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00:00You're not gonna rob me again.
00:01Man, I never robbed you.
00:03That was just a repossession.
00:05Okay, you call it whatever you want to call it.
00:08I really don't care.
00:09Welcome to Mojo Plays, and the GTE series is no stranger to a bad news cycle,
00:14but some of the times Rockstar made headlines could sometimes be so ridiculous
00:18you wonder how they even made the front page to begin with.
00:21You better be kidding me, Tommy.
00:23Tell me you still got the money.
00:25No, sonny.
00:26I don't have the money.
00:28That was my money, Tommy!
00:30My money!
00:31The pirated copy won.
00:33In a moment, sweetheart.
00:34I got a little business to take care of.
00:36I got a little job for you, pal.
00:39The official disc lost in Brazil before the argument even started.
00:43Retail pullbacks and local bands hit the PS2 copies of 3,
00:47By City, and San Andreas hard enough
00:49that the version people actually finished was the one from a stall,
00:53burned and unlabeled,
00:55not the one with Rockstar's logo on the spine.
00:57Suddenly, importing the real box was a hobby for people with money and patience,
01:02while playing the copy was just another Tuesday.
01:05The controversy reads like censorship until the living rooms get checked,
01:09and then its distribution failure with pirates as the winners.
01:13Rockstar had the rating, the manual, and the press,
01:16but the stall had the customers.
01:18The studio managed to keep the rights,
01:20but that didn't stop diehard gamers from still playing.
01:24Said they'd be back for some of his stock today.
01:26He's gonna need backup,
01:28and in return, they'll give you a knockdown, Rach,
01:30on any hardware you buy.
01:32Peace sign.
01:36I know just how you feel.
01:38By 2014, GTA 5 had been out long enough to start collecting lawsuits
01:43the way a freeway collects billboards.
01:46Lindsay Lohan sued over Lacey Jonas and a bikini ad
01:49that she said copied her peace sign photo.
01:52Naturally, the case was dismissed, and the character stayed.
01:56Then Karen Gravano sued claiming another character had copied her life as a reality star,
02:01but that one failed too.
02:03For a minute, the cast list looked like a docket,
02:05with a blonde actress and a mob daughter both insisting the satire
02:09had been a portrait taken without permission.
02:12Rockstar's habit of building people out of magazine scraps
02:15finally met people with nothing but lawyers and time,
02:18and neither suit moved to Polygon.
02:20Both kept the marketing department in the news longer
02:23than the original marketing had managed to do on its own.
02:27What's your name, by the way?
02:28Michael.
02:29Michael what?
02:29Why?
02:30I'm not gonna find a horse's head in my bed, am I?
02:33Taxi driver, real life.
02:35Hey.
02:36Yeah.
02:37Okay.
02:37No, I can't do it.
02:39My cousin will do it.
02:41Yes, he can drive.
02:43No, he's not a cop.
02:44In August 2008,
02:46an 18-year-old in Bangkok robbed and killed a taxi driver.
02:50Len told police he wanted to see if it was as easy in real life as it looked in GTA
02:554.
02:56The local distributor immediately asked retailers to pull the game,
03:00and Thai authorities followed with a nationwide ban
03:03that effectively kept the series off shelves for years.
03:06The story spread fast because it was the cleanest possible version of the argument
03:10everyone had already been making.
03:12A kid played the game, then did the thing the game lets you do.
03:15Rockstar stayed quiet while the rest of the world kept playing,
03:19and the incident became the default example of every games-caused-violence piece that year.
03:25Yeah.
03:28You knew?
03:29I had suspicions.
03:32Buggered.
03:33And you consider them achievements?
03:35These were the opportunities I had.
03:37At least I took them.
03:39And where did these opportunities get you, Michael?
03:41The 2018 Hours report was about Red Dead Redemption 2,
03:45but it still landed on the studio that had built 5.
03:48Dan Hauser said that people were buggered,
03:50and that one word did more damage than the spreadsheet underneath it.
03:54Rockstar had spent a decade selling all-nighters as passion,
03:58the radio full of loyalty,
04:00and the credits full of names that never got a day off,
04:03and then the calendar leaked in public.
04:05100-hour weeks aren't a simple mission design.
04:08They're a schedule with no fail state and no checkpoint.
04:11The controversy became even stranger
04:14because the games being defended were the ones players already loved
04:17and had finished twice.
04:19However, this time nobody was arguing about a torture scene,
04:22they were arguing about whether the city on screen
04:25had been built by people who were allowed to go home at the end of the day.
