Game Maker: Sex Mod Not Our Fault

After staying silent for several days following the discovery of a modification in one of its games that allowed the main character to engage in sexual acts, Rockstar Games said that the modification to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is simply not its fault and should be blamed on "hackers."

The modification, known as "Hot Coffee," does not actually modify the game, according to one of the people behind it. Patrick Wildenborg says that "all the contents of this mod was already available on the original disks. Therefore the scriptcode, the models, the animations and the dialogs by the original voice-actors were all created by RockStar."

When speaking to the Boston Globe, Wildenborg said the sex scenes were an "easter egg," or a portion of the program that takes some kind of action to change it. All that had to be done was removing something called a censor flag from the source code of the program.

"If the censor flag is set, all the sexually explicit scenes are blocked from the normal flow of events," he said.

Later, in a statement on his Web site Wildenborg nearly reversed those initial comments. "All this material is completely inaccessible in an unmodded version of the game. It can therefore not be considered a cheat, easter-egg or hidden feature," the notice reads.

Several people who have viewed the scene in question support Wildenborg's claims, as it appears that the scene is professionally crafted and fits within the normal realm of gameplay.

However, in a statement released Wednesday, Rockstar denied any involvement. "So far we have learned that the 'hot coffee' modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game," the company said.

"Since the 'hot coffee' scenes cannot be created without intentional and significant technical modifications and reverse engineering of the game's source code, we are currently investigating ways that we can increase the security protection of the source code and prevent the game from being altered by the 'hot coffee' modification."