It seems like being “economical with the truth” is all the rage this summer.
The most public case occurred in the saga of the “Hot Coffee mod” for the game from Rockstar Games called “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,”or GTA.
If you haven’t followed this, here’s the scoop: Around the beginning of June rumors began to circulate that there was an Easter egg – the hip name for hidden code – in GTA that allowed the player’s avatar (named CJ) to have a surprisingly good time with his virtual girlfriends.
Subsequently, it became clear that the rumor was true. A workaround called Hot Coffee had been created by Dutch programmer Patrick Wildenborg that, once implemented, exposed some racy content that was otherwise not visible to game owners. (You can find videos of the naughty bits all over the ‘Net and it is not really very shocking. I’d argue that you see worse on Fox.)
As far as I can determine, the workaround is not a simple exercise.
But when Rockstar got called on the carpet by The Entertainment Software Rating Board, which suddenly upgraded GTA’s rating to adults only, Rockstar decided to abuse the truth about the origins of the content.
In a press statement Rockstar included the following ridiculous explanation: “In violation of the software user agreement, hackers created the ‘hot coffee’ modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game’s source code.”
Isn’t that what hackers do? Do you know any hackers who are careful to not violate license agreements? Second, they disassembled and rebuilt the game?! Please! Who did Rockstar think would believe this tale? The press release continued in a similarly off-the-wall vein (see Gearblog for a link to a report on the press release).
Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive Software, owned up. Yep, the code for the naughty bits was already in there, and yes, that means that Rockstar lied to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which has taken a lot of heat over something that I find hard to believe they could have prevented.
Now, it seems everyone is up in arms, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) who is turning this into a cause célèbre by jumping on to the family-values bandwagon.
It makes you wonder whether Rockstar knew about Hot Coffee all along and intentionally engineered this ruckus. Talk about getting press!
The other dissemblance that caught my eye recently was from Microsoft on the topic of open source.
In an interview on News.com, Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy, was asked, “In what way is Linux or an open source infrastructure unsuitable?” Taylor replied: “You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it, add some services and things like that. Because of the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break.”
Pardon? Did I understand you to say that Linux was brittle? In comparison with what? Surely not with Windows?
Taylor continued the spin: “When it comes to the adding of modules … [Linux] becomes more and more difficult [to manage].”
Words fail me. Taylor continued with this nonsense, implying that Microsoft’s Shared Source program that allows select entities access to up to 65% of the source code for Microsoft’s core products is comparable to open source!
Here we have two companies that should know better standing up in public and, well, lying. They lied about sex and source code, and in Rockstar’s case they were found out. When will Microsoft’s lies be exposed for the spin and sham they are? Will Hillary care?
Tell the truth to backspin@gibbs.com. And check Gearblog for links for this column. Links to be posted on Gearblog.
