More about the GTA incident and "mods"

We all now probably know that people just discovered that hidden sex level in GTA(Grand Theft Auto): San Andreas. Well it looks like the name of the programmer is Patrik Weldenborg who made the mod "hot coffee" and made the download freely avaliable on the Internet about a month ago. So when the ESRB heard about this, they immediatly gave an an AO rating and all major retailers got rid of it. "Retail kiss of death," they say.
Let me tell you a few facts and about mods (modifications). It's largely unsolicitated and uncompensated. People do it for their love of the game (even though many big publishers have discovered ways to make some mula with mods that the creators didn't intend.) and do it to add, change, or get rid of things.

Before I go on I just want to add that code (which is used to make games) can be changed and everything, so that's how mods work, they hack into the code of the game and modify it it's just like cheat codes.

Mods are written for PC games (example: that Hello Kitty mod for the flashlight in Doom 3.) and not console games, but it's starting to become popular with the consoles now all of a sudden. Yhe "hot coffee" mod is like many mods accessed the content left in the game by the devlopers instead of just adding the you-know-what scene. Look, if you're expecting me to tell you in exact detail what the scene has in it, you're wrong. It's just because I just don't like having that kind of content on the site.
Okay, back to the GTA story. When the scene was uncovered, Rockstar blamed it on hackers, but later told the truth and said it had been left in the code by the commercial developers. To try and stop this kind of disaster from happening again, the ESRB called on the industry to protect games from illegal mods from third party developers. But Sid Shuman (editor of GamePro.com) says that stopping modders permanently could be impossible. "It's something, frankly, that digital entertainment is not really well equiped to deal with. You can't stop people from making changes," he says. "People will always find where that one file is and they will always be able to modify it." A catch that is always annoying is that the game-development process involves programming concepts or levels that ae never fully explored but left in games because altering or removing them could cause other parts of the game to not work.
All the current GTA: San Andreas for all systems are now rated AO, but good news! Rockstar has stopped making the current versions of GTA: San Andreas and is working on a version that will NOT have the stupid sex scene in it and then you will have the M-rated game back once more. :) Also, to all those people that have the current PC versions, Rockstar is working on a patch to fix the problem and will be avaliable soon.

-Arnie Hermes, July 22 2005

(P.S., again thank you Contra Costa Times for all the info on this article (I stole a couple of sentences, I hope you won't mind) and again you get a 51% of the credit for the article.)

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