The following is from GamePolitics.com:



A group of hardcore gamers who delight in tweaking Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series feel they've been ill-treated by the Entertainment Software Rating Board.

The ESRB's July 20th press release announcing its findings in the Hot Coffee scandal reads, in part, "Going forward...the ESRB calls on the computer and video game industry to proactively protect their games from illegal modifications by third parties, particularly when they serve to undermine the accuracy of the rating."

Late yesterday GamePolitics was forwarded an e-mail sent to the ESRB by GTA mod maker illspirit, who is also an occasional visitor to this site. The e-mail was prefaced by these words:

"Dennis,
I though you might be interested in this letter send by the administration of GTAgarage.com (which happens to be the centre of the GTA modding scene).
PatrickW"

We waited until this morning to publish the information, as we sought confirmation on its legitimacy from Patrick Wildenborg, the now famous Dutch modder who revealed the existence of Hot Coffee to the world in early June. Since Patrick has provided that confirmation, here is the text of the e-mail:

*From:* illspirit
*To:* ***@esrb.org
*Sent:* Monday, July 25, 2005 10:39 AM
*Subject:* Fw: The ESRB has lied to us all

To whom it may concern,

We just fired this message off to Senator Clinton, Assemblymember Yee, and the rather excitable Jack Thompson. Your attacks on the customers you are supposed to protect are reprehensible to say the least. The gaming public knows very well you have rated more explicit games as "M" than what is contained in the allegedly obscene content (hot coffee) which you have admonished us over. Granted, your demonizing of the mod community may be only PR and politics, but we do not appreciate being a tertiary scapegoat for you to pass the already misplaced blame of irresponsible parents along to. So, please, find another patsy.

Just thought it would be fair to give you the heads up we never got.

Cheers,
the administration of gtagarage.com



----- Original Message -----
*From:* illspirit
*To:* *"Recipient List Suppressed"*
*Sent:* Monday, July 25, 2005 9:36 AM
*Subject:* The ESRB has lied to us all

Dear Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Yee, and Mr. Thompson

In recent statements by the ESRB, they have accused the mod community of undermining their ratings by putting sexually explicit material into PC games, namely San Andreas, which was already rated "M". However, if you look into a game by the name of "Singles - Flirt up your Life", it becomes quite clear they are doing a good job of that all by themselves. This "M" rated game features full frontal nudity (and not androgynous "barbies" like The Sims) and characters engaging in interactive sexual scenes. Screenshots of this game can be seen over at IGN: http://media.pc.ign.com/media/667/667197/imgs_1.html

And for that matter, what of the game "Playboy: The Mansion", which is based on the skin magazine, and is also rated "M"?! Seeing as these game contains *far* more graphic depictions of sex than anything found in San Andreas, including the scenes involving nudity which we modded into the game (by default, "Hot Coffee" did contain fully clothed actors...), how exactly have we undermined their rating? If anything, what was left on the disc by Rockstar and modded into the game by us doesn't even come close to what the ESRB itself considers "M" material, let alone rising to their very own standards of "AO". To blame the mod community for this is not only hypocritical, but quite deceptive as well. Not to mention the fact that they've essentially had one title banned for containing "pornography", while they let more explicit games
get by them.

For the record, we feel that "M" is an appropriate rating for these games, as their contents are no worse than R-rated films which have long been considered "okay" for ages 17 and up. However, we do agree with you all that that the ESRB is a big joke. Especially now that they're attacking their own customers for content which they obviously don't seem to have a problem with. Why should we the consumers be persecuted for adding something to a game which the ESRB has already demonstrated as perfectly acceptable for titles in the "M" range? San Andreas originally carried a warning for "strong sexual content", and judging by heir previous ratings, we would insist that we released the "Hot Coffee" mod well within the ESRB's (apparently broken) guidelines.

Best Regards,
the administration of gtagarage.com

EDITOR'S NOTE: GP has requested comment from the ESRB on the gtagarage letter.

Puhleeze. Now this is getting outta hand. The last thing I'm gonna do is applaud some groups effort to attempt and legitimize the sale of pornography to minors.

Yes, I enjoyed playing GTA, though I never applied "Hot Coffee" to it, and I don't see much of an interest to add such a hack. As an adult gamer I find Hot Coffee to be a bit overboard, and don't see it being much of an interest to other adult gamers. Therefore, the only attraction to such a mod is probably teen gamers. I know if I was in my teens, this sort of thing would have attracted my curiosity.

So, why would Rockstar add such content knowing it would be illegal for teen viewing? Particularly since teens are their bread & butter when it comes to sales.

GTA was obviously developed with the teen demographic in mind and the sexually explicit content was their controversial shock & awe advertising gimmick.

Yet again we fall prey to the entertainment industry demeaning the morals of society as a way to gain profits. Its just a shame they target children.

Well, if we went by the ESRB, this game shouldn't be in the hands of minors in the first place.

