Sex scandal leads to game rating change
The video game industry has changed the rating for the hot-button video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" from M for mature to AO for adults only.
The move follows weeks of mounting controversy over a software modification that allows players to unlock sexually explicit content in the game. The scenes elicited outrage from parents' groups and politicians calling for federal oversight of video game ratings.
The game's producer, Take-Two Interactive Software's Rockstar Games, said it stopped making the current version of the game and is now working on an iteration with enhanced security to prevent modifications that allow access to the sex content, according to an Associated Press report.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB, has been investigating the content and revoked the M rating on Wednesday after concluding that "sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs of all three platform versions of the game (i.e., PC CD-ROM, Xbox and PS2)," Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB, said in a statement.
Rockstar initially claimed it wasn't responsible for the so-called "Hot Coffee" mod, blaming it instead on "the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game."
But in an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, a Take-Two spokesman acknowledged that Rockstar did create the racy material.
"There is sex content in the disc," Take-Two spokesman Jim Ankner said. "The editing and finalization of any game is a complicated task and it's not uncommon for unused and unfinished content to remain on the disc."
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Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET's Crave, covers gadgets, games, and most other digital distractions. As a co-host of the CNET News Daily Podcast, she sometimes tries to channel Terry Gross. E-mail Leslie.
