Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  It was like seeing the separate elements of a cartoon but not the whole cartoon itself. With each animation, though, a bigger picture began to take shape. “The diversity and types of animations lead me to believe that it was planned to be a mini game,” posted one modder, who suggested they work now to piece it together. “But we better keep that whole thing private for now,” he added, “or R* will definitely take the anims and models out of the PC version, and that's not what we want, right?”

  The modders knew enough about the real-life battles of Rockstar to realize they were playing with more than laughs. By making this public, who knew what kind of Thompsonian backlash might hit their favorite pastime? “Maybe we should keep quiet about it?” suggested one concerned modder. “If we release this video, all the bitch-mom's in all the world are gonna freak and jump on the anti-GTA bandwagon and give R* grief. Maybe R* will decide to remove it for the PC version. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it'll create a sensation for the PC release.”

  What had Rockstar wrought? Wildenborg wondered. Why had they buried these files? “It was just a sort of treasure hunt,” he later said. “I felt like a detective figuring out how stuff works.” Late at night on his couch with his coffee, he obsessively pored over the files until he found something stunning—a series of commands that enabled the player to control the action firsthand. Because he was just reading code, he couldn't see the action, but the clues seemed sure enough: this wasn't some kind of sexual cinematic, it was a mini-game!

  “There are two variations,” he posted. “A spanking game and a shagging game.” In the spanking game, he explained, players had to smack a girlfriend's booty by tapping a button on the PS2 controller to get her as stimulated as possible. A bar labeled “EXCITEMENT” measured the player's progress. “A wrongly time spank or a missed one lowers the exitement [sic],” Wildenborg noted. “In the shagging game, you need to move the analog stick in rhythm with the movement of the bodies to increment the exitement,” he continued in broken English. He also thought he found scenes showing CJ getting a BJ while driving his car and while taking his girlfriend for a walk.

  Despite all of their detective work, however, they didn't have the files they needed to bring the complete mini-games to life. “We had no proof,” Wildenborg later recalled. They had to wait for the PC version of San Andreas, which would give them the full ability to hack completely into the code they needed. There was just one catch: although Rockstar had left the mini-game code in the PS2 game, for all the modders knew the company had removed it from the PC game. “Lets pray they left the animations in,” Wildenborg posted.

  A few days later, on June 8, Wildenborg eagerly flipped open his laptop on his couch. It was nearing midnight. The PC version of San Andreas had just come out in the States. Now, once and for all, his code could be tested to see whether the full mini-game could finally be made to work. At 11:37 p.m., a modder posted the results. “It looks like this is working Pat,” he wrote. “Although I failed to satisfy her on my first attempt. But I got her on my second try!”

  Wildenborg leaned forward as he finally saw the full video of the scene unfold. It started familiarly enough. CJ pulled up in his car with his date to her house as she said, “How about a little coffee?” A subtitle appeared on the bottom of the screen, “This is it, she's inviting you in for coffee! Gird your loins for love.” At this point in the official version of the game, CJ and the girl would go into the house as the camera remained outside—suggestively shaking. And that would be that.

  Yet with Wildenborg's code running now, the mission cut to the hidden scene of CJ and the girl inside. Her bedroom was small and messy, with a GTA: Vice City poster and a poster for the fictional film Badfellas on the wall. CJ, in his jeans and white undershirt, leaned back on her bed as she stood before him with her back to the camera. She wore nothing but a thong and a Rockstar Games baby T-shirt, just as the company sold in real life.

  Then she knelt down.

  The ensuing scene was more comical than pornographic, mainly because CJ remained fully clothed throughout the tryst. As the girl's head bobbed between his legs, CJ reached for the back of her head and pressed it deeper into his blue-jeaned crotch. She then lay back on the bed, as he mounted her missionary style, still completely dressed. An instructional graphic in the upper left-hand corner explained to “push the left analog stick up and down in rhythm.” An “Excitement” bar graph, just as Wildenborg had found, measured CJ's progress as he thrust. There were no genitals or money shots, but the scene, in such a prudish industry, was outrageous enough. “You're a real professional, baby!” CJ gushed, over her moans. “Go on, tell me I'm the best!”

  After all of that work, all of the collaboration, the modders had done it, unearthed the sex mini-game that Wildenborg dubbed “Hot Coffee”—both for the drink that the girl euphemistically invited CJ to share and for Wildenborg's own love of the stuff.

  “Zege,” he said in Dutch.

  Victory.

  20

  Hot Coffee

  WANTED LEVEL

  Milky white clouds rolled against a bright blue sky over a jagged mountain range. A glowing sun bathed the earth in honey-colored hues of amber. You felt as if you were flying over the Rockies in a smooth, silent glider. Yet this scene wasn't real. It was a simulation.

  The video played on a giant screen in Los Angeles, as a sea of slack-jawed gamers gaped from their seats. It was May 2005 at the annual E3 convention, and more than seventy thousand people had come for the biggest show yet. The game industry was posting record numbers, approaching $30 billion worldwide and more than $10 billion in the United States alone. Even better, three new video game consoles were being announced this week: Nintendo's new machine, code-named Revolution; Microsoft's Xbox 360; and Sony's PlayStation 3.

