Hot Coffee (minigame)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Hot Coffee" is the unofficial name of a hidden minigame inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and it surfaced as a video clip. At 11:37 p.m. Central European Summer Time on the 8th of June 2005, a Dutch modder named Patrick Wildenborg received footage of a minigame that his own edits had just switched on. Rockstar Games had never offered that minigame to players. Yet the game's code held a finished version of it. Within weeks, a California legislator, an industry trade group, major retailers and a federal agency were all asking how it got there. Why would a studio ship explicit material it intended nobody to reach? Who took the blame, and who actually paid? And what did one modder's patch change for the video game business?

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• 2. An Invitation For Coffee

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  San Andreas arrived on the PlayStation 2 on the 26th of October 2004 as the fifth Grand Theft Auto instalment. Windows and Xbox versions followed on the 7th of June 2005. Its virtual world was four times larger than the one in Vice City, and its hero gained role-playing traits. Character customisation also made modding easier for people outside the hacking scene.

  That hero, Carl "CJ" Johnson, can unlock six girlfriends, either by finishing missions or by wandering the map. Each has her own tastes in appearance and in dates, and pleasing her earns CJ rewards. Once she is sufficiently impressed, she invites him home "for some coffee", a euphemism for sex. In the shipped game, the camera stays outside the front door. The player hears muffled sounds and sees nothing explicit.

  The hacked version replaces that discreet moment with a minigame left in the code. Both characters stay clothed. The player is told to "push the left analog stick up and down in rhythm", which fills a bar graph labelled "Excitement". Buttons change the camera angle or the position. Fill the bar and the girlfriend and the game congratulate the player. Let it drain and the game scolds the player for "failure to satisfy a woman". A separate spanking minigame works the same way, with button presses timed to a rhythm.

  None of this was meant to be reachable, and the reason traces back to a series of emails written in the summer of 2004.

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• 3. Houser's Push

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  Before San Andreas shipped, Rockstar Games president Sam Houser told reporters he wanted to blur the line between story missions and leisure time, so that "all of your actions feel like they have consequences". His team also wanted more role-playing depth without turning the series "uber-nerdy". Houser believed the way to add new interaction in keeping with the game's attitude was more explicit sexual material.

  Grand Theft Auto III, the first commercially successful game in the series, had reached stores in 2001. Its violence and sexual themes drew fire from public figures including Joe Lieberman and Jack Thompson. Both that game and Vice City carried the ESRB's "M" rating, meaning Mature 17+. Houser answered critics by saying the series, and the medium itself, were not designed for children. The danger for San Andreas was the Board's "AO" rating, Adults Only. That label would shrink the markets where the game could be sold and put a heavy financial burden on Rockstar.

  On the 14th of July 2004, Houser emailed Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's director of operations, with his wish list. It included oral sex, intercourse, masturbation, erotic whipping and dildos, both in play and in cutscenes. Kolbe replied that an AO rating was a real risk. On the 16th of August, co-founder Terry Donovan sent Houser a list of changes needed to satisfy rating systems worldwide. Spain and Italy were relaxed about nudity, but the ESRB's limits were far tighter.

  The list came so close to the release date that stripping the material out would have endangered the source code. Developers instead rewrote the code so the scenes stayed on the disc while controls made them unreachable.

  Houser was not finished. On the 25th of November, after the PlayStation release, he emailed producer Leslie Benzies to ask "how hard we can push the sex stuff" for Windows. His first idea was two versions, one rated M and one rated AO. The sales department balked at the financial risk. Rockstar chose an M-rated release, with a later patch for players who wanted more.

  On the 7th of January 2005, Rockstar submitted the Windows and Xbox versions to the ESRB. They matched the already-reviewed PlayStation 2 game, so no disc was sent and the M rating came automatically. Because the Board never received a disc, nobody outside Rockstar had examined what those files held.

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• 4. Modders Dig In

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  In December 2004, a group of modders that included Patrick Wildenborg spotted character animations with file names such as "SEX", "KISSING", "SNM" and "BLOWJOBZ". The PlayStation 2 was far harder to hack than a personal computer, so they could only study file formats and plan for the Windows release. A modder using the name Barton Waterduck previewed the animations with character model sheets, and the previews confirmed what the names suggested.

