’ and ‘BLOWJOBZ’. One of the modders, Barton Waterduck, created a viewer that would extract information from the game, change the format of the animations, and render them as moving rough character wireframes. Despite the fact that primitive skeletons were moving on the screen, the results were amazing: more than frank scenes took place on the screen, nowhere seen in the game.

After some time, Waterduck was able to overlay character models, including the main character, CJ, on the animations. He wrote about the discovery in a closed group for modders discussing their developments: “I found CJ in the game, fucking on the floor like a rabbit.”

In some versions of the mod, the characters remained dressed as Rockstar intended. Other versions used models with naked characters, which were also found on the game disc.

But the true extent of the find made by the modders was still not clear. “At the time, we assumed they were unused animations left over from early game development,” says Wildenborg. “Nevertheless, there were mentions of these files in the scripts. Since I was mainly involved in the analysis of scripts, I decided to understand what they were and if there was any code in the game that could shed light on why those animations were needed. The code snippets in which the answer was located were quite confusing, and I spent quite a lot of time and effort to understand what and how it works. The deeper I dug, the clearer it became that that code was not left from the early stages of production, but was completely completed, albeit hidden from prying eyes.
“About March 2005, I realized that we could get this code to run if we could break the security that was preventing it from working. However, with the PS2 version, we couldn’t do that. Our only chance was that Rockstar would leave these pieces intact in the PC version delayed until June.”

All that remained was to wait.

The release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on PS2 was a triumph. As of October 31, 2004, the end of the financial year and only the fifth day of sales of new items, 20.9percent of the annual income of the publisher Take-Two brought one game — San Andreas. In the first two months, 5 million copies were sold.

Despite the wild success of the project, Sam Hauser was still obsessed with hidden scenes. On November 25, 2004, he wrote a letter to the game’s producer, Leslie Benzies, about the PC version of the game coming out the following summer. “We need to explore all options for adding additional content. Find out how much more we can push the topic of sex… no matter how crazy it may seem.

Benzies replied, «We’ll put the sex scenes back where we wanted them to be.»

Houser’s idea was to release two versions of the game on PC — with a softer rating and marked «Adults Only». “We will reach heights that the rest did not even dream of,” he later wrote.

Despite the strong reaction from the public, the sex scenes in the game were planned solely in a humorous way.

Not everyone at Rockstar was happy with the offer. In January 2005, Houser wrote another letter to Benzies, which raised the sales department’s doubts about the rationale for launching two versions of the game: «They think we will face strong opposition to the game if we go too far.»
The team reached a consensus. The game was supposed to come out the same way as it did on PS2, and then there would be an “Adults Only” patch for it, which, according to Sam, was supposed to “let the darkness out”.

Wildenborg and his friends decide to keep their discovery a secret until the game is released on computers. They were afraid that too much attention to the find could cause Rockstar to cut the content completely before the modders could figure out what exactly the code was doing.

June 7, 2005 The PC edition of San Andreas hit the shelves in the US three days before the European release. “One of my friends in the States sent me a copy of that script from the game disc. I edited it to redeem the code and sent it back. 15 minutes later I got the video.”

The video showed that the content was not just a hidden cutscene, but a couple of mini-games. In one of them, which Wildenborg called the «spanking game», players could give CJ a good spanking by rhythmically pressing the button and increasing the value of the «EXCITATION» bar. In the «copulation game,» the gamer moved the analog stick to control sexual intercourse and increase the arousal bar. The hero models were fully clothed and it was hard to see anything erotic in them. However, it was still the most explicit game content that Wildenborg had ever seen in a video game.

“That was the moment I decided to release the patch to the public. I named the file «Hot Coffee» because CJ’s game girls used «shouldn’t we have coffee» as a euphemism for sex. Hot Coffee was the first mod for San Andreas.” Although the European release was still two days away, and Wildenborg did not have his own copy of the game, he had already managed to spill “hot coffee”.