04:28You don't know any better and you can't help it,
04:30but you're an asshole!
04:32Yeah, well why don't you do something then?
04:34Besides just stand there.
04:35Don't call it a beta.
04:37Launch week didn't just lose a server,
04:39it lost the people who had just moved in.
04:42Characters built on day one were suddenly gone the next morning,
04:45with apartments empty and game progress wiped.
04:48With the only proof a player had existed
04:50was a support ticket and a memory of the loading screen.
04:53Rockstar answered the crash with roughly half a million in make goods
04:57and a statement that never called the first week a test.
05:01A live service can restart a session,
05:03but it can't hand back a character it deleted while the owner was asleep.
05:07Players described saves vanishing,
05:09while the company described it as a rough opening.
05:12The hush money was the admission the test was a failure,
05:16while the missing name on the check was the part they refused to print.
05:18There's nothing controversial about joining Mojo Play's 24x7 livestream.
05:23Scan the QR code on screen to join us live for non-stop gaming fun.
05:28Banwave
05:35Online has spent a decade watching paid menus treat the economy like a suggestion,
05:40and Rockstar answers the same way every time.
05:44Ban a wave of accounts, post a list,
05:46then wait for the tools to come back under a new name by the weekend.
05:49However, the honest session is the one that loses the cargo and the afternoon.
05:54A mode that sells shark cards can't exactly admit the register is optional,
05:59so the punishment lands on all the players,
06:01while the site selling the cheats keeps its domain and its customers.
06:05Same bike, same money drop, same lobby dead before dinner.
06:09And the notes show up with names instead of a fix.
06:12Cheating isn't the interesting part.
06:14The interesting part is that a city whose entire personality is based on cash
06:19has been running on counterfeit longer than some of the heists have been live.
06:23It's your last one, man!
06:24I'm reading all of me!
06:25Ain't no way out!
06:26You're dead, fool!
06:28Ah!
06:29Oh, shit!
06:30Come on, we're on the backs!
06:32Lights off for six years.
06:35Membership dues are very reasonable and purchasable at reception,
06:38or on our website, if that's more your thing.
06:40Los Santos players spent six years driving past a resort that looked finished and refused to open.
06:45The diamond sat on the map with the glass lit and the doors locked
06:49while everything else in the city kept getting new reasons to exist.
06:53However, the real holdup was the legal ramifications of a cash shop already selling shark cards
06:58next to an actual gambling floor that read like a lawsuit,
07:01and nobody wanted to be the one who finished that sentence.
07:06Speculation filled the space the update wouldn't,
07:08with most figuring the mode was just late.
07:11The building itself never explained the delay,
07:13and when the doors finally opened,
07:15half the conversation was still about how long the place had been expensive scenery.
07:19The city grew around a resort that wasn't keen on taking guests,
07:23and the wait turned into the only story that Diamond had managed to tell.
07:27And this is our casino floor.
07:29We have all the usual games, blackjack, roulette,
07:32three-card poker, slot machines, and inside track horse racing.
07:37Three men and a joke.
07:39It's one way of looking at it.
07:41Yeah, do you have any other ways of looking at it?
07:43Because I am all out.
07:45Five showed up with three men on the box,
07:47and parts of the press cycle treated a woman in the lead
07:50like a punchline the studio had already heard and declined.
07:53However, the complaint didn't leave.
07:56Instead, it followed the game for a decade.
07:58Marketing had Franklin, Michael, and Trevor,
08:01and the fourth face on the wheel was an online avatar with no campaign and no poster.
08:06Rockstar didn't lack women in the city,
08:09it just lacked one on the cover the game would put first and leave there.
08:12That argument sat through every expansion,
08:15only growing louder when a new trailer didn't immediately replace the series' male leads.
08:20Six's reveal finally gave the series a female lead
08:23with a story that didn't just force her in to check a box.
08:26The controversy wasn't even a controversy so much as online keyboard warriors
08:30screaming about a series that continued to dominate sales despite them.
08:35Does this mean we're in his crew?
08:37Yeah, I think so.
08:39You think he can help us?
08:40We don't have any better ideas, do we?
08:42A bloodless world.
08:44What did you find out?
08:45That there are more criminals in this town than in prison.
08:47We need a lead from the streets.
08:49Okay, let me think, let me think, let me think.
08:51Ah, I got it!
08:52Germany got the PS2 games with the blood and death animations pulled,
08:55and on some discs, the civilians themselves were completely edited out of the street entirely.
