What a difference a few years makes. In this latest installment of my monthly Culture Clash column for the International Game Developers Association, we’re talking about the steps, baby and otherwise, that a creative medium must take in order to ensure its own freedom of expression. As you might recall, in 2005 Rockstar Games decided to cross a creative Rubicon of sorts, hiding a sex scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and leaving it for haxx0rs to inevitably find. Known as the Hot Coffee scandal, it sent tremors through the entire industry as calls for censorship – which had until then been dying out – reignited with fury. Rockstar embarked on what I then quite wittily described as a “polymorphic campaign of bullshit,” going to ever more flamboyantly unbelievable lengths to deny their own culpability in the matter.
The dust did settle, eventually, and now seven years on, it’s only fair to concede that Hot Coffee – dangerous, selfish, and stupid as it was – did accomplish something. The censorship threat blew over and games have more creative license than ever before. Personally, I still don’t forgive Rockstar for what it did; in Vietnam terms, the company destroyed a village in order to save it. What I offer here is not a justification for the company’s misdeed, just a reflection on the fact that they cast a die and got a result. Enjoy!
Dangerous to the Last Drop
By Matthew Sakey
Originally published by the International Game Developers Association
Max Payne 3 is probably the most depressing thing I’ve ever played. A game like Dark Souls is transcendentally bleak, but Max Payne 3 is much more immediately, personally miserable. I can only manage about 20 minutes at a stretch before I have to switch to some cheerful activity, like cutting my wrists, which is why I haven’t finished it yet.
Of course, the series has never been jolly. Read into it what you like, it’s always been the story of a man who wants to die but can’t let go. Max Payne is a figure of tragedy. It’s often pointed out that in his misery he kills an awful lot of people, and I don’t disregard that. It is a shooter, though, and shooting people in one of those is a pretty standard proxy for advancement. I can overlook it.
But where the first two games did have small sparks of hope here and there, and where they were quick with a wink-wink self-referentialism that diminished the fourth wall, Max Payne 3 does away with all that. The pain pills which had been health packs are now an addiction. The drinking, once hard-boiled-cop standard, is now ruinous. The violence, once symbolic of progress, is now at the far edge of shocking. This game revels in a darkness the other two never plumbed.
It ought to go without saying that much of this change in tone stems from the fact that Max Payne 3 is the first in the trilogy to be directly developed by Rockstar Games. While the first two Max Payne titles were published by (and received significant creative input from) Rockstar, it was Remedy Entertainment and writer Sam Lake who propelled the dour human drama in Max Payne 1 and 2. Rockstar and the Houser brothers took the third much further, which I guess isn’t really surprising considering it’s Rockstar we’re talking about.
I have always been conflicted about Rockstar’s products. Recognizing the technical and narrative ambition of Grand Theft Auto, I nonetheless could do without the games – not for the common reasons, but because they’re not fun to play. In my opinion most of Rockstar’s work eschews fun for scale. The writing is usually good but the games often aren’t there at all, and focus too much on pushing the envelope at the expense of everything else.
Though I’m not a fan of their games, my animosity toward Rockstar and the Housers stems from the 2005 Hot Coffee kerfuffle. Not that they put (smirk) “explicit” sexual content into GTA San Andreas; in my view games have the same rights to that as any literature. It’s that they chose to hide the content in such a way that its discovery was inevitable. It’s that they lied and continue to lie about whether its inclusion was intentional. It’s how much danger they so carelessly exposed the medium and industry to, and how smugly unpenitent they have been.
For a long time I thought Hot Coffee was a childish prank by childish people, people too shortsighted to realize the threat they’d created (or too arrogant to care). In fairness, that may still be the case. But now, with the distance of years acting as a lens, I’m willing to concede that it might have been more objective-oriented. Hot Coffee exposed video games to widespread vilification and scrutiny and new calls for censorship. But it also allowed game developers to skip several levels. Before Hot Coffee and After Hot Coffee are dramatically different worlds, and it’s fair to acknowledge that Rockstar’s move forced an acceleration of creative liberty in the medium. Widely accepted mainstream views about what should and shouldn’t be “allowed” in video games had existed forever, and changing those views organically would have been a slow, iterative process. By unleashing Hot Coffee, the die was cast: how ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?