On the day of the release of the PC version of San Andreas, Sam Houser was in San Diego to oversee the development of the studio’s new game, Red Dead Redemption. Two days after the appearance of «Hot Coffee», 9June 2005, there was tension in the office, or in Sam’s case, outside the office. It all started with news that Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, had been ordered by a court to pay a $7.5 million fine after a 2-year SEC litigation. The reason was the falsification of earnings data by management in order to increase their quarterly bonuses. That same evening, Sam saw that the forums were filled with discussions of the mod for San Andreas.

“This mod,” read the banner behind the modding site, “adds sex scenes with your girls to the game. Rockstar built this into San Andreas themselves, but later removed it for unknown reasons. We are bringing this functionality back to the game so that everyone can enjoy the most complete version.”
Houser rushed to call the New York office, but only measured beeps were heard on the receiver. According to an employee who wished to remain anonymous, Rockstar’s advertising department was instructed at the time: “Don’t answer calls or comment. Soon things will get much, much more serious.”

Four days later Houser wrote to Benzies: “They found those scenes. Will we have problems? I hope not, because it’s damn cool.”

In July 2005 Patrick removed the mod from the web as a token of support to Rockstar.

Less than a month later, the ESRB launched an official investigation to see if there had been a violation of their rules.

“No one expected such a stir. Everyone around seemed to have gone crazy, and the installation numbers broke all records. Over a million people downloaded the mod in the first month. Members of the forums found the mod fun, and gaming sites wrote about it — so the first reaction to its appearance was positive, ”says Wildenborg.

But after the ESRB investigation began, the story was picked up by the larger media. “In the days that followed, the controversy reached unimaginable proportions. I felt in the middle of the battlefield when newspapers and TV channels rushed to call and write to me.” Danish TV took up residence on his lawn while the house phone rang with calls from CNN, the New York Times and ABC News. “The media attention has greatly affected the lives of my family, causing a lot of stress and irritation. I was concerned about the implications of all this for my family and career and declined to comment.”
“After some time, attention began to fade. Fortunately, my employer was open-minded and supported me. He hired a team of lawyers in case the name of his company comes up in the proceedings. Fortunately, this did not happen. Later, I even talked about this incident at informal presentations for several departments.”

To avoid press attention, Wildenborg posted some explanations on his website. He made it clear that the mod only worked when modifying the original game, and the sex scenes were not available without additional intervention. “That night I got a call from Rockstar. They wanted to thank me for that statement… At first I thought it was a prank, but in the morning I also received an email. I think these comments calmed the guys from the rating agency for a while.”

However, the story developed progressively. On July 12, 2005, a day after Wildenborg’s call, the company issued an official statement blaming «a group of hackers who discovered a serious vulnerability in the final version of the game» for the situation. The public relations department was keen to put all the blame on the modders, even telling the Rolling Stones that the authors of the sexual content were «not affiliated with the company.»

The modding community was furious. “R* is a bunch of stupid p****s,” wrote one pissed off user. “They are trying to demonize modding and make us look like criminals.” Others wrote: “They openly lie and frame Patrick. I’m sure that there… the heads of those who left all this untouched in the game will roll. ”

Corey Wade, an executive at the company, later admitted that they had chosen the wrong strategy: “Letting it all down to hackers was a colossal miscalculation by the PR department. It was a complete disaster… they lied.” The tactic didn’t work. On July 20, 2005, the ESRB changed the game’s rating to Adults Only. America’s four largest retail chains — Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Circuit City — have taken the game off the shelves. Rockstar was forced to withdraw all copies until the release of the new edition, in which the controversial content was completely cut.

As word spread about Hot Coffee, the situation began to attract the attention of politicians. Senator Hillary Clinton ordered the Federal Trade Commission to launch its own investigation. Take-Two attempted to incriminate violation of federal laws under the pretext that “by only slightly covering the prohibited content, and not removing it, the defendant deliberately created the conditions for the detection and dissemination of prohibited information. ”

Hilary Clinton’s face superimposed on the Statue of Liberty in the sequel to San Andreas, GTA 4.

