[tfecw]

"Really. Although you have to admit, for the coders at Rockstar to put that in the game in the first place was pretty stupid...."

Not really. It probably was included in the original code and then their teams of lawyers and HR folks decided what little excitement you got out of it wasn't worth the loss of sales due to a hire rating. They go to the coders and say this is getting cut. They aren't going to remove the code they are just going to disable it so they don't have to send it through another development cycle which takes time and money.

[steveegg]

It was included in the original code, and that's been public knowledge for the last several months. As for the disabling over removing, that was operable only for the PS2 version; they had nearly a year to excise it from the PC/XBox versions. In the past, they've done changes between the original PS2 and PC versions of the GTA series; most notably, the PC version of GTA3 not only has several fixes of bugs that were in the PS2 version, but the tear-gas grenade was removed.

That reminds me; they've back-tracked fixes to the PS2; the "Double Pack" version of GTA3 (which was released when they ported both GTA3 and GTA:Vice City to XBox) is based on the PC version.