Hot Chai

Hot Chai

While the original story of GTA: San Andreas' 'Hot Coffee' modification is now close to two years old, the announcement of the new GTA title has resurrected the controversy surrounding the franchise. ('Hot Coffee' is the name of a modification which allowed players to unlock game code that the developer has disabled from the final game but that still remains in the code.)

A month ago, the first trailer for GTA: IV was unveiled, giving a glimpse into the next game in the series and cause for alarm from its opponents. Jack Thompson, a controversial attorney who has filed a number of lawsuits against Rockstar Games, the company that owns the GTA franchise, has made numerous comments concerning the content of the game, which he believes will be ever more damaging to young players than any of the previous games. As support of his claims, Thompson produced evidence in the form of the game's original source code, for which he refuses to provide sources, that includes "vulgar and suggestive comments and ... sexually explicit variable declarations".

Rockstar has refused to comment on the content of the upcoming game, but has addressed Thompson's evidence, stating:

Where did you get that? Were you the one who set off smoke bombs in our building and tried to hang from the ceiling with climbing ropes like in that stupid 'Mission Impossible' movie? And come on, it's just comments, that stuff doesn't make it into the finished binaries! Oh, and those 'sexually explicit variable declarations'? You can't write 'UnauthorizedAccessException' without 'sEx', you dimwit!

Rockstar's response continues on for a number of pages, attacking Jack Thompson on a number of technical points and suggests more than once that Thompson may not have received enough 'love' when he was younger.

US Senator Hillary Clinton, who sided with Thompson during the 'Hot Coffee' scandal, has distanced herself from the controversial attorney, citing Thompson's lack of factual evidence and his poor ethics, adding:

I want to appear to be more conservative than I really am in order to get more red state votes, sure, but that raving lunatic is pulling stuff out of his ass now. Not even someone like a misinformed NASCAR fan would believe the crap this nutjob is spewing. Whoops, did I say that? I mean... I support family values. Abortion is wrong. A gun and a Bible in every household!

Thompson was unavailable for comments.