Ramblings, just ramblings
GTA hits stores again
Published on October 23, 2005 By Amitty In Gaming
So, Grand Thieft Auto: San Andreas, has hit stores again.

Hundreds of thousands of copies of Rockstar's massive game were recalled due to a unlocking of a scene with the help of the Action Replay code device for the Xbox. Called the 'Hot Coffee' mod, when unlocking the code, you can watch a adult scene with your character and his girlfriend. Ironically enough, Rockstar claimed that they didn't really know it was in there, but with remarkably little pressure, they decided to recall and rewrite the coding for the game to exclude this unlockable scene.

While there is always some controversy surrounding Rockstar's flagship franchise, I think that it shows incredible good side to recall a lot of games for something that can't normally be seen. The full functionality of the game is still there, after all, the code was tiny compared to the costs of what Rockstar probably had lost in the recall and in the lack of sales while the mistake was correct.

It is a good thing to see a company make a decision like this, even when under attack for releasing a game.

Comments
on Oct 23, 2005
This was no act of good-will. After the shit hit the fan, the ESRB upped the rating on GTA:SA to Adult Only. An AO rating means WalMart, BestBuy, CircuitCity etc will NOT carry your game, and with WalMart being the single biggest videogame retailer in the world, you don't want to lose WalMart sales. The decision to remove the content and rerelease a "clean" version was almost definitely mandated by Take Two Interactive, the game's publisher.

Remember, Rockstar at first tried to push the lie that the Hot Coffee deal was an illegal mod, that the content wasn't anywhere on the GTA discs themselves... until someone showed how to "unlock" it on the console, where you can't add game mods. If they weren't big enough to admit the mistake in the first place, I doubt the recall and rerelease was a graceful thing, an attempt to "do the right thing"

Basically, there was a LOT of pressure on Rockstar to recall and rerelease the game.