A really good article about the GTA:SA Hot coffee incident..
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-30-who-spilled-hot-coffee
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-30-who-spilled-hot-coffee
Not for the first time that month, Patrick Wildenborg was disoriented. With a one year-old baby in the house he was familiar with the fug of a deep sleep cut short by noise. But this awakening was different. It was prompted not by an infant's wail but the hysteria of a telephone ringing in the night. Eyes still closed, Wildenborg lifted the receiver.
“Hello, Patrick?” The accent on the end of the line was unmistakably New Yorker. “This is Rockstar. The game developer. We want to thank you for what you've done.”
On 14th July 2004 Sam Houser, the president and co-founder of Rockstar Games, wrote an email to Jennifer Kolbe, the company's operations director. At most other firms, its contents would have been considered 'NSFW'.
“These are some examples of content that will be displayed graphically:
■[Oral sex]
■Full sex (multiple positions)
■Dildo sex (including being able to kills [sic] someone with a dildo)
■Whipping (being whipped)
■Masturbation (one of the characters is compulsive; this MUST be kept)
“All of these items are displayed through cut-scenes [a "cut-scene" is a cinematic sequence during which game play stops] and in-game.”
He continued: “In [GTA: San Andreas] we are keen to include new functionality and interaction in line with the 'vibe' of the game. To this end, in addition to the violence and bad language, we want to include sexual content, which I understand is questionable to certain people, but pretty natural (more than violence), when you think about it and consider the fact that the game is intended for adults.”
please read the whole thing.. it´s really good stuff.On 17 August 2004, just eight weeks from GTA: San Andreas' scheduled release date, Houser wrote to the team explaining: “Graphic displays of sex cannot be shown in a Mature rated game… The sex scenes that are in San Andreas currently are going to be considered graphic."
Kolbe assembled a list of the cuts required to guarantee the game an 'M' rating. Houser replied: “This is WAY, WAY more than I expected. Not only is it insane to edit comedy like this - look at movies and everything else - to do so is going to be a lot of work and will screw with things…
"Is this really as far as we can push it? I just cannot believe that. Changing this stuff will absolutely have a time impact. Let me know if this is really the final position.”
Still smarting from the apparent injustice of the situation, Houser wrote in another email: “Can we confirm that these are the content changes that need to be made? As I mentioned to Terry [Donovan, then CEO of Rockstar Games], I was pretty shocked by the list. The cuts are everywhere. It doesn't feel like we are pushing any boundaries now. Why bother? I really, really do not want to change this stuff. It feels SO wrong at the behest of psychotic, mormon [sic], capitalist retailers.”
But the commercial imperative was clear: fail to make the cuts and the potential audience for GTA: San Andreas' could be restricted by the ratings board. The question now was how to extract the explicit material without breaking the wider game's functionality so close to release. An emergency meeting was called so that the senior managers could discuss a solution. During the meeting Houser explained: “You can't always take a thing out of a game."
He had an alternative solution: rather than remove the content, the team could 'wrap' the sexual scenes so that while the relevant code would still be present on the game disc, it would be impossible for the player to access from within the game
As he put it in an internal email sent at a later date: “We locked it away because there was no other way to get the game done on time - safely. The code is very interwoven in [GTA] and everything reacts to everything else. The impact of yanking something late is too scary.”
The decision was made. The sex would remain, but the sex would remain hidden.