Wonder what that thing does for this:
July 11, 2005
In Video Game, a Download Unlocks Hidden Sex Scenes
By STEVE LOHR
Action video games are renowned for serving up simulated gore and violence, but an intriguing mystery surfaced last week in which politics, business and simulated sex feature prominently as well.
With some code written by Patrick Wildenborg, a 36-year-old Dutch techie, and a few friends, some scenes in the best-selling video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas become sexually explicit.
His free code, which can be downloaded over the Internet, acts as a software key, Mr. Wildenborg explained. He said it merely unlocked the sexually graphic images that are hidden inside the game and written by programmers who work for the game's developer, Rockstar Games, which is owned by Take-Two Interactive, a leading game publisher.
Mr. Wildenborg's program has become quite popular since it was posted on a Web site last month. By last week, the effects of his software handiwork came to the attention of Leland Yee, a California assemblyman, who has long called for legislation to curb the sales of video games to children. In a statement last Wednesday, Mr. Yee chided the game industry's self-policing unit, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, for failing to properly rate Grand Theft Auto as a game for adults only.
In taking on the Grand Theft Auto series, Mr. Yee was going after a well-known target. "This particular game has been known to include extremely heinous acts of violence," his statement said, "and now it has been uncovered that the game also includes explicit sexual scenes that are inappropriate for our children."
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is not intended for younger children. It is rated M, or mature, for players 17 years and older. The national electronics store chains sell M-rated games, but tend to avoid adult-only titles.
The game rating board said on Friday that it would investigate Grand Theft Auto to see if the publisher had violated the industry rule requiring "full disclosure of pertinent content."
Mr. Wildenborg's program, called Hot Coffee, is known as a mod - for code that modifies a game. Such programs have helped spread the popularity and lifespan of many games by adding features and flourishes not imagined by the publishers. For the most part, the industry encourages these hobbyist contributors.
Whether the publishers will be held responsible if they wrote, and then hid, the sexually graphic scenes is not clear. The sexually explicit scenes do not appear with a few keystrokes, as happens with software "Easter eggs" - typically names, messages or games hidden in programs. The graphic episodes in Grand Theft Auto cannot be rendered unless a user downloads the Hot Coffee code or a similar program.
"At the end of the day," Mr. Wildenborg wrote in an e-mail message yesterday, "Grand Theft Auto is not a game for young children, and is rated accordingly." The hidden graphic images, he added, are "not something it is possible to accidentally stumble across" in the course of playing the game.
Representatives for Take-Two or Rockstar Games could not be reached for comment yesterday. But Rockstar issued a statement on Friday that said it was confident that after the rating board's inquiry, Grand Theft Auto would retain its current rating, M, for mature.