The panel concluded: «In our expert opinion, it was obvious and inevitable that there would be people who could discover and make this content public after the release of the PC version of San Andreas.»
In January 2006, Sam Houser entered the FTC building in Washington DC. He volunteered there to answer questions regarding whether Rockstar intentionally cheated on the ESRB to avoid an uncomfortable rating. The commission had already received tens of thousands of letters from the company’s internal archives, and Hauser commented on them for nine hours.
«You’re sitting in a room like this… you, your lawyers, and all these investigators in front of you,» Houser later recalled in an interview with 1UP. “They have your correspondence in their hands and they ask: “Why did you put this word in quotation marks? Why did you do that? Why did you do that?”… It’s not that easy to answer, is it? Few of my fellow developers have been in this situation… I knew these people wanted to destroy us, and given the chance, they would do it without a shadow of a doubt. ” In June 2006, the Commission acknowledged that the game’s marketing was misleading, but did not force the company to pay out huge sums. Although Take-Two was not punished, Rockstar made it clear that if the law was violated again, the company would face much more serious measures. The publisher is committed to “accurately and explicitly disclose full product information, including ratings, on packaging and in all forms of advertising.”

However, ordinary citizens have been suing Rockstar for years. Finally, in September 2009, Take-Two paid $20,115,000 in a class-action lawsuit against disgruntled plaintiffs. Five years after Houser’s discussions about sex as a natural part of GTA, the company has paid the price in full for its choice.

However, the boss of the studio did not forget the insults inflicted on him. In GTA 4, which takes place in an alternate version of New York City, the face of the Statue of Liberty has replaced that of Hillary Clinton. Instead of a torch, she clutched a cup of steaming coffee in her hands.

Today, Wildenborg has no regrets: “If I went back in time, I would do the same. Not the fact that this mod would not be released by someone else. Plus, it’s a great story for parties and grandchildren,” he laughs.

But no one at Rockstar is in a hurry to share the details of that story. One of the employees anonymously explained that «Hot Coffee» brought too much trouble and is not discussed even within the company. As Sam’s brother Dan Houser said in an interview with The Guardian: «It was exhausting and frustrating — in short, then there were difficult times.» Even former employees are afraid of the consequences of the stories about what happened then. One of the people I tried to contact told me that he forwarded the correspondence with me to his legal representative and did not plan to continue the conversation. With such huge sums involved in that case and potential risks, no one wants to get involved in a new conflict and admit their participation in the creation of controversial mini-games.

Amidst all the drama, political disputes and lawsuits, there is still an obvious contradiction in the Hot Coffee story. Wildenborg himself describes it best: “From my point of view, there is no reason why this sexual content cannot be included in the game. After all, the game was already rated Mature. Why can a 17-year-old boy run around a virtual city with a weapon, kill cops and beat up passers-by, but cannot make love to a girl after a long relationship? I don’t understand how Americans can find this more shocking than all the brutality in the game.»

Perhaps this culture war cannot be won by a single warrior. Houser could have tried to argue to the ESRB that the game’s relatively chaste sexual acts were not equated with pornography. Perhaps, with so many shareholders, the risk was too high. Maybe the defense did not have enough time to prepare the necessary evidence. In any case, it was much easier to comply and cut the controversial pieces of the game.

However, the consequences of history were still significant. In addition to financial damage, employees also suffered emotional damage. Rockstar has yet to discuss this story with the press or with fans (the company declined to comment for the article). Blaming hackers for everything, the company moved away from its most devoted fans. The rash decision showed how unprepared the company was for an ideological battle in a war in which multimillion-dollar revenues keep game developers from showing sex in their projects.

grand theft auto san andreas gta sa gta san andreas hot coffee Rockstar North San Andreas copyright gta san andreas story story

the most detailed story of the grand scandal

GTA San Andreas

Posted by Splinter

01-12 03 :30

25

Not for the first time this year, Patrick Wildneborg was disoriented. Being at home with a one-year-old child, he knew what it was like when a sudden noise pulled you out of sleep. But this awakening was different. It was not the scream of a child that had caused him, but a sharp phone call at night. Without opening his eyes, Wildenborg picked up the phone.

“Hello. Patrick?» The voice on the other end of the telephone line clearly had a New York accent. “This is Rockstar. Game developers. We want to thank you for what you’ve done.»

