Googling the phrase "hot coffee" now results in a few interesting pages, most apparant of which is the whole Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas fiasco.
For those who don't know, GTA: San Andreas is a open-ended adventure game which allows players to do just about anything, with a few noticible exceptions, such as having sex. Well, with the PC release of GTA, a not-so-scrupulous hacker supposedly poked around in GTA's code and found a few unused sections of code, the sex minigame.
Rockstar is saying that they did not put the code in the game, of course. So, on one side you have a well known company who releases products that tend to be very edgy and adultish. On the other side, you've got a dutch hacker.
Frankly, I don't know which side I'd believe.
You see, Rockstar has every reason to deny the code being there, if they indeed did put it in. Right now, the game has a Mature rating, the game equivalent of an R rating. This means that no one under 17 should play it, but its nothing strict. Parent's discretion and all that. However, if the game gets saddled with an Adults Only rating, the game equivalent of NC-17, then bad stuff starts happening.
The game no longer gets sold at many prominent stores, especially places such as Wal-Mart and Target, as well as more gaming oriented locals like Gamestop and EB Games (which is now owned by Gamestop). Sales drop like a rock, because while the "Mature" tag is somewhat open to interpretation, Adults Only kinda isn't.
What's worse (in the long term) is that they would have pissed off the ESRB, the guys who decide where the line between Teen, Mature, and Adults Only is. They are not good people to fuck with.
However, the only person saying otherwise is this lone hacker. So we really can't take his word for it either.
Well, fortunately, the ESRB is being sensible. They're going to investigate, which likely means get the "Hot Coffee" coder to turn over his patch's source code so they can figure out if it really does just unlock it.
In the meantime, any news organization talking about Hot Coffee is probably not going to chat about the latest album to be sold at Starbucks, and is more likely talking about the decline of society, moral decay, the evils of this new media, and how someone should smite Rockstar.
You know. The usual.
