Author: by Nich Maragos, Simon Carless

Rockstar Games, developers of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, have issued an official statement regarding the recently discovered 'Hot Coffee' segment of the game. The game section, which allows the player to have sex after a successful date with one of the four girlfriends in the game, is not available in the standard retail version of San Andreas, and only came to light after hackers made it available on PC and hacked Xboxes by modifying in-game files. Rockstar's official statement on the matter reads: "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. In violation of the software user agreement, hackers created the 'hot coffee' modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game's source code." The company's release continues: "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." Rockstar's position is meant to calm some of the controversy that has arisen as a result of the "Hot Coffee" minigame, especially California senator Leland Yee's charge that the minigame is an indictment of the ESRB's inability to properly rate a game. In an additional development, newly unearthed Action Replay codes have been released that seem to enable the "Hot Coffee" minigame on the retail PlayStation 2 version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, making these section much easier and more accessible to view. Though these codes could still signify "intentional and significant technical modifications and reverse engineering of the game's source code", in Rockstar's parlance, the discovery makes it clear that little or none of the content in the 'Hot Coffee' mod was created by the original game modders. Hidden game elements that were cut but are still available on the game disc are not unheard of: notable examples of the same phenomenon include extra voice samples in Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain and the more recent Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords indicating alternate story directions and gameplay, though these elements were not actually playable.