Once the dust settled, game designers have felt a lot safer exploring adult themes in titles rated to contain them. Would CD Projekt have taken on a series like The Witcher had Hot Coffee not shone a light on sex between consenting adults in a video game? Would Bioware have clumsily explored sexual relationships in Mass Effect and Dragon Age? Being openly first to do something is very risky. Hot Coffee forced the change from hiding. The medium got much of what it wanted in terms of deserved creative liberty because of Rockstar’s stunt, but that doesn’t make the stunt righteous – in fact it was cowardly, and dangerous.
The growth of adult themes in games, whether empowered by Hot Coffee or not, hasn’t been limited to sexual situations. The overwhelming despondency of Max Payne 3 wouldn’t have been welcome ten years ago, nor would its repeated, unflinching themes of addiction, grief, and suicidality. But the mistake was always believing games “shouldn’t” explore stuff like that.
Irresponsible as Hot Coffee was, it did bring progress. Seven years ago that hidden content was seen by some as monumentally shocking. Compare it, though – its absurd, clothed QTE sex – to what’s going on in the background when Max Payne wanders into a brothel during his visit to the favela. And consider that no one has uttered a peep about that scene.
Some believe that the U.S. government had foreknowledge of an attack on Pearl Harbor, and let it happen because the United States “needed” to get into the war. Caught between months of policy debate and one shocking attack, the argument goes that Roosevelt and his advisors chose the most perilous, but also fastest and surest, path to their objective. I’m not comparing Hot Coffee to an event that cost human lives, just noting that dramatic action does tend to quickly produce dramatic results. And I guess after all these years I’m willing to accept that Hot Coffee resulted in dramatic and long-deserved increases in creative freedom. I just wish that Rockstar – and by extension the Housers – had found a way to do it without putting so much at risk.
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Great article, as usual. Never really thought about Hot Coffee this way.
Oh, Rockstar. So many, many ways in which you are a problematic developer, and so few in which I find your presence rewarding…
Well, okay. I like Rockstar’s publishing sensibilities. LA Noire, Max Payne 1&2…other…things? And I appreciate, weirdly, that someone has brought as soul-crushing an experience as Max Payne 3 to the market in a AAA, high-profile title – and it’s soul-crushing in the best possible way. Because the gameplay is good at being what it is, an intense cover-shooter, but Max has fallen pretty far. Maybe in a good way. Maybe not. I wonder how much of Max Payne 3 is, intentionally or not, a deconstruction of the mass-murdering action-shooter protagonist we so gleefully accept…well, everywhere else.
Nice take on a sperminal moment in gaming, one that was also interesting in seeing who came down where on the debate.
And speaking of deconstructing the trigger happy fps, may I also suggest the new release Spec Ops:The Line
Great article, very thoughtful and, as always, objective and fair-minded.
Thank you for this article! I totally agree. I remember feeling this way at the time in spite of Rockstar being jerks about it – that this move was, ultimately, in the service of the medium in a roundabout way. It was an issue we needed to face.
That being said, I can think of games more explicit on the same platforms that were released prior to Hot Coffee, and eyes were not batted. Well, I can think of at least one game. What GTA did was bring the issue in to the limelight because it was GTA and the brand carried that weight.
That, and some people felt that the content was not properly covered by the ‘M’-rating.
Okay, so, it turns out I’m going to be Dr. Contrarian today.
At the time I believed the response that the whole thing was just a silly accident and, of course, which developer would want to hand Jack Thompson a gift like this? Looking back now, it seems less believable that this thing was a mistake.
On the other hand, I’m not convinced we can join the dots from Hot Coffee to the more adult themes that are more commonplace now. I see it more as just one of many developers who were pushing those boundaries. Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy came out a year after GTA:SA and that features sex scenes (I believe, having not played it) which were surely in development before Hot coffee came to light; Mafia (2002) was released two years prior to GTA:SA which also sported a sex scene as part of romantic plot development.