09:01Players who wanted the version they had read about were forced to import it,
09:04and the series people remember, and the series the shops were allowed to sell,
09:08were not the same game, even though the box art matched and the radio was still filthy.
09:13The pavement stayed clear while the wanted level kept climbing,
09:16and nobody died the same way the uncut disc allows.
09:19Rockstar shipped the cut build because the alternative was no build at all,
09:24and import shops did the rest of the work, and it still split the room.
09:28One half had the game Rockstar intended,
09:31while the other half had the version that flinched at the first sight of blood and called it a rating.
09:35I would have had you made!
09:38Take good night, Mr. DS!
09:43The End of Modding
09:44Take-Two sent the letter in 2017, and all of Open 4 went dark.
09:50The creator said he had been told by the developer that modding was illegal, full stop.
09:55Rockstar answered that the real target was the online harassment the tool had been enabling,
10:00not because people were swapping cars in a single-player save.
10:03However, the scene heard a ban either way,
10:06and the clarification showed up after the download link was already a 404.
10:10A program that had been the front door for a decade of custom work
10:14suddenly got treated like a menu that drops money in a public lobby.
10:18Players who had never joined one of those lobbies still lost access to the wrench.
10:22The studio wanted the harassment gone,
10:25but what it got instead was a week where the PC community decided the company had finally said out loud
10:30who was allowed to open the files.
10:32The producer takes the studio.
10:35So, so, so, you full of crap or what?
10:41What?
10:42Leslie Benzies ran the HD era as the producer on the games that made the studio the juggernaut it is
10:48today,
10:48and then left and sued over unpaid profits.
10:51Which, in turn, led to Rockstar and Take-Two fighting the case for years.
10:56The company that had put loyalty on every radio station ended up in court with the person who had actually
11:02shipped the productions,
11:03arguing about money players only ever saw as names scrolling after a long campaign.
11:08His credit was familiar, while seeing it on a docket was not.
11:12There's no clip for this one and nothing to pause,
11:15just a partnership that built the cities and then couldn't agree on the cut.
11:18Online kept dropping heists while the case sat open,
11:22and the company kept running like a broken home pretending everything was still fine in public.
11:28You won't regret this, man.
11:29I am out of here.
11:31Wanted to live anyway, get away from all these people from back home?
11:34Australia's long ban.
11:36Wake up!
11:39We had to gag him to stop the screaming.
11:42The early games that hit Australia were refused classification or heavy cuts down under,
11:48and four shipped with the violence and the prostitute scenes heavily altered.
11:52It was a crime game edited for a living room that had already decided the series was the problem,
11:57before the disc even showed up.
11:59Five finally launched uncensored once an adult rating existed,
12:02which was the sticker the studio had been waiting on for years.
12:06However, the shops pulled it anyway.
12:08Years of an official no, followed by an official yes,
12:12only for Target and Kmart deciding the classification still wasn't enough for the sake of the children.
12:17Rockstar had finally cleared the board that was supposed to decide these things,
12:21only for the retailers to overrule it in a week.
12:24Permission was granted, but the retail shelf still said no,
12:27while the rest of the country kept selling it.
12:30Let's go get in the car, alright?
12:31Hey, let's go have the time of our lives.
12:35The clip every news desk used.
12:37The news cycle thrives on moral panic.
12:41The clip was always the same interaction.
12:43Pick up a prostitute and then kill her to take the money back.
12:47There was never a mission, it was simply two systems sitting next to each other,
12:51a service and a wallet,
12:52yet every desk ran the footage like Rockstar had printed the steps on the back of the box.
12:57The footage never changed and never needed to,
13:00because the series spent years answering for an interaction nobody was assigned
13:04and nobody could skip with a marker because there wasn't one.
13:08A designed scene has an author,
13:10whereas a loop the player invents between stoplights doesn't,
13:13while the footage still looks deliberate enough for a segment.
13:16That's what made the controversy last as long as it did,
13:19because politicians pointed and parents pointed without ever bothering to pick up a controller.
13:2440,000 signatures
13:26Target Australia has announced it will be removing Grand Theft Auto 5 from its shelves
13:32and will no longer sell the game.
13:33A petition from women who had survived violence,
13:36including in the sex industry,
13:37cleared 40,000 names and asked Target Australia to pull GTA 5.
13:42Naturally, Target did and Kmart followed the same week.