  At the packed Sony press conference, the company's iconic exec Phil Harrison towered onstage in a blue suit and an open-collared shirt, evangelizing the PS3's awesome processing chip, called the Cell. Technical specifications elicited fetishistic oohs and aahs from the crowd. “Even the clouds are generated procedurally,” Harrison effused, as the gamers pressed their digital cameras against their eyes. The heavenly scene was, Harrison added, a “stunning example of where immersion in games will go from here on in.”

  If the players wouldn't take Sony's word for it, they would believe the deified game king whose face then filled the enormous screen onstage: Sam Houser. The pretaped video seemed like a dispatch from deep in Rockstar's elusive bat cave. Sam sat in a darkened room, blinds cracked ever so slightly on the window beside him. He wore a loose gray T-shirt and an unkempt beard. Dark circles puffed under his eyes, as if he'd just been pulled from an all-nighter.

  “I think what we're most looking forward to creating in a PlayStation 3 game is a truly realized, truly immersive living, breathing world,” he said, gesturing emphatically and evoking the old tagline from DMA. “This is what we live for,” he said. “You know, every five or six years, these amazing companies like Sony come along and give you this wonderful new piece of equipment that allows you to start unlocking your vision and unlocking the dream that you've been having for however long.

  “With Cell and with PlayStation 3, we feel very excited and very confident that we're going to be able to absolutely push the limits of what can be created and the experiences that we can immerse our audience in. We really know that we're going to be able to go to the next level in terms of realistic simulations and realistic immersion, combined with incredible narrative, incredible storytelling, and those two elements combined are what are going to create the experiences of the future.”

  Then, as quickly as he had materialized, he was gone. Gamers weren't used to hearing much, if anything, from Sam anymore. Since his early days of preening on magazine pages, he'd withdrawn so much that any interview with him was preceded by adjectives such as reclusive and Pynchonesque. At E3, Rockstar maintained the enigma, parking a fleet of jet-black tour buses with blackened windows inside the conven
tion hall. Only conventioneers with elite invites were allowed inside to check out the company's latest games.

  Despite the stealthy pretense, Sam seemed busier and happier than ever. Now married, he and his wife had recently welcomed a baby boy. Sam's days became even sunnier this month when he went to San Diego to oversee the making of a new game, Red Dead Redemption. The Old West adventure was a follow-up to the previous year's Red Dead Revolver, also developed by the team at Rockstar's San Diego studio. Though Revolver earned mixed reviews, Sam, an erudite fan of spaghetti Westerns and Sam Peckinpah, felt convinced that the sequel could be a brilliant way to bring the open world design of GTA to a fresh, but no less outlaw, American dream.

  In the meantime, business was booming. Sony had recently launched its new PlayStation Portable handheld game system, and Rockstar's title Midnight Club 3 had been the top launch title. San Andreas was still selling out around the world. Privately, Sam was eagerly awaiting the launch of the PC port of the game. Rockstar had still been talking about distributing a patch following the PC release, which would let gamers unlock the sex mini-game, once and for all. As an added concession to the modders, Rockstar changed the end user license agreement for the PC San Andreas to permit players “to construct new game levels and other related game materials.” Game on.

  Yet when Sam arrived at work in San Diego on June 9, 2005, two days after the PC game's release, it seemed more like game over. That morning, the SEC revealed the findings of its two-year investigation into Take-Two Interactive. The commission announced a settlement agreement under which Take-Two would pay $7.5 million in penalties (including $6.4 million in combined penalties paid by Brant, the vice president of sales and two former Take-Two executives)—but would admit no wrongdoing.

  The allegations suggested an elaborate game behind the scenes. The SEC alleged that on Halloween Day 2000, executives at Take-Two recorded a single shipment of 230,000 video games for $5.4 million, its biggest sale to date, but the games were soon sent back to headquarters. To hide their return, Take-Two had disguised it as a purchase of “assorted products.” As a result, the company improperly recognized $60 million in revenue from 180 different parking transactions in 2000 and 2001. To “consistently meet or exceed” revenue ensured that Take-Two, according to the SEC, met or surpassed financial forecasts and delivered “substantial bonuses” to execs, including Brant—who sold $20 million in stock along the way.

  Yet the blow of the SEC news that morning was only the first punch. When Sam went online, he found another story about Rockstar blowing up on the message boards. Some dude named Patrick W had just uploaded a new mod for GTA: San Andreas to his homepage in the Netherlands. He called it Hot Coffee. “With this mod,” Patrick W posted, “you will be able to unlock the uncensored interactive sex-games with your girlfriends in San Andreas. Rockstar build [sic] all this stuff in the game, but decided to disable it in their final release for unknown reasons. And now this mod enables these sex-games again, so now you can enjoy the full experience.”

  Sam grabbed his phone and stabbed the numbers for Rockstar's office in New York. Because Rockstar hadn't yet put its patch online for the sex scene, this meant that the intrepid modders had somehow reconstituted the mini-game on their own. Back in the loft on Broadway, the phones were ringing off the hook. Rockstar's harried team of publicists looked up to find a boss looming over them.

