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Former GTA co-writer Dan Houser recently opened up about the stress he and Rockstar Games felt when GTA San Andreas' Hot Coffee controversy took place in 2005. A fear of the company shutting down was in the air back when they faced major legal backlash. While San Andreas had massive success as a video game, the Hot Coffee incident made a major dent in the company's reputation.In a recent interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, Dan Houser explained why there was a lot of pressure while developing GTA 4. 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 very pressured because there had been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to Hot Coffee. It was extremely tough. So I think that felt very stressful," Houser said. [58:07]He feared that the company would simply shut down because of the Hot Coffee mod for GTA San Andreas."As a company, we'd had all that Hot Coffee drama, so we constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that. You know, a lot of drama in the company," former GTA co-writer said. [42:30]In 2005, a group of modders and hackers found an explicit sexual mini-game in the GTA San Andreas game files, which allowed CJ to have sexual intercourse with one of his four girlfriends. Though this feature did not make it to the final game, the group of hackers extracted the data, altered it, and made 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 unreleased features, Rockstar Games and their parent company, Take Two Interactive, received loads of public and legal backlash. The game was immediately re-rated to "Adults Only". The companies also received warnings from the Federal Trade Commission for not disclosing the graphic content that was in the game, even though it was hidden.Dan Houser's comments on GTA San Andreas' Hot Coffee mod back in 2005Hot Coffee was one of the biggest controversies Rockstar Games faced (Image via Rockstar Games || GTA Wiki)This is not the first time Dan Houser has spoken about GTA San Andreas' Hot Coffee mod. Back in 2012, a few years after the mod exposed the unreleased features, Houser did an interview with The Guardian where he expressed his feelings about the controversy. He said that it was mentally draining to get out of the situation."It was draining and upsetting – a tough time in the company," Houser said.However, he was also saddened by the fact that Rockstar Games was not attacked for the content but for the medium in which the content was present, i.e., a video game. He argued that people would not have cared much if these unreleased scenes were in a book or a film."We never felt that we were being attacked for the content, we were being attacked for the medium, which felt a little unfair. 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," he added.Check out our other content:GTA parent company Take Two Interactive's next earnings call: Timings and how to watchShould GTA 6 have traffic rules as a feature?"There was so much Americana": Rockstar's co-founder Dan Houser on why GTA was always based in the U.S.A.
