ManaByte said:It's a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge fine for not disclosing everything when you send in your tape/forms to the ESRB.
Yes, but AFAIR, this only applies to content that's accessible to the player as part of the game experience, which this was not. You can't normally get at that content by playing, regardless of what you do in the game. It's only accessible via an unauthorized modification of the game itself, one which Rockstar neither encouraged nor condoned. It took a hacker on a fishing expedition to find and enable the sequence in question.
Other people here have already mentioned that disabling particular chunks of code rather than yanking them out wholesale is hardly unheard of, particularly late in development, and that this occurs for good reason. Giving Rockstar more than a slap on the wrist for shipping SA with what was intended to be a deleted minigame because they didn't delete it well enough would hardly be just, IMO.