GRAND THEFT AUTO III BRADYGAMES PC

It was that bad (not the table tennis game, which was pretty good).

The company had to go make a table tennis game to cool off before heading back to the fold. This was the nuclear moment for Rockstar, where the dam burst and the publisher transformed from a relative afterthought into a singular enemy of the moral majority. Senators Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and Evan Bayh got involved, all of whom cosigned a bill that asked for federal oversight over the ESRB. This provoked a massive recall, causing Rockstar to restock the shelves with versions of San Andreas that obstructed the minigame.

GRAND THEFT AUTO III BRADYGAMES PC

The ESRB reclassified all versions of San Andreas-not just the PC port where the minigame was first accessible-to 'Adults Only,' a distributional death kiss that led US retailers, who by policy didn't stock anything rated above Mature, to stop carrying the game. It was supposed to be a gag shared among the developers, but tinkerers found that minigame, put it in a mod, and unleashed one of the dumbest and most frustrating reckonings in the history of the hobby. The short of it is that Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with a cheeky sex minigame baked deep into its source code. I'm not going to write an exhaustive recap of Hot Coffee, because it's one of the most famous and well documented sagas in videogame history. He's since been disbarred, and I don't think anyone knows what he's up to now. (Rap music, Howard Stern, and violent videogames were frequent targets.) Thompson would become something of a fixture throughout the decade, always popping up whenever there was a new GTA in the can. Basically, the man was some flunkey Florida attorney who built a career by bringing these exhausting, dubious moral panic charges to court. Maybe some of you younger readers don't know about Thompson. The lawyer representing the plaintiffs in that case? You guessed it: Disgraced legal operator, hammy, unrepentant talking head, and genuine eccentric Jack Thompson. This led to a $200 million lawsuit filed against Rockstar, which was later voluntarily rescinded. Later, they'd claim that they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto, where they frequently fired guns at passing cars.

In 2003, two teenage boys in Tennessee shot and killed a motorist. I suppose we'll have to see how the remaster sits with today's sensibilities. Tommy Vercetti is obviously a total Scarface pastiche, but I bet if Rockstar were rendering a Miami send-up now, it would probably think a little bit harder about how it represented these communities. I do wonder how some of those stories and universes will fare in 2021. 'The game shouldn't be designed to destroy human life, it shouldn't be designed to destroy an ethnic group,' reads a quote from Jean-Robert Lafortune of the Haitian American Grassroots Coalition in an ancient CNN story. The only difference is that this one also earned some (reasonable!) pushback among Haitian and Cuban communities in South Florida, who objected to the game's instruction to kill 'the Cubans' and 'the Haitians,' gangs in Vice City. The release of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was controversial in the exact same way GTA 3 was-summoning up censored editions in certain markets who still possessed a prehistoric perspective on videogames. 2002: Still banned in Australia, Miamians rankled If you're curious, YouTuber Vadim M put together a compilation showcasing the differences between the editions, offering a strange perspective into a universe where GTA was rated T for Teen.

Rockstar had to go back and edit the version of GTA 3 that fit Australian regulations, toning down the gore significantly. Australian videogame regulations are a riddle wrapped in an enigma, which is why nobody should be surprised that GTA 3 was refused a ratings classification by the OFLC-the now-dissolved down-under government bureau that served as the country's version of the ESRB, now replaced by the Australian Classification Board. That is, of course, unless you live in Australia, where you are very much out of luck. You just got out of middle school and are hitching a ride with your buddy Glenn to chug Jolt Sodas, crank the first Alien Ant Farm CD, and play about 12 consecutive hours of the greatest videogame in the world, Grand Theft Auto 3.

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