Hot Coffee draws no crowd

Chris Kruger

Apparently only thousands of people have made moves to claim compensation over the Hot Coffee sex mini-game hidden in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The Hot Coffee mini-game allowed players to perform consentual acts of a sexual nature with a young lady of the player's choice. While the artwork to support the mini-game was shipped on the GTA: SA disk the game logic to activate it was primitively disabled. It was a fairly trivial task for miscreats on the internet to reactivate. Once the technique was know it was even easier to distribute a program to re-activate the mini-game.

It was claimed that millions downloaded the simple alteration in order to access Hot Coffee. Some customers were offended by what they saw and filed a lawsuit against Rockstar. The court ruled in favour of the customers.

The outcome of the debacle was that anyone who had purchased the version of San Andreas on which Hot Coffee was included became entitled to claim up to 35 US dollars in compensation.

The New York Times reported that the deadline for claim submissions was May 16th 2008. Only 2676 people bothered to lodge a claim. A very small proportion of the 21.5 million that purchased San Andreas.