  Windows was the prize, because only there could the control toggles around the hidden code be overridden. Wildenborg lived in the Netherlands, where the Windows and Xbox versions went on sale three days after North America. So he teamed up with an American modder who could reach the game files early. The American sent him a copy of the game script. Wildenborg altered it with a hex editor and sent it back.

  He published the patch on the 9th of June 2005 on GTAGarage.com, a Grand Theft Auto modding site. He named it "Hot Coffee" after the game's own euphemism. In four weeks it was downloaded over 1 million times.

  Houser found out the same day, by reading Grand Theft Auto message boards. Doug Lowenstein, then president of the Entertainment Software Association, learned of it the same day too, after watching a viral video of the scenes. For the next month, Rockstar's public relations staff were told to answer no requests for comment. The only people Rockstar did contact were Lowenstein and Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB. Both were told that "Hot Coffee" came from a third-party modification.

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• 5. Ratings Reversed

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  On the 7th of July 2005, Leland Yee, speaker pro tempore of the California State Assembly, issued a press release condemning the ESRB for not rating San Andreas AO. Yee was then promoting his bill AB 450, which would put warning labels on violent games and require retailers to check identification. The next day Vance attacked his "crusade... to undermine the integrity of the ESRB", yet she also announced an investigation into the modification. On the 12th of July, Australia's Office of Film and Literature Classification opened its own inquiry at the request of Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. It had first rated the game MA15+.

  The minigame had been a hit among modders, but Yee's remarks pushed it into public view. Wildenborg posted a statement saying he had created none of the explicit material. He argued the patch could not be called a cheat, an Easter egg or a hidden feature. In his view it was "most probably just leftover material from a gameplay idea that didn't make the final release". On the 14th of July, Rockstar denied responsibility. It called the minigame "the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game".

  The ESRB was not persuaded. On the 20th of July, it re-rated every edition of San Andreas from M to AO. The Board accepted that Rockstar had not meant to expose the material. But the scenes sat "in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs", and the patch's wide spread undermined the original rating. Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Circuit City announced they would stop selling the game.

  On the 29th of July, the Australian office stripped the game of its classification. Australia then had no R18+ rating for games, since that rating existed only for films and television. The result was a total sales ban.

  Take-Two suspended production until it could ship a version that blocked access to the minigame. On the 11th of August, Rockstar released a Windows patch to do so. By September, an M-rated edition was out for Windows and Xbox. In November, a Special Edition came to the PlayStation 2 without "Hot Coffee". Outside the United States, an edited edition arrived only in September 2015, and Australia rated it MA15+.

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• 6. Washington and the Courts

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  On the 28th of July 2005, the United States House of Representatives voted 355-21 to launch a Federal Trade Commission investigation of Take-Two and Rockstar Games. The question was whether they had misled the ESRB about San Andreas to dodge an AO rating. Senator Hillary Clinton had already urged the FTC to trace the game's "graphic pornographic and violent content" and to examine how well retailers enforced ratings. She promised a bill making it a federal crime, with a mandatory US$5,000 fine, to sell violent or sexually explicit games to anyone under 18.

  Clinton filed the Family Entertainment Protection Act on the 17th of December 2005, backed by senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh. The bill also told the FTC to check each year for hidden material like the code behind the mod. It went to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and expired without action at the end of the 109th Congress.

  The FTC case ended with a settlement on the 8th of June 2006. The agency ruled that the companies had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. Their failing was not disclosing "unused, but potentially viewable" nude and sexual imagery, whether or not a third party switched it on. They had to disclose rating-relevant material clearly on packaging and in promotion, with violations punishable by fines up to US$11,000. No fine was imposed for the incident itself. By then, though, the recall had already cost Take-Two US$24.5 million.

  Private lawsuits followed. On the 27th of July 2005, an 85-year-old New York woman sued in the federal court for the Southern District of New York. She had bought the game for her 14-year-old grandson before the re-rating. She alleged false advertising, consumer deception and unfair business practices. In January 2006 the city of Los Angeles, led by City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, filed a similar suit. Several claims were eventually merged into one case.

