Former Xbox boss Peter Moore sees 2004’s GTA: San Andreas, and specifically its sexually explicit Hot Coffee minigame, as a turning point in the video game industry that put it in league with the film and music industries.
In case you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about and if you missed out on the uncut version of San Andreas, no, Hot Coffee is the colloquial phrase for a minigame that was cut from San Andreas before launch and eventually leaked by a modder.
There’s a whole fascinating backstory behind Hot Coffee, but the gist of it is: At the time, Rockstar founder and president Sam Houser, who’s still with the company today, wanted to really emphasize the GTA series’ reputation for controversy, and from that desire spawned a minigame that allowed protagonist Carl “CJ” Johnson to have interactive sex with his in-game girlfriend. However, at risk of losing the game’s ESRB rating, the developers were forced to rein in the more NSFW elements of the game, including Hot Coffee, but instead of fully removing it from the game they just made it inaccessible, which of course made it ripe for leaking.
Appearing on Danny Peña’s Gamertag Radio podcast (timestamped here), Moore reflected on his time at Xbox, which encompassed the launch of GTA: San Andreas on Xbox in 2005, and said both the game and Hot Coffee helped the whole industry prove its legitimacy on the world stage.
“Getting that franchise on the platform, again for those who don’t know it was a PlayStation exclusive for many years, and you could see how that franchise in particular – and look at it now – was starting to drive a more mature consumer,” said Moore. “It was starting to take full advantage of obviously the graphical power of the high definition of Xbox 360. And I think it was the stickiness of GTA, it said to gamers, ‘We see you as mature adults. This is no longer content that you will pass through in a phase and get on to more mature things.’ GTA, as controversial as it obviously was at times, if anybody remembers Hot [Coffee], I think it signified a maturing of the industry, no pun intended, and put us on par with movies and music.”
Even if I’m judging purely by my parents still thinking I only write about “Nintendo” and “Pokemon,” there are large swaths of society that still think gaming is mostly for kids, but it sure isn’t for a lack of trying on Moore’s part.
“During that period, or a little bit before that period, we were fighting for respect, we were the root of all evil in society, ‘we’ being gaming. I spoke in Senate hearings in Washington DC on behalf of the gaming industry to make sure people understood this isn’t some polluting of young boys’ minds, this is a legitimate entertainment medium that is interactive in nature and was about to be taking full advantage of the internet in ways even movies and music weren’t.”