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Coffeegate July 17th 2005
When I read earlier this week that
Hillary Clinton was calling
for an investigation into the alleged sexual content hidden inside the
video-game Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas, my knee-jerk reaction was skepticism. (just about anything
that comes out of Hillary's mouth, I immediately doubt, as almost all of it
is self serving half truth's) So I started doing some digging. I don't like
jumping to conclusions, and I try to get all my facts straight before I weigh
in on an issue. As the saying goes, when you assume, you make an ass out or
you and me.
It turns out that this whole debacle started when a hacker in the Netherlands by the name of Patrick Wildenborg released a code that would allow players to go into certain areas of the game that were restricted before, to witness, and take part in sex acts. (without the code being enabled, all you would see is the outside of the house, and hear sounds making innuendo's)
The hack (called "Hot Coffee") first popped up on the PC version of the game, which unlike its console counterparts is much more susceptible to code modifications. But quickly has moved to both the Xbox and Playstation 2 versions of the game. (through the use of cheat devices like the Gameshark & Action Replay)
When this hack was only available for the PC I was leaning towards the conclusion that this was a pretty complex reworking, that drastically modified the content of the game, and inserted new motion capture data, to make the models do things that were not originally programmed into the game. But now that the console versions can be changed perform the same way, it is becoming increasingly obvious that this content was most likely left in the original program by the developers at Rockstar.
I feel that GameDailyBIZ put it best when they wrote
While "it's definitely, theoretically possible," that a modder could have created all-new content for San Andreas, the fact that new codes for the cheat device Action Replay make it possible to play the "Hot Coffee" scenario in the PlayStation 2 version of the game makes it highly likely that all the code is already present on the game disc as shipped.
"It's simply not possible that an Action Replay code could have all that animation data or control... this code is literally a few numbers, which is not enough to [create that content] from scratch. The code doesn't even change any of the files on the disc; all that does is after the game is loaded into memory it's changing memory locations—it's changing the contents of code which is in the PS2's memory at that point."
That pretty well
has me convinced that this falls on Rockstar's
shoulders. The only question left is one of intent. At best they're guilty
of some really lousy house cleaning when packaging this game for public consumption.
At worst they have maliciously insterted porn into a game marketed to teenagers.
So they're either morons, or smut peddlers.