  “Don't answer the phones,” he said. “This is going to get ugly.”

  DOUG LOWENSTEIN walked into his office of the Entertainment Software Association in Washington, D.C., on June 9 to find his assistant looking forlorn. “Oh, shit,” he was told, “we have a problem.”

  A video of the Hot Coffee mini-game was already going viral online. As Lowenstein watched the girlfriend go down on CJ, he thought it was a joke—cartoonish, like something from a PG-13 movie. Yet he knew that while the world had long decried violence in video games, this was pushing into a new territory: sex. As the industry's chief lobbyist, Lowenstein knew the stakes better than anyone.

  Since the industry developed the ESRB in 1994 in the wake of threatened government regulation, he had labored every day to win the trust of politicians. It had been costly, with hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on related legal fees. The battles hadn't been easy, and he had put himself on the line when Take-Two and Rockstar refused to get involved in the public debate. Hot Coffee was no laughing matter. “If this undermined the political support we had, from Joe Lieberman to David Walsh and Hillary Clinton,” he later recalled, “we would be in a very compromised position. This endangered the credibility of the most important shield our industry had to excessive regulatory force.”

  After seeing the clip, Lowenstein phoned Pat Vance, the head of the ESRB, who was also reeling from the news. Vance felt the same pressure that Lowenstein did to defend the industry's ratings from government regulation, but, she wondered, maybe this mod wasn't a problem after all. The ESRB rated games, not user-generated content, and if this was just something programmed in some basement in Holland, then it seemed beyond their purview. Even the staunchest opponents weren't lobbying to legislate what gamers did in their own homes.

  If it was true, however, as the modder claimed, that “Rockstar build [sic] all this stuff in the game,” then they had a potential nightmare ahead. Had Rockstar gamed the ESRB by neglecting to disclose sexual content hidden in San Andreas in order to get an M-rating? If so, this would confirm the worst stereotypes of the industry and would provide a smoking gun that legislators and critics such as Jack Thompson had been hunting for all these years. Like the pixilated girl in the Rockstar baby tee, the gamers would be screwed. “If the publisher put the content on the disc,” Vance said, “somebody knew it was there.”

  “THEY FOUND IT,” Sam wrote in e-mail to Les Benzies on June 13. “. . . [does] this cause any problems? Hope not as it is pretty cool.”

  But why stop there? Rockstar could release its patch online anyway, so that less industrious gamers could easily “unlock this gem” of Hot Coffee themselves. Donovan, as usual, expressed concern. Releasing a patch now would only fan the flames of controversy and possibly cause the game to lose the M-rating they had labored so hard to receive.

  By the next day, Hot Coffee was the talk of the office. Two producers within Rockstar were gossiping about the leak, saying that Benzies seemed psyched that the sex scene had been discovered by hackers because now “we don't have to do anything ourselves,” as one wrote. The other agreed that the hack was “better than an official patch” because of its cryptic nature.

  Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's director of operations, e-mailed Donovan and Rockstar producer Jenefer Gross that same day to further explain what had happened. “[W]hen we originally created the sex scenes that Sam wanted approved, we used girlfriend models wearing underwear,” she wrote. “Also present in the code (but unused by us) were fully nude girlfriend skins. The author of the mods used those skins instead of the clothed versions, making things appear even worse than we'd originally intended.” She added that the unlocked scene “is the entire sex animation that was in the game previously . . . the mod unlocked everything.”

  In an e-mail to Donovan, Sam reiterated that deleting Hot Coffee from the game would have been too complicated. “We locked it away because there was no other way to get the game done on time—safely,” he wrote. “The code is very interwoven in [GTA] and everything reacts to everything else,” he continued. “The impact of yanking something late is too scary.”

  Yet Rockstar's veteran technical officer, Foreman, didn't agree. Yanking the mini-game “wouldn't take that long at all,” he later said, “not even days.” The fact that it wasn't removed was “laziness, pure and simple,” he said. Foreman felt duped. When he had been told that the sex scene had been removed from the game, he assumed that meant it had been deleted from the disc, not merely wrapped. “We didn't question it,” he later said. “If it's out, it's out.”

  For years, Sam had tried to play life li
ke a video game, planning for every contingency, sculpting Rockstar's outlaw image, fighting conservatives, managing the media, plotting precisely how much they could get away with in a game. Real people—in their complexity and emotions and unpredictability—always seemed to be a source of frustration for him. No one believed in the games as he did. No one worked as hard for them as he did. No one saw the beauty in them as he did. Yet now, after one deft move by some gamer in the Netherlands, the carefully constructed world shattered. This crisis was real. Now he had to deal with it.

  With Hot Coffee unleashed, Rockstar readied its PR team for the crisis. “There is some sexualized content that was removed from the released version of San Andreas,” Gross explained to the publicists in an e-mail. “The process of removing it involves burying it deep within the code, however, with the release of the pc version, modders (people who go into the code to add things/change things to make quirky things happen), have found the hidden code and accessed it revealing the sexual content that was removed from the released version. They then post instructions for others on how to access this content.”