Beginning

On July 14, 2004, Sam Houser, President and Co-Founder of Rockstar Games, wrote to Jennifer Kolbe, COO:

]
— Full sex (multiple positions)
— Sex with a dildo (including the ability to kill someone with a [yes-yes] dildo)
— Whipping (when whipped)
— Masturbation (one of the characters is very passionate, this MUST be saved).

All this will be displayed in the cut-scenes and in the game.

And he added:
“In GTA San Andreas, we’re looking to include new features that match the atmosphere of the game. To that end, in addition to profanity and violence, we want to include sexual content. This, I understand, raises questions from some people, but it is quite natural (more natural than violence), especially since the game is intended for adults.

Over the years, Rockstar has encouraged gamers in their games to act out violent scenes on monitors and televisions. And the appearance of sex was only a natural evolution of this idea. But Houser understood the essence of the contradiction that reigned in Western culture: tolerance for violence and total intolerance for sex. His e-mail to Kolbe was a kind of petition for a blessing, and, at the same time, an opportunity to shift the decision about the appearance of such content on her shoulders.

The letter ended like this:
“This is a very complicated matter. But I want to find a way to make it work.»

Patrik

Patrik Wildneborg was born in the Netherlands in 1969 to a working-class family. In 1984, his parents bought the first home computer, a Commodore 64. At that time, Patrick was only 15 years old and used it only for games, but soon his interests expanded to the point that he began to make these games. Specialized books and magazines helped him in a difficult task.

The hobby became a calling and Wildneborg graduated from the university in 1995 with a master’s degree in computer science. Then he met a girl who became his wife, and in 1999 they had their first child. Patrick found an outlet in the games — only spending time with them, he really relaxed.

“I was a casual gamer and never dedicated myself to a particular game or series,” he says now. — I came to Grand Theft Auto relatively late. Some time after the release of Vice City, I borrowed a game from a friend. Maybe it was the setting and the music or maybe it was the humor and the action, I don’t know. But in the end I found the game very attractive. When I finished the main story, I didn’t want to stop playing. So I started doing side missions, looking for secret packages, etc. It was the first game that I completed 100%.»

It was time to hunt down many secrets of GTA Vice City when Wildneborg made contact with other players. “While searching to uncover all the secrets of the game, I scoured the Internet, and that’s when I began to contact the fan community. They had the data I needed and besides, they were crazy about the game. And I loved her too.»

“With my background as a programmer, I was fascinated by mods that added new features to the game. So I started experimenting and trying my hand.»

Patrick’s first modification corrected his biggest disappointment in Vice City: being able to keep only four cars in the garage. His «Marine Car Park Mod» allowed up to 40 cars to be stored in game memory and was very well received by the fan community. This lifted him up the modder career ladder (if that was even possible) to the very top, and he began to discuss with his comrades the imminent release of GTA San Andreas and all the opportunities for experimentation that a new game could provide.

Jenifer

“Of course there are two issues to deal with… First is the AO (Adults Only) rated ESRB, which will automatically take away from us 80% of the distribution channels that we have with the Mature rating. .

The second question is working with retail. How to raise the level of content, staying within the vague boundaries, and work with conservative retailers?”

Sex seems to sell everything except video games. And the Rockstar COO knew it.

Sam Hauser:
“Censorship around the world. I don’t feel like we’re pushing any boundaries right now. I seriously, seriously don’t want to change our stuff. Because he only feels SO wrong at the behest of psychos, capitalists and Mormons.”

But on August 17, 2004, Sam Houser, president and co-founder of Rockstar Games, wrote a letter to his employees: should now be reviewed.»

Jennifer Kolbe organized a list of abbreviations to be organized for the M rating. Houser replied to this:

“This WAY… this WAY is more than I expected. Not only is it just crazy to edit a comedy like this one, but it will also take a lot of time and turn into a long job.

In an emergency meeting, along with top managers, Hauser explained, « not everything can be removed from the game.»

He came up with an alternative solution: instead of removing the sexual content cleanly, the team could just close a part of the code. It will still be present on the disc, but it will not be usable in the game.