In fact, Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy had problems on release with the North American version being neutered for retail. Games were already testing the waters. I could agree that these were the years in which games were redefining the box they had been put into since Space Invaders, but not that Hot Coffee was responsible for enabling a leap forward in terms of acceptance.
If we had a bunch of developers saying words to the effect of “when I observed how the Hot Coffee controversy played out, I knew we were green light to go red light in our games” then I would be more convinced.
@HM: It’s true that games were experimenting with sexual content before and after Hot Coffee (with varying results). I think Indigo Prophecy would’ve had the (weird) sex stuff in it no matter what, and no one on the nightly news would’ve cared.
In fact, the first Mass Effect had a (stupid, manufactured) sex controversy, and that was post-Hot-Coffee. The only real reason it was notable is because there was a feud between gamers and a woman who spoke out against the game (without actually playing it). But what matters is, in the end, nothing came of it. Because this was actually an old conversation, and we’d already been there.
It was never the developers who looked at Hot Coffee and said “Oh, now they’ve done that, we can go farther.” I should have been clearer about that. Hot Coffee didn’t empower developers so much as it weakened criticisms, because once something’s out there, however great the fallout or backlash, it’s out there. Hot Coffee made it harder to criticize, not easier to make, the increasingly mature content we’re seeing these days.
As for Rockstar’s intentions… well, this is an editorial piece and my opinion is my own, but I’ve been in the business for a lot of years and there’s no doubt in my mind that Rockstar knew very well that the Hot Coffee content remained in their shipped game.
Certainly from a practical perspective there IS a very valid reason to leave disconnected stuff in a game build. Games are complicated machines. Removing something – even something that’s ostensibly inaccessible during gameplay – can break other things in unexpected ways. It’s not at all uncommon for developers to leave disconnected art assets, sounds, cutscenes, even whole levels in the filesystem of a game. Usually it’s totally innocent and the content is horribly broken anyway (like the immense hidden world of the first Metroid, or the -1 level of Super Mario Bros). Taking it out might break stuff. It might have been completely innocent on Rockstar’s part.
Of course, during the scandal Rockstar lied repeatedly, and was repeatedly caught contradicting itself, regarding the completeness of the content and the platforms on which it appeared. The company also quietly accepted the ESRB’s toothless U.S. recrimination – a puny fine and on-shelf restickering with an AO rating – rather than fighting; to me that implies they knew that even more damning evidence of knowing complicity might have been revealed in a lengthy investigation. Moreover, to my knowledge it never attempted to defend itself against anyone who accused the company of deception. Normally if someone points at you and shouts “liar,” you say “no I’m not”… unless, of course, the denial couldn’t hold up to even the flimsiest review.
I’ll be clear seven years after the fact as I was at the time: in my opinion the ESRB should have pilloried Rockstar, demanding a North American recall and repackaging of the game; a fine not to exceed 65% of profit from all retail sales of GTA:SA made after the discovery of Hot Coffee, and a mandated five-year full-content review of all Rockstar products, essentially demanding that Rockstar turn over every asset and line of code in a shipping product to the ratings board (rather than the standard questionnaire and 10-minute reel). Rockstar should have been forced to sit on gold masters of its games for months while the ESRB combed through every zero and one looking for hidden “treasures.” Fool me once and all that.
If the industry’s supposedly robust ratings systems are meant in part to defend the medium’s right to exercise freedom of expression, then those ratings authorities have a responsibility to severely punish anyone who invalidates them, particularly during the medium’s infancy, when it’s most vulnerable to outside attacks that could set its creative liberty back decades or cripple it altogether.
Of course there was explicit content in games before Hot Coffee. Hell… Custer’s Revenge, for crying out loud. Soft Porn Adventure. Leisure Suit Larry. The difference?
Those games didn’t hide their content, and their creators never lied about it.
It’s not that Rockstar put sex in a game. Games should have the same content rights as any art form; and if Hot Coffee had been revealed to the ratings boards and the game received an appropriate rating, that’s equitable treatment. But Rockstar is not the ESRB, it’s not PEGI, it’s not the regulatory authorities of the medium. I believe that with Hot Coffee it took it upon itself to knowingly deceive those authorities, and to this day maintains a smug web of deception that tries to cloak itself in glory while handing off any blame.
