Gamemaker Sued Over Hidden Sex in GTA

http://enews.earthlink.net/ ^ | 27 July 2005 | staff

[gridlock]

So I guess film studios should be responsible for edited footage in an R-rated movie, too.

If they release is spliced to the end of the reel, yes they should.

These people engaged in fraud to release material with a misleading label. Why are you bothering to defend them?

[Thoro]

I guess the closest analogy I can come up with is this. Many DVDs come with "Easter Eggs." Which are little undocumented featurettes that play when you enter certain combinations of buttons on a remote. Imagine if you bought a DVD that was rated PG-13, but had an "Easter Egg" that brought up a porn scene. Should the studio then be liable?

Close, but no cigar. A more correct analogy would be an "Easter Egg" that can only be accessed after adding a computer chip to your dvd player. Any factory player out of box wouldn't allow you access. Only by doing something that both the manufacturer of the player and the dvd didn't intend are you allowed access to the easter egg.

[steveegg]

So I guess film studios should be responsible for edited footage in an R-rated movie, too.

Slight difference between film studios that edit out footage to get it within the R-rating and Take-Two; the film studios don't include the footage as a hidden feature, while Take-Two did. They may well put that back in an "unrated" DVD version (which is the trend nowadays), but they market it as stuff that couldn't make it past the censors.

[Modernman]

These people engaged in fraud to release material with a misleading label.

Fraud? How so.

[Little_shoe]

Hey I respect your opionion, however for me its the "butcher" tommy who is my personal favorite. I never caught the name of the guy from GTA 3 before. I did like how they tried to tie all three games in the series together. Especially with having Maria being a cocktail waitress at Ceasar's. Also some of Catalinas comments reminded me of something my tomboy ex girl would say.

I think my favorites from this game where the airplanes and the parachute. Its awsome to be able to base jump from buildings.

[thoughtomator]

Yeah seriously... shouldn't she be charged with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor"? That's still a crime in New York State, IIRC. And we have her confession signed and sealed and already submitted to court.

[Little_shoe]

Bad Dry humping.... I think I would find the bouncing car from GTA3 more entertaining.

[tfecw]

Hopefully RockStar will take the kid to court for violation of the EULA.

[gridlock]

Fraud? How so.

They intentionally released a game to the rating authority which had hidden scenes. These scenes, if known, would predictably have effected the rating applied to the game. The rating authority, also predictably, did not consider these hidden scenes when issuing a rating. This is fraud.

The publisher then compounded the fraud by printing the fraudulently acquired rating on millions of packages that many customers relied on when purchasing the game. Retailers also relied on the fraudulently acquired rating when making the decision whether or not to stock the game.

If the publisher wished to release a game with this particular content, they could avoid fraud by making the content available to the rating authority and showing them how to access it, and then accepting whatever rating resulted. But they did not do this. They perpetrated a fraud to get a lower rating, thus increasing their profits.

This is not rocket science...

[HairOfTheDog]

"I didn't know it had ~sex~ in it, I thought it was just about stealing cars and running from the cops and killing people!"

[wingnutx]

Even the original parts of the game had sex with hookers in cars.

This is silly on so many levels.

[tfecw]

"This is not rocket science..."

And yet you keep missing it. There is no fraud involved.
They showed the rating authority the game as it was intended to be played. Should the Sims 2 get a AO rating because someone creates a mod to make everyone naked?

[Allosaurs_r_us]

Maybe she should sue herself over providing inappropriate content to a minor.

 

Better yet, is it not a crime to furnish such things to minors? It certainly is when we are talking about alcohol and porn. The store can certainly be held criminally responsible for selling said product to a minor. Why not grandma?

Maybe she should sue herself over providing inappropriate content to a minor.

Better yet, is it not a crime to furnish such things to minors? It certainly is when we are talking about alcohol and porn. The store can certainly be held criminally responsible for selling said product to a minor. Why not grandma?

[Asphalt]

Actually, put it this way- Say you took your kid to an "R" rated movie thinking they were mature enough to handle it. You sit down, start eating pop corn and then all of the sudden you see some hard-core porn. Would you not be angry? Sure your kid was 14 and it was an "R" rated movie, but that was XXX content.

This game was rated too low. From the sound of it, it should have been AO, adults only

[Terpfen]

These people engaged in fraud to release material with a misleading label. Why are you bothering to defend them?

Because they didn't defraud anyone. The code was not accessible, period. It was not accessible in the retail PS2 version that I bought last year, nor was it accessible in the retail PC version I bought a few weeks back: period. I have no doubt that it was intended to be included, and was made inaccessible either due to time constraints in shipping the PS2 version, or in order to get an M rating from the ESRB. Either way, THE GAME ROCKSTAR SOLD DID NOT DEPICT SEX, and in order to depict said sex, the end user had to download a third party patch: in other words, modify what Rockstar sold.

Leftover/junk code ships in every software product sold, from movie players on up to operating systems. I'm not about to condemn a game featuring extreme amounts of violence because of inaccessible sex.

[tfecw]

"This game was rated too low. From the sound of it, it should have been AO, adults only"

you think that extra year would have made a difference?
The M rating is 17+, not 17+ unless your grandmother is too stupid to know what 17+ means.

[Terpfen]

IMO, the only difference is that Rockstar is using a medium where they could leave the code in the game, and simply remove the event to execute said code, and it would be as if the code never existed in the first place. Film studios can add unrated footage, true: but game makers cannot exclude certain parts of their game from being rated. That'd be completely dishonest and would render the ratings system meaningless, for starters.

Either way, Rockstar is remastering the game with the code removed entirely, and the remastered version will be re-rated M, instead of the current AO. "Scandal" over, regardless of the lawyers trying to profit from it.

[Modernman]

They intentionally released a game to the rating authority which had hidden scenes.

The scenes were never meant to be accesible. The game that R* gave to the rating body is the game that was meant to be played. It is hardly fraud if someone goes back and figures out how to hack the formerly innaccesible material.

[Terpfen]

Yeah, the cameos were great, though I think if Tommy appeared, it would've taken away from CJ, as it likely would've made one of the two appear "better" somehow. Rockstar used a convenient excuse for why CJ beat Claude in that race, and also let Claude get some revenge with that title to an abandoned garage. Given that CJ's goal in Venturas is to remove the mafia from influence, it would put him and Tommy at odds--not good, since we're supposed to "like" Tommy.

If Catalina reminds you of your ex-girlfriend... whoa, good thing there's an ex- in front of that girlfriend.

[Asphalt]

Again, this is the equivilent of seeing "X" rated content at an "R" rated movie. There are reasons they have different levels of bad