How did it get past the ratings board?"The owner of Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, said it expected net sales to drop by about $50m (£30m) in the current quarter Not everyone was sympathetic. Critics say the punishment is negligible, given the Grand Theft Auto franchise has earned it revenues of nearly $1bn in four years.. "I tip my cap to that first step of showing responsibility," said Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council "Phase two needs to get to the bottom of this coding issue. This kind of interaction with buyers can extend the shelf-life of a title for months.But Rockstar denies any such strategy in this case, suggesting the sex sequences were left inside the code by mistake.
It is the first time that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board has been obliged to change the rating on a product after it has already entered the market."Apparently the sexual material was embedded in the game. The company admitted that," said Senator Hillary Clinton, who was among politicians lobbying for action against Rockstar Games.Some video games makers have recently begun encouraging the more sophisticated games players to try to manipulate their products The best of them can alter a game's code to change its plot. With the software modification, users of the game are able to direct their characters to the house of a "girlfriend" to engage in sex acts. While the characters remain largely clothed, the acts are said to be entirely explicit.The outrage grew quickly as parents and other groups accused the company of trying to pervert the games rating system. This week, however, it admitted the sex scenes have been within the games since they were first shipped. Players found they could unlock the illicit material simply by downloading a modifying software programme, called Hot Coffee, from the internet.Grand Theft Auto is one of the most popular game franchises in the world and when the San Andreas episode came out in October, it sold more than five million copies in the US. Mainstream retailers yesterday removed the best-selling title from their shelves. The game, which is playable on computers or on portable consoles such as Sony PlayStation or the XBox, has been under assault by politicians and family values advocates for several weeks since the existence of the hidden sexual material was first revealed.The company that produced it, Rockstar Games, at first accused hackers of somehow polluting the title, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
A tempest has struck the American video-game industry after the publisher of the country's most popular series, Grand Theft Auto, acknowledged that its latest instalment includes embedded pornographic content that allegedly was never meant to be seen by players. The globally successful game sold one million copies in Britain in nine days when it was released last October, where it attracted an "18" certificate.The regulatory board in the US that applies ratings to video games stripped the game of its "Mature" ranking and upgrading it to "Adults Only". Mr Romano's father, who lives in Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, said that he had not been contacted with ransom demands, but he feared for his son's safety.Mr Romano took over a struggling Cruz Azul last December and guided the squad to several weeks at the top of the Mexican league. "I think it is evident now what we all know: that this is a city in which anyone can be kidnapped," he said.Police have recovered Mr Romano's vehicle, which had one of its back windows shot out by the kidnappers. The coach of one of Mexico's most popular football teams has been forced from his BMW by five armed assailants and abducted outside his team's training ground in southern Mexico City. Insurgents claimed to have killed one of them, the Egyptian ambassador, this month, Bahrain's envoy was slightly wounded and Pakistan's ambassador escaped injury.Sunni Arabs are continuing a boycott of the committee drafting Iraq's new constitution.