If you’re going to nail a protest to the church door, have the balls to sign your name to it, knowing you might get burned at the stake.
When the Hot Coffee thing came to light, it was a head-in-hands moment for me. I thought, how could you be so stupid? How could you leave that thing in there? I mean, ESRB and everything? And the mainstream media? You just *know* what they are going to say.
At the time I thought it was a mistake but I didn’t follow it because I just wanted it to go away. But looking back, the mini-game was completely fleshed out (someone in Rockstar has a design document for this thing) and it was clear they had thought about incorporating it into the proper game but decided to step back at the last minute… but I now think they wanted the players to know they’d done this thing. Off the record.
So as I said I’ve come around – prompted by your article to think about it again – to accepting this was unlikely to be a mistake.
Now as to the point of the article: it’s definitely food for interesting thought. I can see where you’re going with GTA was a mainstream title that carried sex in it – Hot Coffee or not, it still alluded to a bedroom scene with a shakycam outside the house. But I still remain unconvinced that Hot Coffee made it harder the criticize mature content. Hot Coffee was clearly a developer screwing up in a big way, Rockstar were at fault here.
I think it’s probably more important when the media are called out for bad coverage as with FOX News Mass Effect’s alien lesbian sex simulator or the offensive GTA Rothbury article in the UK’s Daily Mail. I think that makes the press more wary about going in all guns blazing and perhaps affords games more cultural breathing space than they previously had.
Oh God, don’t mention Custer’s Revenge. That’s like saying Candyman three times in front of a mirror.
(I think I’ve probably exhausted this conversation now. Time for a nap.)
I have to disagree with your central tenet that Hot Coffee played a pivotal role and “made it harder to criticize, […] the increasingly mature content we’re seeing these days”.
Increasingly mature content is enabled by:
1) Customers increasingly demanding it
2) Regulators allowing it
I understand that you are trying to propose Hot Coffee as a “trail blazer”, but I think Rockstar has been more successful at this with their overt boundary testing.
For example, in GTA3 (2001) you were able to pick up streetworkers, have intercourse with them and then run them over. Naturally it attracted controversy but the game remained on the shelves and this “freedom” has remained in all sequels since.
Meanwhile explicit minigames and hidden adult content have not broken into the mainstream… yet.
Matt… it’s not fair that your writing is this good, you make me simultaneously hate you and want to have sex with you. And I am heterosexual!
Meho, I’d switch teams for you. 😉
@Bernard – thank you for your comment! You make an interesting point when you say that Rockstar may well have been more progressive with the content it didn’t hide. The point where I disagree with your view is this: had GTA:SA simply included the Hot Coffee scene, I suspect it would’ve gotten no more attention than the GTA3 hookers did.
But they didn’t simply include it. The material was hidden. Concealed in a way that all but assured its being found. I maintain that Rockstar absolutely intended Hot Coffee to be discovered; that the company put it in the game with that objective in mind. And the “shock” (note the quotes) that such “horrid” (note the quotes) material could be included in a game “for kids” (note the quotes) is what made it a dam-breaking event.
I doubt the company possessed enough foresight to anticipate all that Hot Coffee would bring, but I increasingly believe that they did what they did knowing it might – in the long run – increase overall freedom of expression for the medium.
The reason I’m conflicted by the whole affair is that it could have just as easily led to a level of censorship that the industry might never have recovered from. The Comics Code Authority in the United States is precedent; art forms – particularly those wrongly viewed as “for kids” – can and have been nearly destroyed by censorship. It wasn’t until the 1990s that comics recovered actual freedom in the States, and even now it remains a niche literary form in part because of the crushing censorship it endured for decades.
One wonders where comics might have gone had the CCA never happened. Hot Coffee could have been the spark that ignited the same kind of oppression in video games.
Good read, good comments too. Christ, I can scarcely imagine one day living in a world where unwarranted censorship is a term for the history books.