Hot Coffee Creator Remembers GTA: San Andreas Mod Development

Patrick Wildenborg, the modder who created the infamous Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, recalls how he found the files that enabled the sex mini-game in the Rockstar open-world title and how the decided to make them available to the public.

Speaking to Eurogamer, the modder explains that his interest in the unused content was piqued when he noticed that they had some pretty suggestive names in the files system of the PlayStation 2 version of GTA: San Andreas.

He says, “Our assumption at that time was that they were unused animations which were abandoned in the early development of the game. There were, however, some references to these animations in the script files. As I was mainly focused on figuring out the scripts I decided to figure out what those references were and if there might be some abandoned code indicating how they might have been used.”

The fact that the discovery was made on the PlayStation 2 home console from Sony meant that Wildenborg had no actual way of changing the game structure in order to enable the content that Rockstar had cut out.

But in 2005, the developer and publisher 2K Games launched a version of San Andreas on the PC, which allowed the modder to test out his solution for making the game whole again.

He adds, “I had one of my fellow modders in the USA send me his copy of the script file. I edited it with a hex editor, to flip the infamous toggle which I believed would unlock the content. I sent it back to him. 15 minutes later he sent me a video.”

The modified files caused a scandal at the time and Rockstar was forced to apologize for including the content that Hot Coffee enabled.

At the moment, the team is working on Grand Theft Auto V, which is scheduled for a spring 2013 launch.