I have to give some credit toward GTAGarage though, sticking up for modders and hackers alike is no tough job. I really hope that the ESRB will respond to this... Along with Hillary Clinton; That should be nice, soomeone is probably writing her response now.

.nF

They're probably going to ignore it. The modding community is small enough and doesn't really represent any significant demographic, so they couldn't care less to shit on us. It's very media friendly to say that hackers did it, because people will be like "oh, I don't understand what hackers do, but I know they're bad, so.. sure. it's their fault"

(this is all my sarcasm/the media's generic view of the matters.)

hackers plant viruses, which are bad.
hackers add pornography into otherwise decent (hahaha) games. (yeah right, I didn't just go chainsaw a stripper in my (unmodded) GTA, then buy a hooker and drive her off a cliff and bail).

that's because sex is alot worse than violence.

... That's if sex and violence were bad in the first place...

Wow ESRB is a load of crap. I founded the first Xbox GTA Modding site sometime in June and so far we've got roughly 190 members and 3500 posts. We are still keeping Hot Coffee on our site and plan to produce some more mods excluse to the Xbox.

IMPEACH HILIARY CLINTON (hmm..if thats possible)
Dissemble ESRB!
Make Rockstar PAY!

DarkBlizzard,

Nice job on the site, just checked it out. Finally a site that plans to make mods that a exclusive. Did you get inspiration from GTAGarage? Or was it one single-handed effort? Looking forward to some mods from your site.

The following is a link to a well-written press release obtained from GTAGarage.com:

MUST READ PRESS-RELEASE!

no, i dont visit the PC sites and i've visited all of them cominbed less than 10 times

I could care less about the actual game content. But this scares the crap out of me.

Last thing I want is to have to break any type of file encryption. Or deal with every game using in-house/propietary file formats.

break file encryption and every "Tecmo" will be on your ass.

Ya no shit ....what the hell is ESRB doing! Now if by chance there is another GTA, it will be encrypted and probably have been looked over many times to be sure its "secure" so us hackers cant make the so much worse than it alreadt is.

It makes me laugh that killing cops isn't bad enough for them, but having sex is. 99.9% of the world will have sex at least one time by the time they die (if we're counting X-S forums alone, the number dramatically decreases ) wheras something like .000000001 percent of the world will kill a cop. Anyone think the priorities are a little skewed here?

IPodder2003,

The ESRB seems to a hard case of not listening to anyone and the senators are in love with creating their own little dictatorship. It's almost like they know that attacking video games would be one sided, and they could stay in office by having the media blow things out of proportion and then have the first of the end users (the parents) to become outraged and become uniformed... and get votes.

I have to say that this "scandal" couldn't have come at a better time. Attacking Rockstar is at a perfect time since there are now a load of games that can just be added onto the list of "Terribly violent" games.

If I could ever get the chance to talk to one of these "Child-Safety Advocates", I'd ask them if they were really doing any good for the public and not just trying to get votes to stay in office. I really believe that there are MUCH better thing that our senators can be doing with OUR MONEY than just farting around and using video games as scapegoats. IPodder2003 speaks of about .000000001 percent of people that actually want to go out shoot a police officer because they saw it in a video game. Why take out an industry that is really advancing America in it's computer technology when there are MUCH GREATER risks that .000000001 percent. Like smoking for example. What is that doing for America? Are tobacco products advancing American economy? Is tobacco Americas top killer? Are Senators really THAT blind to see that there are bigger fish in the sea that are actually proven to kill people???

Why must our Senators be so blind.

_rant_terminated;

haha i love this argument. it just sums up america in every way (no offence to americans)

think about how it first began: god-fearing pilgrims who would never dream of pre-marital sex would go over to new lands and mercilessly kill whatever is there

now it's the philosophy of video games: "by all means kill endless people with chainsaws, flamethrowers or other methods (including burying some bloke's portaloo under cement) - just don't have sex. sex is wrong and unnatural. it should be banned"

sure, i love san andreas. i love shooting people in the head based on what part of the city they live in, or what colour their clothes are. but adding sex to it should barely be noticable. wait a minute - are those BREASTS i see?????

everyone's too uptight and needs to get laid

ok, so the game files are now all encrypted, so we now have main game EXE's that have to decrypt them, ok, so now we have them decrypted for us at runtime...

so now if we like, we can simply edit the EXE to not use encrypted files and feed it unecrypted ones, to make our lives easier, or just re-encrypt everything.

so what end result are we looking at here? simply, a pissed off modding community who now have to make an unnecessary exercise in pointlessness cracking the game, less interest in the game from skilled modders and ultimately, something that the only protection from is law, and frankly, sueing the individuals who have purchased your merchandise for finding new ways to enjoy it is, to put it frankly, fucking stupid, and an excellent way of gaining both hate, and thus less customers buying your games.