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Take Two Investigated by New York Grand Jury

Posted by Zonk on Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:15 PM
from the they-switched-to-tea dept.
The Courts Games
cjm182 writes "Over a year after the infamous sex minigame (aka Hot Coffee) was found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the New York District Attorney's office has subpoenaed Take Two Interactive and its subsidiary, Rockstar Games. Reuters reports that a grand jury requested documents relating to 'company officers' and directors' knowledge about the creation and inclusion of the 'Hot Coffee' minigame. This marks the first time Take Two has been asked to provide documents directly relating to the incident. Last week, GamePolitics.com ran an editorial calling for the U.S. Congress to subpoena Take Two directly, rather than criticize the FTC and the ESRB over the incident."

Related Stories

[+] Games: ESRB Ratings Unfairly Targeted? 53 comments
John Callaham writes "The US video game ratings system created by the industry and the ESRB has come under attack in recent months, but is it really all that bad? FiringSquad decided to take an informal retail survey and compare how the ESRB rates games to how the movie and TV industry rates DVD releases." From the article: "One person who has been highly critical of the ESRB system is Leland Yee, the California Assemblyman who authored the bill that was signed into law last fall in that state that would ban the sales of certain games with violent content to minors (the law is currently not being enforced pending the conclusion of a court case started by the video/PC game industry). When the study of content descriptions in M-rated games was issued by Harvard earlier this month, Yee was quick to send out a press release ..."
[+] Games: FTC and Rockstar Settle Hot Coffee Dispute 295 comments
kukyfrope writes "The FTC and Rockstar/Take-Two have reached a settlement surrounding the 'Hot Coffee' mod for GTA: San Andreas that will serve to prevent future incidents. The FTC has stated that Rockstar and Take-Two must disclose all content to the ESRB when rating games, or face an $11,000 fine per violation if undisclosed content is discovered. 'Parents have the right to rely on the accuracy of the entertainment rating system. We allege that Take-Two and Rockstar's actions undermined the industry's own rating system and deceived consumers,' commented Lydia Parnes, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection."
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  • shocker: people knew (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 192939495969798999 (58312) <info AT devinmoore DOT com> on Thursday June 29 2006, @12:19PM (#15628903) Homepage Journal
    Here's another shocker: They probably wanted it to be discovered for the publicity... but they probably figured it would stay an underground thing. They apparently forgot that it's 2006 and people now spend way too much time "thinking of the children". Back in the day, games would have full on hidden swear words, etc. hidden in there, and it never made the news or whatever. Heck, who hasn't been to an arcade and seen some creatively NC-17 vulgarities on the high score boards?
    • Who could have thought anyone would object to clothes-on softcore adult material in a game rated M ("for Mature")?

      A few days ago I watched a South Park episode called "Fun With Weapons" where the kids accidentally hurt someone with their real weapons, b
      • Ok.

        Let's say you buy a car. A domestic car.

        It's a good car, does what it's advertised, etc. You don't have any complaints.

        But then you get on the intarweb, and you find out that inside the door is a bunch of pornography. And that you need a special screwdr

    • accident maybe? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by alphaseven (540122) on Thursday June 29 2006, @01:02PM (#15629383)
      It's entirely possible it was left in accidently, people with hex editors find stuff left over from earlier builds all the time in games. For example, Bioware got criticism for Kotor II when people found dialogue from a more elaborate ending left in the game (suggesting the game was rushed) and a Japanese preview demo for the game Xenosaga III accidently included all the dialogue for the game. Those weren't Easter Eggs, that was stuff that the companies wished they hadn't released.

      On a related note, I read an interview with the people behind Indigo Prophecy were they said they had to take extra care to make sure none of the code for the uncensored European release was in the American version. Normally you would could REM out some code but because of the Hot Coffee incident they had to make a more thorough audit of the code.

      Even though I think this got blown way out of proportion, I'm very curious to what really happened.
      [ Parent ]

    • Re:shocker: people knew (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Chazmyrr (145612)
      The last time I spent money in a coin-op arcade, they were still using initials on the high score boards. It's pretty hard to fit an NC-17 vulgarity into 3 letters. Of course, that was back in the day. I don't remember any hidden swear words either. Maybe

      • The parents that don't want their kids exposed to nudity have every reason to be upset.

        You're absolutely correct. They can get *upset*. The problem is that they also get *litigious*. What happened to good old fashioned "getting mad and dealing with it

      • You make an important point, and certainly one that gets little respect in the Libertarian-heavy /. crowd. However, the real issue is that the whole issue of parenting has become political in a sense that your comment is fairly naive about. The problem in

      • Oh please - I use the initials "ASS" every chance I get.

