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Hot Coffee Makes List of Dumbest Business Moments 53

Posted by Zonk from the that-was-pretty-stupid dept.
Via Next Generation a list of 2005's Dumbest Business Moments, which rightly lists the Hot Coffee debacle as one of those ignoble icons. From the article: "In June a Dutch programmer releases software that lets players of Take-Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas access sexually explicit content left in the game's source code by its developers. Already marked 'Mature' for 'blood and gore, intense violence, strong language, strong sexual content, and use of drugs,' the game gets rerated 'Adults Only,' causing Target and Wal-Mart to pull it from stores. Take-Two's quarterly revenues fall $40 million short of projections."
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Hot Coffee Makes List of Dumbest Business Moments More

Hot Coffee Makes List of Dumbest Business Moments

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  • the only one? (Score:3, Funny)

    by X0563511 ( 793323 ) * on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:54PM (#14574293) Homepage Journal
    Am I the only one around here who is so SICK of hearing about this it makes you want to break stuff?

    • <Jack Thompson> (Score:5, Funny)

      by idonthack ( 883680 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:03PM (#14574379)
      it makes you want to break stuff
      Obviously, the effects of this extremely violent and sexually explicit game have taken their toll on you.</Jack Thompson>

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sj0 ( 472011 )
        When that man took the suicide of a young person as an opportunity to blast a gaming community, he stopped being funny.

        He's a disgusting human being who will piss on someones grave to get his point across. It's a disservice that we can't legally shut him up.
  • No matter how dumb it is, it makes media taking about it over and over again.

  • I wonder why a bunch of others are not on this. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Avillia ( 871800 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:55PM (#14574315)
    The Sims, World of Warcraft, and a thousand others who display at least partial/censored nudity which have third-party modifications which show full nudity of characters.

    • It is completely different. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As far as I know, San Andreas is the only game where the binary already contains the explicit material. I.e. for the Sims, WoW, and other games, the nude patches and what-not are generated in their entirety by third-party modifications. Or to really dumb it down, the "bad stuff" is (was) ON THE SAN ANDREAS RETAIL DVD. You just download a patch that unlocks it (or you can just use a hex editor). The "bad stuff" for the Sims, etc, are full-blown modifications containing skins, models, textures, etc, that
    • Its because the majority of commentators and politicians were ranting on about something they have not actually played and know absolutly nothing about (I can really see Hillary Clinton downloading the millions of various add-ons and hacks to popular games).

      The whole event reminded me of a TV programme which aired here in the UK about 4 years. The TV programme was a satire on the way the media love to really overdo stories on phedophilia. While not actually condoning it at all, it was immediatly blastered i
      • You're thinking of the Brass Eye [wikipedia.org] special on paedophilia, which was created by Christopher Morris. My girlfriend and I are currently halfway through watching the original series (we are on a kind of Chris Morris binge) on DVD, which includes the special. They're very, very funny. Especially the way they got celebrities of the time to talk about complete rubbish (such as the dangers of a made-up drug called "Cake").

    • Re:I wonder why a bunch of others are not on this. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Feanturi ( 99866 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @09:48PM (#14575054)
      Actually I did read someone somewhere, might have been Jack Thompson, ranting that The Sims was a tool for pedophiles to practice seduction techniques on kids. They stated it was made even worse by the nudity patch, which the author of course had an enourmous problem with, however the article had strongly emphasized that the game was pedophilic enough without mentioning the patch.

      I think that for somebody to come up with that suspicion, they've got to have some issues. It takes one to know one...

      Tom Lehrer knew this:

      "Old books can be indecent books
      Though recent books are bolder.
      For filth, I'm glad to say,
      Is in the mind of the beholder.
      When correctly viewed,
      Everything is lewd.
      I can tell ya things about Peter Pan,
      And the Wizard of Oz - there's a dirty old man!"

  • Strange (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eightyford ( 893696 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:57PM (#14574333) Homepage
    I find this surprising. I would have guessed that all of the publicity would have actually helped the game, and I wouldn't have been surprised if Take-Two let the Hot Coffee easter egg out on purpose. Usually bad publicity is good publicity (Public Enemy, 2 Live Crew).

    • Re:Strange (Score:2, Informative)

      by NetRAVEN5000 ( 905777 )
      Normally you might be right, but in this case the rating got bumped up to "AO"("Adults Only") causing Wal-Mart and other stores to take it off the shelves.

  • best one (Score:5, Insightful)

    by corbettw ( 214229 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:59PM (#14574345) Journal
    20. He's a perfect 10 -- a 1, plus 9 glasses of sparkling Lambrini!
      Having barred alcohol marketing that associates drinking with sex, British regulators block an ad that shows women imbibing Lambrini sparkling wine while using a fishing pole to hook a hunky guy. The Advertising Standards Authority says the ad violates its guidelines because the guy "looks quite attractive and desirable to the girls." It would pass muster if only he were "overweight, middle-aged, balding, etc." The company then runs a version of the ad using a paunchy, chrome-domed model.

    Yeah, cause showing a bunch of drunk women getting so horny that even a fat bald guy looks good doesn't violate any standards linking sex and alcohol, does it?

  • Something Even Dumber (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikeswi ( 658619 ) * on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:16PM (#14574492) Homepage Journal
    It was absolute stupidity to leave the sex stuff in the game, but they followed it up with something even more stupid. The second release version of GTA:SA is completely incompatible with the first.