In an internal email he sent out later, Sam explained:
“We will block it because we don’t have time to do it more securely. The code is very intertwined with the game and removing it will affect everything else. It’s too late to change things so drastically, and it’s scary.”

The decision has been made. Time is money, so sex in GTA San Andreas remained, but already in a hidden quality.

Penetration

“Of course I really wanted to see the new game,” says Wildneborg. But at that time, Rockstar made a disappointing step for many — they released San Andreas on PS2, ignoring the PC.

But the modding group started tinkering with the game’s code within a month or so of GTA SA coming to PS2.

“Once we started looking at the code, we noticed several animation files that referred to sex acts. In itself, this was not surprising, because in the game there are strip bars, nightclubs and prostitutes, sexual activity is also there (although it is not shown explicitly).”

The files had tempting names like ‘SEX’, ‘KISSING’, ‘SNM’ and ‘BLOWJOBZ’. And some mysterious modder, Barton Waterduck, recoded them for viewing, which allowed the scenes to be rendered as animated skeletons. The result was astounding: sex acts that didn’t exist anywhere in the game.

Later, a way was found to visualize sex using Carl Johnson and other models from the game. On a modding forum, Barton Waterduck described it like this: «He was there, CJ, on the sidewalk, fucking like a rabbit.»

But the modders didn’t yet understand what they had stumbled upon. “Our assumption at the time was that they were abandoned animations that weren’t used in the development of the game,” says Wildneborg.

“When I started to dig deeper, I realized that this is not just animations, but a fully working system, only someone tried to make it inaccessible. Around March 2005, I no longer doubted that I could run this code if I could remove the flag that prohibited it from executing. But that wasn’t possible on PS2, so we had to wait for the PC version that Rockstar promised in June.»

On the crest of success

Everything was just perfect. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has become a real commercial triumph. Just five days after the game’s release in North America, its sales accounted for 20.9% of Take-Two’s total revenue. And in the future, sales of the game exceeded five million in two months.

Despite the resounding success, Sam Houser continued to be haunted by the ghosts of the deleted scenes.

On November 25, 2004, he wrote to producer Leslie Benzies about a PC version that was going to launch next year:

“Explore any ideas for additional content. Look how hard we beat sex … to be outlawed.

Benzies replied: «We’ll get the sexual content back the way it was.»

Hauser’s ingenious plan was to release two versions of the game, one rated M (no sex) and the other AO (with sex). But not everyone at Rockstar shared his thoughts.

In January 2005, he wrote to Benzies lamenting the sales department’s concern about the dual release: «They’re worried we’ll get a lot of backlash if we take the PC version too far.»

The Solomonic decision was finally made: release the game in the same form as for PS2, and then release an AO-rated patch that unlocks sex scenes and, as Sam called it, «Unlocks darkness. »

A secret around the world

Wildneborg and his comrades decided to keep their discovery until the release of the game on PC. They were afraid of getting media attention and that Rockstar would remove the hidden content.

June 7, 2005, three days before the European release, GTA San Andreas was released in the US. “One of my fellow modders from the US sent me a copy of the script file,” explains Wildneborg. — I edited it with a hex editor and turned off the notorious flags that blocked the content. I sent it all back and fifteen minutes later I got the video.”

The video sent to Patrick did not show cut scenes, but a couple of playable mini-games. In one, it was necessary to flog CJ’s girlfriend in order to raise the «Excitement» indicator. In another game, with the help of an analog stick, it was necessary to reproduce sexual intercourse with acceleration. There was no ending and the characters were all dressed up, but this was the first time Wildneborg had seen such intense sex scenes in a video game.

“It was at this point that I decided to release the patch to the public,” he says. — I named the file ‘Hot Coffee’ because some of Carl Johnson’s girlfriends called him for coffee, as if hinting at sex. Hot Coffee was the first mod for San Andreas.»

And now, without his copy of the game, two days before the release of San Andreas in his homeland, Patrick Wildneborg spilled «hot coffee» on the fan community and the world community.

Houser’s home loss

On PC launch day, Sam Houser was in San Diego overseeing the development of the upcoming Red Dead Redemption game. On June 9, 2005, a couple of days after the release of Hot Coffee, the office had a very busy day. And for Sam, out of the office. It all started with the news that T2 was ordered to pay $7.5 million in fines for some accounting miscalculations and misreporting. And then, at noon, Hauser stumbled upon a mod.

