Rockstar's Houser: 'Hot Coffee' wouldn't have mattered if it were a book

"It was draining and upsetting - a tough time in the company."

- Dan Houser, one of the co-founders of Rockstar Games, discusses the ordeal his company went through during the "Hot Coffee" Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas fiasco. In 2005, a modder found a sex-based minigame hidden away inside the code for the best-selling open-world action game, that Rockstar had failed to highlight to the ratings board. Soon afterwards, Rockstar was sued by the Los Angeles city attorney's office, and later forced to pay $4.9 million in damages. Talking to the Guardian, Houser opened up about the whole experience, stating, "The massive social decay that we were supposed to induce hasn't happened. So in that regard, a lot of those debates that used to go on, they're not such a big deal now." "We never felt that we were being attacked for the content, we were being attacked for the medium, which felt a little unfair," he continued. "If all of this stuff had been put into a book or a movie, people wouldn't have blinked an eye. And there are far bigger issues to worry about in society than this."