Game Over for Modders

When the smoke clears around the Grand Theft Auto sex scandal, the innocent bystanders of the collision between politics, puritans and corporate dissembling may prove to be the community of "modders" who tinker with game content for their own amusement.

Game hackers have probed, tweaked and enhanced everything from Halo to The Sims 2 over the years without incurring the wrath of game makers -- despite widespread click-wrap contracts prohibiting unauthorized modifications, and ambiguities in copyright law that make distributing the hacks legally uncertain.

All that changed last week when game industry opponents and some Democratic lawmakers raised a furor over a sexually themed mini game baked into Rockstar Games' best-selling PC and console title GTA: San Andreas. The raunchy bonus material was hidden from normal play, but could be unlocked by a downloadable mod titled "Hot Coffee" developed by hacker Patrick Wildenborg of Deventer, Netherlands, last month.

Rockstar's parent company, Take Two Interactive, was quick to blame the modder and disavow responsibility for the racy content. In a July 13 press release, the company claimed that "a determined group of hackers" had gone to "significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game," a process that the company said involved disassembling, recompiling and "altering the game's source code."

But on Wednesday, an investigation by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board concluded that Take Two was, in fact, responsible for the sex content, which was found in all three versions of San Andreas: the PC, Xbox and PlayStation2 dis

[ Wired ]