He called the Rockstar office in New York, but no one answered. All because the employees made the only wise decision — not to answer all the phone calls.

Four days later, Sam received a letter from Benzies:

“They found him. It won’t cause problems? I hope not, because it’s very cool.»

Less than a month later, the ESRB announced a formal investigation into the content that «Hot Coffee» exposed to see if a rule violation actually occurred.

Nuclear explosion

“At no point did any of us expect this to blow up the internet,” says Wildneborg. — The community just went berserk, and more than a million copies of the mod were downloaded in four weeks. Most people found it very funny. In the first weeks, in general, the opinion about him was very positive: gaming sites and gaming channels only talked about it.

But when the ESRB came on the scene, it got media attention. “Over the following weeks, the controversy grew at an absurd rate,” recalls Wildneborg. — I felt like I was in the center of a hot spot, various media called me and recorded interviews. Dutch television was stationed outside of my house, while CNN, New York Times, ABC News and others just called on a regular basis. This greatly affected my family life, resulting in a lot of tension and irritation. I became concerned about the consequences and stopped doing any interviews.”

Soon, attention to the modder in particular began to cool down a little.

In an attempt to further distract the media, Wildneborg posted an explanation on the website. He made it clear that the mod changes the source code, and without it there is no way to get this content from the standard version of the game available at retail.

“That’s when I got a call from Rockstar from their New York headquarters,” says Patrick. They said they would like to thank me for this statement on the site. At first I thought it was a boyish prank, but they confirmed their identity by mail the next day. I think at that point they thought it was enough to get the ratings board guys off their tail.»

No luck

But the story was just picking up speed. On July 12, 2005, Rockstar issued a statement in which themselves blamed Hot Coffee and referred to «a certain group of hackers who went to great lengths to change some scenes in the official version of the game.» The developers decided to release their version of events, which was roughly how they voiced it for Rolling Stone magazine: “Creating Sexual Content did not occur within the company.”

The modding community was furious. Quoting all messages from angry people simply does not make sense, since they will almost all consist entirely of *******.

Later, Corey Wade, senior manager at Rockstar, admitted that he had chosen the wrong defense strategy:

“Putting the blame on the hackers was a colossal failure. It was a total disaster… it was a lie. ”

This is probably why Wade’s tactics failed. Too many lies. On July 20, 2005, the ESRB changed the rating of GTA: San Andreas from Mature to Adults Only 18+. The four largest US retailers — Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Circuit City — have removed the game from their shelves. Rockstar hurriedly began to create a version of the game in which the content of Hot Coffee would not be available even with the Wildneborg mod.

Since the mod caused a real uproar in society, this issue began to be politicized at the highest level. Senator Hillary Clinton called on the Federal Trade Commission to conduct its own investigation. A case was brought against Take-Two. The plaintiffs alleged that «the developers knew that adult content could be made available to the general public.»

In January 2006, Sam Houser appeared in person at the FTC to answer questions about the ESRB deception. For nine (!) hours, Sam answered all the questions that people had about this scandal.

Over the next few years there were a wild number of lawsuits, FTC agreements with Take-Two, and potential fines placed on Rockstar if this happened again.

Finally, in 2009, the last lawsuit was finished. In September, that is, almost five years after Sam Houser said that sex is a direct part of Grand Theft Auto, all financial penalties (more than $ 20 million) were paid in full.

But Rockstar wouldn’t be rockstar if they didn’t keep their last word. Hillary Clinton’s garden stone appeared as her face on the Statue of Liberty in GTA 4. And instead of a smoking torch, she holds a coffee mug there.

Today

Today, Wildneborg has few regrets. “Looking back,” he says, “I still would have published my mod anyway. Because if not me, then someone else. I will have something to tell my grandchildren when I am old and wise.”

But none of Rockstar would want to play this old song on a record again. One of the employees says that Hot Coffee is simply an indecent topic in the company and it is a taboo to talk about even among friends.