Rockstars & Porn Stars

Prepare to gasp, kids! Turns out there's sexual imagery hidden deep within the coding of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, an otherwise happy video game that involves the stealing of cars, the killing of prostitutes and the celebration of mayhem in the pristine city of Los Angeles. Apparently programmers at Rockstar Games, the developer of the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto series, were caught with their pants down, so to speak, when Patrick Wildenborg, a Dutch techie with waaaaaaay too much time on his hands, wrote a code to unlock the software, making the sexually graphic images hidden inside the game available to all.

Naturally this revelation caused a stir -- and we can guess where -- but one California state assemblyman in particular, Leland Yee, seemed to have worked himself into a lather on this one. Lee feels that the sexually explicit scenes are "inappropriate for our children." Indeed! When teaching children about grand larceny, muddling that lesson with sex will merely serve to fuck up those kids beyond repair.

But the Joystick jockey Wildenborg says that the hidden images, "are not something it is possible to accidentally stumble across" as players go through the game. A gamer must first download his code, "Hot Coffee," in order to access them. Grand Theft Auto is already rated M, for mature, (which I find highly amusing in and of itself), so I guess I'm missing whyfor the outrage? Since video games cost around $50 a pop, it's safe to assume that a parent is the one purchasing it for his or her child. Seems to me like the title alone, "Grand Theft Auto," might be enough to warn a parent, "hey, this ain't so much a 'values' game." (Though I suppose one could make the argument that knocking off prostitutes is a form of street cleaning.) But the bottom line is that kids aren't just going to happen upon this stuff. In order for that to happen, it would take some serious computer diddling. Either that, or simply typing the word "sex," into Google.