      • What nudity? Hot Coffee does not contain any. What are you talking about?

        • It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a user who merely has different values, views, or ideas, and a user who is intentionally trolling

          You know its possible to do both at the same time, right? Just look at all the George Bush fanbois.

  • not just hot coffee... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by freshman_a (136603) on Thursday June 29 2006, @12:24PM (#15628943) Homepage Journal
    1up.com [1up.com] had a little more detail on the "other issues" -

    New York's District Attorney is looking for information covering a number of issues, including knowledge of company officers and directors regarding the Hot Coffee's development and subsequent failure to remove from the shipped game; the game's submission to the ESRB and any admissions to Hot Coffee (or lack thereof, really); disclosures and presentations of acquisitions, partnering arrangements and earnings results; invoices from, payments to, and termination of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and retention of Ernst & Young LLP; acquisitions in 2005; certain compensation and human resources documents; and documents concerning the board of directors and committees.

    If I'm reading that right, I think the Hot Coffee mod should be the least of their worries. The mod may not be a good thing, but the other stuff looks like it has the potential for worse legal repercussions.

    • Re:not just hot coffee... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      TakeTwo was already delisted once (temporarily) for financial irregularities (misreporting of quarterly financials over a two-year period). The Hot Coffee part of the subpoena is likely just to bring attention to the rest of the grand jury stuff -- the NY
    • earnings results

      There's       the real reason this is happening, right there. Because of Hot Coffee, the shareholders made less money in dividends that quarter than they thought they would from such a guaranteed mega-hit. In any other environment it would be

  • Look Deeper (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheRequiem13 (978749) <therequiemNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday June 29 2006, @12:31PM (#15629019)
    The documents Take Two hands over will have pictures of supreme court judges fornicating on every page, drawn in invisible ink on top of the boring Memos.
    • where one of the judges recently got tagged and is under trial for meddling with a penis pump during trial of actual cases at the bench.

      he may not know pornography, but he'll know what he likes.

  • Who Knows ? (Score:2, Funny)

    by brufar (926802)
    I highly doubt the Directors or Officers of Take Two said "Gee lets insert some Sex Scenes in the game !!"

    Then again with how hard the programmers are usually pushed for deadlines, when would they have time on their own to insert a "side quest" ?

    • They probably did say "let's add a sex minigame" but then they considered how much that freaks those Americans out so they decided to remove it again.
    • From my experience in the dev world, easter eggs are usually created near the end of the development cycle. This is when you've had an entire team coding like mad for months, then tell all but five (or two) of them to stop as (nearly) all the features are

  • Timing is everything (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Volante3192 (953645)
    I'm also sure that this coming within meer months of an election is purely coincidental...nothing like a good porn in otherwise respectable video games story to bring out the best in people.

    Remember, not only do we "Think of the Children"(TM), we remind yo

  • A Barbie game has similar - but never found (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I spoke with developers of one of the earlier Barbie games and they talked about what incredible drunken fun it was to have access to 3D models of Barbie and her Horse - and indicated that hidden in one of the games in an intresting "scene" (in the bondage

    • yes (Score:1, Troll)

      by swschrad (312009)
      the alleged content is totally age-inappropriate and should not be in the consumer package. they can put all the hacksmut they want on the development server hidden deep in the bowels of the office, but if any of it gets out on releases, it should be decl

  • The dumb thing is.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2006, @01:11PM (#15629508)
    The stupid thing is that the ESRB's M rating is supposed to be equivalent to the MPAA's R rating. The AO rating is supposed to be equivalent to an NC-17 (or worse) rating.

    The Hot Coffee scenes are not NC-17 material, they're R material. There's no wang, there's low quality pixelated boobs, etc. If you've seen any good sex/violence R movies, you've seen worse than Hot Coffee. So either the rating system needs to be addressed or there's a double standard between video games and movies.

    I'm all for Take Two getting in trouble for not removing unused questionable content, however crucifying them for what should be a rerating from M to M is getting out of hand. Of course, the ESRB went with the flow and rerated the game to AO.
    • The problem is that computer games are still seen as an activity for children, despite what the ESA has said [theesa.com] based on their research. Therefore, any violations are judged much more harshly and it's easier for accusations of obscenity find a willing audien
  • The game had the appropriate rating of "Mature" from the very beginning. The hot coffee mod should not have changed that. Yes, they may have witheld hidden game content from the ESRB, but it was not content that was a) accessible through normal play b)
  • Is it just me or do other people find it ridiculous that with all the problems going on in the world, that a video game company is being taken to court over a hidden/unfinished and unaccessible (unless hacked) portion of the game that depicts sexual activi

  • It was probably a cut feature (Score:3, Informative)

    by LordZardoz (155141) on Friday June 30 2006, @07:44AM (#15635456)
    Having not seen the cheat in action, I cannot be certain.