    Save files will not work between versions, so if you went to a message board and asked someone to play a mission you can't get past, it wouldn't work. The people who take the time to help people in this way all run the first release. Anyone needing help at this point are people who have recently bought the game, meaning they have the second release.

    Someone has hacked around this now. You have exchange script files from the two versions, play the game and save it, then run another script to fully convert it to the other version.

    But wait! There's more!

    The second release cannot be modded. At all.

    The new executable looks for a checksum value in the script files. If they've been modded, the game crashes out. The majority of people who buy it on PC already have it on PS2. They bought the PC version ONLY because they wanted to install or create mods. And they go and remove all mods, because someone discovered Rockstar's stupidity of leaving a sex mission in the game.

    This may have changed by now, but Rockstar continued to advertise it as having support for mods, so that you can change the game as you wished. False advertising anyone? That's a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act, right?

  • Maybe for them (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) * <fidelcatsro&gmail,com> on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:27PM (#14574567) Journal
    Stupid for take 2 perhaps , although like the first utterance of "Fuck" on TV in the 1960 , they may have pushed the boundaries that little bit further .. not intentionally mind you and they were the victims of a witch hunt* because of it . I think though that in the long run we may all benefit , perhaps it looks a little grim right now with all the Vote currying , but after this dies down and is forgotten then we may notice the changed landscape and what is acceptable .
    Parents may also for once take an interest in what their child is playing and deem for themselves if it acceptable or not , but that is just a pipe dream

    *Wondering If I should replace Witch hunt with a more modern but relevant term ,such as Satanic Ritual abuse scare.. but that would be too long.
    Perhaps we could call it a Hot Coffee : A moral panic surround Games

    • Re:Maybe for them (Score:5, Funny)

      by Feanturi ( 99866 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @09:56PM (#14575097)
      Let me try it on...

      "Wow, those guys really pulled a Hot Coffee."

      "Watch the content Bob, we don't want a Hot Coffee on our hands."

      "Miss Smith, can you please give me a Hot Coffee? What? Harrassment suit? Why?"

      Hell, two out of three aint bad, let's use it.
  • ...that journalists are frequently wrong.

    "...access sexually explicit content left in the game's source code by its developers..."

    While I'm sure that Hot Coffee was in GTA's source code, that's not how it was found by the outside world. Source code means the code in C++ or whatever they used to program the game. Where they found the content was in the game's binary. This is pretty damn basic distinction, yet the journalist didn't get it. Once you start looking around, you'll notice these kinds of small erro

    • I don't think the journalists got it wrong. They didn't say that people found the sexually explicit content in the source - they said that people found it because the developers left it in the source. That's true. The reason it appears in the binary is because it was included in the source. If the developers had been responsible, they would have made sure that their joke was not in the code that was released. Sure, they could have done that via conditional compilation ("make noporn"), but by far the safest

    • Wouldn't it have had to be in the source code in order to appear in the binary?
  • that something such as sex. . . which is an act that creates life causes more of an uproar than an act which takes a life.. So GTA:SA you run around senselessly killing and destroying property, but when they throw in some scene where you have to do some crazy process to get this small glimpse of sex the game is pulled from the shelves. seems backwards don't ya think :)

    Isn't it easier to just google the word "sex" ??
  • ok - this has to be added to the 'dumb business moments'...
    saw this on stupidvideos or one of those.
    http://www.stationaryisbad.com/rubberband [stationaryisbad.com]
    (btw - when you first see the video what you don't figure is that its actually an msft ad)
  • Anybody else noticed that tfa points to page 1 but starts at number 11?? Here's the first page. [cnn.com]

    Haydn.

    • Anybody else noticed that tfa points to page 1 but starts at number 11??

      Given the choice of text to put in the link, I'd say they decided to point directly to the page with the content in question...

  • "Business Moment" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MoogMan ( 442253 ) on Friday January 27, 2006 @06:33AM (#14577313)
    Hot Coffee Makes List of Dumbest Business Moments

    It wasn't a business decision (read: not their choice, they probably were oblivious to it)
  • I know at least a dozen people off the top of my head who went out and got GTA: San Andreas just because of the whole Hot Coffee thing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the whole ESRB fiasco was expected by Rockstar. Who wouldn't take a bit of a hit to increase sales in the long run? I would guess that the majority (if not all) of the type of people who play GTA: SA are the types of people who will want to see the mod. Murder and violence in the game, but no sex? C'mon now, what kinda thinking is that?

  • Yeah I'm sick of hearing about this too.

    If your kid has Internet access, yes he can download the Hot Coffee mod. It takes a deliberate action though. It's not something that gets accidentally enabled. It's something that Rockstar was working on but didn't become part of the final game. I don't see this as much differnet than buying a car with the build sheet left under the carpet.

    But hell if he can download Hot Coffee, he can download tons of mods/skins/pictu
  • 71. Phantom menace [cnn.com]

    In October the board of Infinium Labs reveals that chairman Timothy Roberts is under investigation by the SEC for allegedly sending junk faxes touting penny stocks -- including shares of Infinium, maker of the little-known Phantom game console. The board also announces that financial reports prepared by Roberts, the company's CEO before he resigned in August, should not be relied on. A month later the company's new CEO, Kevin Bachus, also resigns. The board -- which still includes Roberts

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