Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition has suffered a pretty bad launch since releasing on November 11. On PC, players have been unable to play the game for over 24 hours due to Rockstar Launcher issues. All versions of the game are filled with bugs, visual glitches, horrible weather effects, missing fog, and more. And now, it appears that some code from the infamous GTA San Andreas “Hot Coffee” controversy is still in the collection as well as songs that were cut presumably over licensing. Some of this could explain why the game is still unavailable on PC.
Shortly after the remastered trilogy was released, dataminers and fans quickly began digging into the files and code of the collection. What they found was surprising. Buried in the Definitive Edition are numerous pieces of code, scripting, and files that shouldn’t be there, including dev comments, cut content, and more.
Also found in these files: Code connected to the infamous Hot Coffee sex mini-game. That’s according to multiple dataminers on social media as well as popular GTA expert and dataminer Vadim M who talked to me about the recently discovered code.
A brief bit of history. In 2004 Rockstar released GTA San Andreas which featured the ability to have sex with various girlfriends in the game. However, these scenes weren’t graphic and instead featured a short cutscene of CJ entering the GF’s home after being invited in for some “coffee” and some suggestive audio clips played over an exterior shot of the home. However, buried in the code of San Andreas was a fully developed sex mini-game that Rockstar disabled but didn’t actually cut from the retail release.
In 2005, players found a way to reactivate this “Hot Coffee” content and that led to a lot of legal problems for Take-Two and Rockstar, including a $20 million settlement, court cases, class-action lawsuits, and US congressional hearings and involvement. It was a whole thing. Rockstar would release patched versions of San Andreas that removed all of the controversial content, allowing the game to keep its M rating.
But now, the newly released San Andreas remaster appears to at least contain the code associated with the “Hot Coffee” content. According to Vadim M, it’s unlikely that players will be able to reactivate the sex mini-game like in 2005, due to the fact that most of the actual assets needed for the mini-game are still missing from these versions.
As for why this code is even in these newly released ports, the best theory is that the devs behind the collection were given the “master build” of San Andreas and just didn’t remove anything from it. So all of Rockstar’s comments, changes, and code from the most recent build should be present within GTA The Trilogy - Definitive Edition’s files.
Another interesting discovery is that apparently all of the songs from the original version of San Andreas are still in the game. However, a script is used to stop them from playing. Assuming the reason that some music is no longer included is due to licenses expiring, it’s probably not great that the songs are still in the game and so easily accessible. I imagine a lawyer or two might find that questionable.
These “cut” songs—plus the hot coffee files—could be some of the “data files” that Rockstar says was unintentionally included in the PC version of the game. Whatever the files actually are, two days later the remastered trilogy remains unplayable for folks on PC.