In a short statement on their official website, Take2 Interactive, parent company of GTA developer Rockstar Games, said the "OFLC decision had been expected and the financial impact (would) not alter the Company's recently announced guidance". The Board found that the content unlocked by a third party "Hot coffee" modification contained material that could not be accommodated at the MA15+ classification.
The "Hot Coffee" mod opened up the minigame in the PC version of GTA: San Andreas, while a series of cheat codes need to be entered for it to be opened up in the PS2 version. The "contentious" content in question relates to a sex minigame that can be unlocked which allows players to control the main character CJ during a sex act.
The OLFC pulled its rating on San Andreas "on the basis that it contains contentious material (activated through a code or otherwise) that was not brought to the Board's attention when it was classified". Since there is no R rating for games in Australia, any title deemed to have content more graphic in nature that the MA15+ rating allows cannot be legally sold. "Businesses that sell or hire computer games should remove existing stocks of this game from their shelves immediately," said Director of the OFLC Des Clark. The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OLFC) revoked GTA: San Andreas' MA15+ classification last week, and has asked retailers to immediately stop selling the game. If Rockstar responds, or the Launcher comes back to life, we'll update.The "Hot Coffee" controversy has caught up with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in Australia, with the game now banned from sale. Things are unlikely to get quite so heated this time around. The Hot Coffee controversy ran for years and ultimately resulted in an investigation into Rockstar by the Federal Trade Commission, a bunch of lawsuits, and the game being reissued with an adults-only rating. Rockstar denied that the minigame was present in San Andreas, which was technically true inasmuch as no 'normal' player could access it, but untrue because the code for the minigame was present in the game's files (and could even eventually be accessed on consoles).
In that case Rockstar released the game with a removed sex minigame still present in the code: which eventually a modder was able to access. If these files are any kind of factor, however, this would be one hell of an echo of the San Andreas Hot Coffee farrago. Rockstar has not responded to PC Gamer's request for comment. At the time of writing the Rockstar Games Launcher has been down for 24 hours. The unlicensed music tracks or the files the games were released with may have nothing to do with it.
To stress: it isn't certain that this is why the GTA Trilogy has disappeared from sale, or why the Rockstar Games Launcher is down. The music industry is infamously one of the most protective industries out there with no quarter given, and it could be the case that Rockstar's remasters land the company in legal hot water (in which eventuality, the company's swift removal of the titles from sale would be part of its defence). And, oh yeah, without the appropriate license. While the music may not be accessible to the average user, it is in the product's files and can be accessed using certain tools. The presence of unlicensed music could in theory be a big headache for Rockstar. played PC Gamer the file of James Brown's Funky President (People It's Bad) which contained radio chatter from the Master Sounds station. "For San Andreas EVERY song is there, Ozzy, James Brown, Rage Against The Machine, 2pac, etc."Īsh R. Most Unreal 4 tools can extract the files, I'm using UModel," writes Ash R. "The audio codec used in these games is the open source OGG-VORBIS, so yes these are playable after being extracted. The only thing is its sealed in the package with the AO rating on the packaging itself. I asked if the unlicensed songs were playable. I was at a game store today and they had a copy of San Andreas that was supposed to be a hot coffee version from when they pulled them, he said it was from when he worked at EB Games and they were pulling them. However because they've split it up like this it makes it incredibly easy to restore the tracks in this version by syncing it with the PS2 version and creating your own _3." _3 being Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' in this example.
"For Vice City they've split the stations up into track order, so the songs that were cut for the 10th Anniversary edition are missing here, in the screenshot above you can see how FLASH goes from _1, _2 and THEN to _4. and asked them to explain what we're looking at in the above image.