Gamasutra.com - Issues: Hot Coffee's Effects on the Mod Scene


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By Brenda Brathwaite
[Author's Bio]
Gamasutra
October 27, 2006

Issues: Hot Coffee's Effects on the Mod Scene

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Hot Coffee's Effects on the Mod Scene

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By July 6th, nearly a month after the mod first appeared on GTAGarage.com, news of the now infamous hack had made its way out of the industry publications and sites and become national news. That day, California Assemblymember Leland Yee and the National Institute of Media and Family (NIMF) had issued separate press releases warning parents of the mod’s existence. While the warning may have kept some away and alerted parents to the illicit content, it also drew a great many people to it. Illspirit, a modder and administrator of GTAGarage.com, is still surprised at the reaction. “Before NIMF and Yee ‘warned’ everybody about Hot Coffee, we only had a couple of thousand downloads on the mod,” he said. “After the media panic, over a million! In late summer of last year, our server was pushing like 7TB of data a month.”

Throughout the controversy, Rockstar Games and its publisher, Take Two Interactive, had remained largely silent. On July 8th, however, they too pointed their fingers in the mod community’s direction. In a press release, the game’s publisher noted that the mod was “the work of a determined group of hackers” and further noted that the group had gone to “significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game… by combining, reconstituting, and altering the game’s source code.” Wildenborg had disagreed, saying that it was a minor change, and that everything one needed to create the mod was right there on the disc and just a few bits and a hex editor away.

Though it was ultimately discovered that the mod community, and Patrick in particular, were not to blame for the content that shipped on the disc, the mod community and the practice of modding itself had taken a serious hit nonetheless. First, they had been blamed for creating the content. When that proved false, they’d been blamed for creating a means to access it. The ESRB had even gone so far as to suggest that publishers and developers “proactively protect their games from illegal modifications by third parties.” The treatment left many in the GTA mod community with mixed feelings. On the one hand, modders extend the shelf life of games by creating additional content and playability at absolutely no cost to the developer or publisher. On the other hand, others accuse modders of creating or revealing content that gives the industry headaches.

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