Hot Coffee (minigame)
"Hot Coffee" is the unofficial name for a minigame in the 2004 action-adventure video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas by Rockstar Games. While it was not playable in the official game release, the modding community discovered hidden code that, when enabled, allows protagonist Carl "CJ" Johnson to have animated sexual intercourse with his in-game girlfriend.
Rockstar Games president Sam Houser wanted to include more role-playing elements in San Andreas while also pushing the Grand Theft Auto series' controversial reputation. The development team was forced to curtail the nudity and sexual content of Houser's original vision, however, to obtain a "Mature" rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Rather than removing the content, the developers made it inaccessible to players. Modders discovered the code on the game's PlayStation 2 release, and when San Andreas was released for Windows, modder Patrick Wildenborg disabled the controls around the code. He released this modified code online under the name "Hot Coffee".
The discovery of the "Hot Coffee" minigame resulted in intense legal backlash for Rockstar Games and their parent company, Take-Two Interactive. While both companies remained mostly silent on the matter, Rockstar Games released a statement claiming that modders were responsible for the minigame. The ESRB re-rated the game "Adults Only" after an investigation, while the game was banned entirely in Australia until the explicit content was removed. Rockstar Games and Take-Two received a warning from the Federal Trade Commission for failing to disclose the extent of graphic content present in the game, while a class action lawsuit alleged that the company had misled customers who believed the game's content fell along the lines of a "Mature" rating.
"Hot Coffee" had a major impact on the video game industry. Rockstar Games's refusal to publicly comment on the matter was poorly received by the industry and modding community, while the ESRB announced fines of up to for game developers who failed to disclose the extent of their graphic content. "Hot Coffee" reappeared in future Rockstar Games releases: A similar mod for Red Dead Redemption 2 was posted on Nexus Mods in 2020 and subsequently taken down by Rockstar Games, while 2021's Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, which includes a remaster of San Andreas, was briefly removed from sale after data miners discovered the code associated with "Hot Coffee".
Gameplay
, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, released the action-adventure video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PlayStation 2 on 26 October 2004. The game was subsequently released for Windows and the Xbox on 7 June 2005. The fifth instalment in the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise and a sequel to 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, San Andreas expanded upon its predecessor with a virtual world four times larger than Vice City, as well as the introduction of more role-playing elements. By exercising and feeding the player character, Carl "CJ" Johnson, altering his hairstyle and outfits, and practising shooting and driving, the player maintains CJ's health and street cred. Prior to the release of San Andreas, the Grand Theft Auto series was popular among the modding community, with players known as "modders" hacking into a game's source code and creating modifications, or "mods". By introducing in-game character customisation options, San Andreas made game mods more accessible to those outside of the hacking community. Rockstar Games's president Sam Houser told reporters before the game's release that he "wanted to blur the lines more between what was in-mission and part of the story and your 'leisure time' in the game... all of your actions feel like they have consequences, and you are always in the world".San Andreas begins with CJ returning to his home state, the fictional San Andreas, to attend his mother's funeral. Upon his return, he engages in an overarching quest to become a kingpin in the area's criminal underworld. Although there is an overarching plot, San Andreas is primarily an open world game, where narrative missions are supplemented by other activities and interactions that have little bearing on the primary mission. One open world task in which CJ may participate is romantic. San Andreas contains six unlockable girlfriends that can be discovered either through completing missions or by exploring the virtual world. Each girlfriend has preferences for CJ's appearance and date activities; if CJ impresses the girlfriend by catering to these preferences, the player unlocks certain rewards. When CJ has sufficiently impressed one of these girlfriends, she will invite him home "for some coffee", a euphemism for sexual intercourse. In the unmodified version of the game, the player hears muffled sexual sounds from inside the house, while the camera remains outside the front door and no explicit content is visible.
The modified version of San Andreas replaces this censored cutscene with the unused minigame found in the code. After receiving fellatio from his girlfriend, CJ assumes the missionary position. Both characters remain clothed as the player is instructed to "push the left analog stick up and down in rhythm", which increases CJ's progress on a bar graph labelled "Excitement". Button controls allow the player to change the camera angle or the sex position. If the excitement bar reaches completion, CJ's girlfriend and the game congratulate the player; if the meter empties, the player is criticised for "failure to satisfy a woman". There is also an erotic spanking mini-game in which the player must press buttons in rhythm, which results in CJ spanking his girlfriend and her excitement bar increasing.
Development and discovery
Rockstar Games development
The first commercially successful game in the Grand Theft Auto series was Grand Theft Auto III. Upon its 2001 release, the graphic violence and sexual content in the game were met with controversy from politicians and other public figures such as Joe Lieberman and Jack Thompson. Both Grand Theft Auto III and its sequel Vice City received commercial success but faced scrutiny, particularly among those concerned about the impact of violent video games on children. Both games received an "M" rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board in the United States, and Houser responded to the criticism by stating that the Grand Theft Auto series, and video games as a medium, were not designed for children.In an interview with 1Up.com prior to the release of San Andreas, Houser told reporters that the game was the "official conclusion to a trilogy" preceded by Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City. Houser and the creative team at Rockstar North faced two major challenges in the development of San Andreas: First, they wanted to implement more role-playing elements without turning the series "uber-nerdy". Furthermore, they were determined to "do everything possible to exceed people's expectations" beyond previous games in the series. By this point, games in the Grand Theft Auto series were expected to contain graphic violence, depictions of crime, and coarse language, and Houser believed that the way to "include new functionality and interaction in line with the 'vibe' of the game" was to branch into more explicit sexual content. The inclusion of sexual content in video games proved challenging for developers, as the medium was still seen primarily as entertainment for children. The inclusion of in-game nudity, for instance, was likely to earn San Andreas an "AO" rating from the ESRB, and such a rating would curtail the markets in which the game could be sold, putting a great financial burden on Rockstar Games in the process.
On 14 July 2004, Houser emailed Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar Games's director of operations, with a list of the sexual content he planned to include in the game. This included oral sex, sexual intercourse, masturbation, erotic whipping, and dildos, both in-game and during cutscenes. Kolbe responded with concern that the graphic content would result in an AO rating, and the creative team began to research the content limits for video games in the United States. On 16 August, Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan emailed Houser a list of alterations that developers would need to make to ensure that the game fell in line with video game content rating systems in all markets. While certain countries like Spain and Italy had more relaxed guidelines towards nudity and sexuality, the ESRB's strict limits on these situations drastically limited the content that Houser and Rockstar Games could include without receiving an AO rating. Because Houser received this list of alterations so close to the game's intended release date, there was insufficient time to remove any graphic content from the game without compromising the source code. Instead, developers rewrote the code so that the content was still present on the game disc, but controls made this content inaccessible to the player.
Houser emailed San Andreas producer Leslie Benzies on 25 November, after the PlayStation release of the game, to see "how hard we can push the sex stuff" on the impending Windows release. Houser's original plan was to release two versions of the game, one with an M and the other with an AO rating, but the sales department was concerned about the financial impact of releasing an explicit game. Instead, Rockstar Games decided to release the game in its M-rated form, with a later patch including more graphic content for players who desired. On 7 January 2005, Rockstar Games submitted the Windows and Xbox versions of San Andreas to the ESRB. Because the game was identical to the already-reviewed PlayStation 2 version, the company did not need to send the Board a content disc, and it was automatically given an M rating.