Dan Houser on how GTA San Andreas' Hot Coffee feature caused huge controversy

Former GTA co-writer Dan Houser recently spoke about the stress he and Rockstar Games felt when the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy took place in 2005. Fears of the company shutting down were in the air when they faced major legal backlash. Although San Andreas was massively successful as a video game, the Hot Coffee incident took a heavy toll on the company's reputation.

In a recent interview on Lex Fridman's podcast, Dan Houser explained why there was so much pressure while GTA 4 development. One of the reasons why Rockstar Games felt the pressure was because of the hot coffee controversy that took place a few years ago.

“I think GTA IV was under a lot of pressure because there had been all this pressure on the company. The company almost imploded several times because of hot coffee. It was extremely hard. So I think it was very stressful,” Houser said. (58:07)

I was afraid that the company would be closed simply because of the Hot Coffee mod for GTA San Andreas.

“As a company, we'd had all this Hot Coffee drama, so we constantly thought we might shut down in the middle of doing that. You know, a lot of drama in the company,” said the former GTA co-writer. (42:30)

In 2005, a group of modders and hackers found a sexually explicit minigame in the GTA San Andreas game files, which allowed CJ to have sex with one of his four girlfriends. Although this feature did not make it into the final game, the group of hackers extracted the data, altered it and turned it into a playable mod called “Hot Coffee”.

Since GTA San Andreas was only rated “Mature” by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, but had these new features, Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take Two Interactive, received a lot of public and legal backlash. The game was immediately re-rated to “Adults Only”. The companies also received warnings from the Federal Trade Commission not to disclose the graphic content that was in the game, even though it was hidden.

Dan Houser's comments on the Hot Coffee mod for GTA San Andreas in 2005

This isn't the first time Dan Houser has talked about the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee mod. In 2012, a few years after the mod exposed the new features, Houser gave an interview to The Guardian where he expressed his feelings about the controversy. He said it was mentally draining to get out of the situation.

“It was exhausting and upsetting, a difficult time for the company,” Houser said.

However, he was also saddened by the fact that Rockstar Games was attacked not for the content but for the medium in which the content was present, namely a video game. He argued that people wouldn't have cared much if these unseen scenes were in a book or a movie.

“We never felt like we were being attacked for the content, we were being attacked for the medium, which we felt was a little unfair. If all these things had been put in a book or a movie, people wouldn't have blinked an eye. And there are much bigger problems for society to worry about than that,” he added.

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