    I would guess that the sex game was a full feature for quite a while that was essentially cut do to legal liability. It is very possible that it was cut very late in development. Plenty of games ship with assets on the install disks that are not used by the final product.

    This in turn would mean that the feature probably shows up as a feature in a design document somewhere. Take 2, being the publisher, probably has internal documentation debating keeping or cutting the feature, and quite possible a document that ultimately telling the developers to cut it.

    Being late in development, the hooks to trigger the missions were probably just removed at a script level. And that would result in the possibility of someone restoring a few lines of game script to re-enable the code.

    In any event, I dont see the big deal about this.

    END COMMUNICATION
    • Umm have you see the hot coffee mod? Its unfinished work. Obviously scraped from development early on.
    • You make a some really good points about what they were probably doing. But why is the government involved?

      The ESRB is "a non-profit self regulatory body that independently assigns ratings". The quote is from their website. How does that in any way have
      • But why is the government involved?

        Because Take Two is a publicly traded company. It is not just the ESRB and game buyers who may have been defrauded. The Take Two *investors* may have been defrauded as well, they were not aware of all risks that the c
        • It is a subpeona for evidence relating to what they knew about the mod and how it was disclosed to the ESRB. Companies that put games up for ESRB ratings essentially sign a contract and agree to disclosure.

          This would be a valid point if the ESRB were suing

    • Re:Bravo, I say (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Thursday June 29 2006, @12:45PM (#15629170) Homepage Journal
      The problem I have with your argument is that it would take kids less effort to locate and download some hardcore porn than it does for them to locate, download, and apply this patch. (Not that it's hard, but it's 50% more steps) :) There's no way to unlock this content with any official product/download. If they offered a patch to enable hot coffee, then I'd agree with you. They didn't.
      [ Parent ]
      • And.... it's animated porn. It's not even real porn. It's a couple animated characters having animated sex. Can that poissibly be more harmful than real porn? Aren't kids already supposed to know the difference between real and make-believe? (Not tha

    • Re:Bravo, I say (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kihjin (866070)
      ... the potentiality of parents letting their children play.

      I would think that this "potentiality" should be very very close to zero anyway.

      Then, lo and behold, there's a whole bunch of D and E hidden in the game that was never advertised, and it was pret

    • Re:Bravo, I say (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vertinox (846076) on Thursday June 29 2006, @01:10PM (#15629496) Homepage
      Take Two and Rockstar should have known the possible consequences of what they were doing.

      Not really. It would be like a construction working putting pin ups of Playboy or Hustler between the drywall and insulation and then you finding it 5 years lader when you are knocking down a wall.

      I mean the construction work is at fault, but is the company who did it really to blame? Unless the contractor foreman sat there and watched the guy do it, then you can't really blame the company with anything other than poor managment.

      Its not like it is company policy or a design issue to do these things.

      It may have been an oversite... Like during construction one of the workers was making obscene woodcarvings in the studs of the house (no pun intended) and the foreman comes over and says "Hey you can't put that there! Get rid of it!" and instead of removing the studs with the obscene word carvings, the construction worker puts drywall over it to save himself time.

      That is most likley what happened with hot coffee. The programmers put it in there thinking it would be cool and the manager says "Guys we can't have this in game! we'll get an AO rating!" and the programmers just wall it up like the lazy construction worker since it would require more effort to hunt down and remove all the code than just remove its accessbility.

      Still... We shouldn't be wasting tax money over this issue in persuing selective morality in the courts. We want ethics in our courts so it would be best suited to going after Take Two's alledged fraud.
      [ Parent ]
      • I mean the construction work is at fault, but is the company who did it really to blame? Unless the contractor foreman sat there and watched the guy do it, then you can't really blame the company with anything other than poor managment.

        Not likely. It was
        • If you think you can keep track of everything that has been added to and/or removed from code that is being worked on by a team of programmers for years. You obviously never worked on a big project like this. There is way to much going into these games and
        • I think it was somewhere in the middle. The programmers probably realized that enterprising individuals would find the content. They simply didn't expect the level or public backlash it would generate.

          The moral of the story? Never underestimate the pow
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