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‘GTA Trilogy’ Players Claim To Have Found ‘Hot Coffee’ Code In The Definitive Edition

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Something weird is going on with the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: The Definitive Edition. Shortly after release, the game was stripped off the Rockstar launcher, and right now you can neither purchase it, nor even play it if you’ve already bought it.

Originally, this was thought to be something related to the fact that there were some game-breaking errors in the PC version that made it unplayable. But while that may be part of it, Rockstar offered this explanation last night:

And you’ll never believe what “files unintentionally included in these versions” includes.

Yes, that’s right, players claim to have found evidence of code relating to the most infamous GTA sequence of all time, the Hot Coffee mod of GTA San Andreas in which your character entered a minigame to have sex with a girlfriend, which was secretly included the game and caused Rockstar all manner of headaches when it was discovered.

First reported by VGC, there are several instances of users claiming to be able to see this code in the game:

To be clear, this does not appear to be accessible in the game. As in, there was no way for players to actually play the Hot Coffee mod, which landed the game an AO rating back in the day and caused it to be banned from sale many places. But the code from the original version describing it, and deactivating it, appears to have been left in.

The Hot Coffee mod isn’t even the only unintentional collection of files from the original games left over. Dataminers also appear to have uncovered every single song that was left out of the re-released trilogy. They’re in the game, but due to licensing issues, the game simply avoids playing them.

If, by some miracle, modders figured out a way to reactive this music or boot up the Hot Coffee mod, that would be a nightmare for Rockstar to deal with, so they’re not risking it at all, hence why people who bought GTA cannot even play the trilogy right now until they can scrub it clean. It’s unclear how long this process is going to take, but players are growing irate they physically do not have access to a game they paid for and likely planned to play over a weekend.

This whole mess speaks to the idea that the GTA Trilogy remaster was a rushed, haphazard project in many ways. Secret code issues aside, the game is suffering from many other issues, including janky character models and eye-straining weather effects.

We’ll see how long it takes GTA to come back online, and if all this allegedly found code is removed when it does.

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