Friday, May 16, 2008

Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee Minigame

While in the game the player as main character Carl "CJ" Johnson can date up to six girlfriends, carrying out various "date missions" in order to improve his relationship with a particular girl.

Once Carl has become particularly close to a girlfriend, she may end a successful date by inviting him into her house for "coffee," from which Carl may choose to accept or decline. Improving relationships with girlfriends through successful dates and other related activities will eventually reward CJ with new items (vehicles and special wardrobes), along with pre-existing gameplay benefits (e.g. dating a nurse grants the player free visits to the hospital, without losing their weapons, after dying).

In the unmodified version of San Andreas, the player sees an exterior view of the girlfriend's house while hearing the muffled voices of Carl and his girlfriend as they engage in sex.

However, the Hot Coffee modification replaces this with a minigame which allows the player to actually enter the girlfriend's bedroom and control Carl's actions during sex.

None of the six possible sex scenes involve any nudity, and there are animation problems with the girlfriends' partially-clothed textures and bedrooms, suggesting the minigame was abandoned at a relatively early stage.

Third-party additions were later incorporated in the Hot Coffee modification which replace the girlfriend's clothes with alternate, nude models also originally from the game disc. These models, like most nude patches, do not incorporate visible genitalia.

Rockstar Games, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series, initially denied allegations that the minigame was "hidden" in the video game, stating that the Hot Coffee modification (which they claim violated the game's End User Licence Agreement) is the result of "hackers" making "significant technical modifications to and reverse engineering" the game's code.

However, this claim was undermined when Jay FNG Philbrook, on July 12, 2005, released an "Action Replay Power Save" for the Xbox console, and codes for the PlayStation 2 Action Replay game enhancer that allowed the scenes to be accessed in each of the console versions. These new methods of accessing "Hot Coffee" demonstrated that the controversial content was, indeed, built into the console versions as well.

The creator of the original PC mod, Patrick Wildenborg (under the Internet alias "PatrickW"), a 37-year old modder from the Netherlands, rejects Rockstar's claim that the mod required significant technical effort, pointing out that he only changed a single bit in the installed game's "main.scm" file, and that there is absolutely no new content that he actually created — every piece of the required code was already in-game, just not available to the player.

The PC mod itself is actually just an edited copy of the game script files with the bit changed. The mod was also made possible on the console versions, by changing the bit inside a user's savegame or by using a third-party modding device. Mods for the Grand Theft Auto series are nothing new.

The mod community has flourished for years creating additions to the map, new cars, and even a mod for multi-player gameplay. All of this is possible because Rockstar left the scripts open for mod makers to edit in order to have user created content. Take Two has stated that the mod constitutes a violation of the End User License Agreement even though modification of the main.scm file is common within the mod community.

The possibility of enabling the minigame by changing a single bit of code shows that the sex content is part of the game's original data, and not new content inserted into the game by the mod. However, it is not possible to access the content simply by playing the game as intended by the developers, because it was fully disabled and the bit cannot be changed by normal gameplay.

The animations are however clearly visible in the background of an early mission, "Cleaning the Hood", even in the re-released game.

This may explain why the mini-game was not simply removed when the decision was made to cut it from the game: its assets were in use elsewhere.

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