  In October 2006, a federal judge let the first plaintiff pursue class action status. Talks began in February 2007, and the case settled on the 28th of January 2008. Buyers from before the re-rating could claim up to US$35. San Andreas had sold over 21.5 million copies, but fewer than 3,000 people filed claims. Attorneys had settled for US$1.3 million, yet resolving the claims would take under US$30,000, so most of the money would go to legal fees. Rockstar also agreed to donate US$860,000 to charity. With so few claimants, a judge decertified the settlement class on the 31st of July.

  Take-Two had other troubles. The Securities and Exchange Commission was already investigating alleged insider trading involving founder and chairman Ryan Brant, and that probe ended in a US$7.5 million settlement on the 9th of June 2005. On the 17th of February 2006, shareholders sued over the company's financial handling. They argued that merely "wrapping" the adult material rather than removing it meant Take-Two knew it would spread widely. That suit settled on the 2nd of September 2009, with Take-Two paying over US$20 million and changing its corporate governance. By then shareholders had voted out most of the executive team, and Strauss Zelnick had been named chief executive officer.

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• 7. Industry Fallout

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  "Stand up and defend what you make," Doug Lowenstein said of Rockstar's silence during the crisis. He accused the studio of cowardice for refusing to comment. In a 2012 interview, co-founder Dan Houser took a different view. He said the company never felt attacked for its material, only for its medium, and that a book or a film with the same scenes would have drawn no objection.

  The modding community felt shut out. Modders were told that future versions of the game would be "much more mod-resistant", and they bore much of the blame for the uproar. GTAGarage.com took the patch down voluntarily. A chilling effect set in, as some modders feared that any alteration might be read as exposing intentionally hidden material, which could invite tighter legal limits on games.

  The ESRB had to tighten its own process. The year after San Andreas was reissued, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was re-rated from "T", Teen 13+, to M. The Board had found "more detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating", and a locked skin that, once modded, let female characters appear topless. Citing both cases, the ESRB told a House Energy subcommittee on consumer protection and commerce that publishers hiding mature or explicit material would face fines up to US$1 million.

  In September 2006, Senator Sam Brownback introduced the Truth in Video Game Rating Act. It would have forced the ESRB to see a game's full contents before rating it, instead of relying on video demonstrations from publishers. He introduced it in both the 109th and 110th Congresses, and it died without action each time.

  Take-Two also felt the heat. In June 2006 it cancelled Snow, a real-time strategy game about the illegal drug trade being built at its Frog City Software studio. No reason was given, but observers linked it to political pressure that "Hot Coffee" had helped create. The same scandal was partly blamed when, by November 2006, six months after San Andreas's Japanese release was announced, there was still no news of it.

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• 8. Echoes In Later Games

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  Grand Theft Auto IV reached stores on the 29th of April 2008 to critical and commercial acclaim. Some fans saw a nod to the scandal in its Statue of Happiness, a Statue of Liberty look-alike that resembles Hillary Clinton and holds a steaming coffee cup where a torch would be. The game also offers an achievement called "Warm Coffee", earned when protagonist Niko Bellic is invited into a girlfriend's home for sex. When Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2014, players could have sex with prostitutes from a first-person view. The ESRB still gave it an M rating.

  In February 2020, a Red Dead Redemption 2 mod appeared on Nexus Mods and drew comparisons to "Hot Coffee". It let protagonist Arthur Morgan take a prostitute upstairs in a saloon. Rockstar, which makes the Red Dead series as well as Grand Theft Auto, sent the modders a cease and desist letter citing the game's end-user license agreement. The creators denied breaking any terms, but Nexus Mods removed the mod soon after it went up.

  The pattern surfaced once more on the 11th of November 2021, when Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy in a Definitive Edition. The compilation remastered Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City and San Andreas for Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox One and Series X/S. Two days later, Rockstar pulled the Windows version from online sale to "remove files unintentionally included", mainly unlicensed songs in the soundtrack. Some data miners said they had also found "Hot Coffee" in the code. Three days after its removal, the collection went back on sale.

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