13:45However, other R18 Plus games stayed on the shelf,
13:49which made the exception the entire story.
13:51Take-Two said it was disappointed and a counter-petition showed up immediately,
13:56arguing that an adult rating was the point of having one.
13:59The game had already been on sale for a year and the classification had cleared it,
14:03but none of that reached a retailer that didn't want the argument in the aisle.
14:07Rockstar lost two chains despite the same disc in the same box,
14:11just refused in those shops but still stocked everywhere else in the country that week.
14:15Wow, this is one of the most violent things I've ever seen in my life,
14:18but it's not available to kids, right?
14:20It's supposed to be available to adults.
14:22By the book.
14:23You.
14:24Where did we meet?
14:26Nowhere, pal.
14:27Yeah, we did.
14:29Hey, what are we doing here, huh?
14:32This.
14:33The mission requires the player to torture a man for the FIB,
14:36and Rockstar left it in the campaign even after critics called the whole thing pointless,
14:41which is why it's still the scene people pull up when they want the series to sound cruel on purpose.
14:47There's no other path if the objective is going to finish,
14:50so the tools get handed over and the game simply waits while the player decides how long to sit with
14:55it.
14:55The argument never stopped because the mission never left the disc,
14:59and players still reach it and sit through it while they disagree about whether the discomfort was the design
15:04or just the content that shipped without a patch.
15:07The game purposely never answers any of that.
15:10It simply loads the next objective and keeps the file exactly where it was.
15:14I think it's a good time, buddy.
15:16You know, go for a drive.
15:18A mission line too far.
15:20You know what I'm gonna do?
15:22I'm gonna kill me a Haitian.
15:23And then, and then I'm going to make love like a man.
15:27You know that, chica?
15:28Something like this.
15:31A Vice City mission objective about killing Haitians drew protests from the people the mission had named,
15:37so Rockstar apologized and patched the dialogue out in future re-releases.
15:41A crime game opened the file simply because the gag had picked a living community instead of a cartoon accent
15:47in a series that almost never does that.
15:49Hot coffee caused a recall, and the studio still argued intent in public,
15:54but this was one sentence in a mission, and it was removed.
15:57Players who had been filing every complaint in the same folder had to sit with one that ended in an
16:02edit.
16:03The controversy is small on the page and large in the patch,
16:07because GTA so rarely agrees a line went too far and then proves it by deleting the content.
16:12You know what I'm gonna do?
16:14I'm going to make love like a man.
16:17You know that, chica?
16:18Something like this.
16:22House of Lords.
16:23Before the first game was even finished, BMG had fed hit-and-run stories to the tabloids,
16:29and peers were on their feet in the Lords talking about sprites as if a village had burned down over
16:34the weekend,
16:35and the panic sold boxes.
16:37A top-down toy with a stolen car and a body count the hardware could barely render became business for
16:42the upper house,
16:43which is the kind of advertising a budget can't buy,
16:47and a publisher would never admit it arranged.
16:49The company that would become Rockstar learned early that Outrage was a distribution channel
16:54with better reach than any magazine ad.
16:57Those weeks look almost charming now,
16:59with Lords debating a genre that hadn't even been defined yet,
17:03while every ban and petition that followed was just the same panic moved into a louder room.
17:09Murder Simulator.
17:10In the part of the brain in which copycatting is likely to occur,
17:15whereas adults process them in the forebrain,
17:17where differentiation between reality and fantasy occurring.
17:21Jack Thompson spent years filing threats portraying GTA as a murder simulator,
17:26including attempts to get four off shelves before anyone had played it.
17:30Thankfully, all these claims didn't hold.
17:32He was a Florida lawyer with a press list and a theory that the games were training tapes,
17:37and the courts kept declining to feed into his delusions.
17:41Rockstar later went after him over his conduct around Bully,
17:45and the settlement included his agreement not to sue to stop Take-Two's future releases.
17:50The campaign against that other game bled into the GTA fight,
17:54until the studio treated both as one nuisance.
17:57That last part is the rare one where the critic was forced to sign something.
18:01Years of hearings and endless camera time,
18:04and the document that ended it was a promise to stop filing the next one.
18:08There's no findings, no research, no studies whatsoever that say games are bad for each other,
18:14or it changes your mind whatsoever.
18:1690 Clips.
18:18Said you was here for a pick-up or a drop-off.
18:21Pick-up.
18:23A teenager tied to Lapsus dumped roughly 90 Clips of an early 6 build in late 2022,
18:30and Rockstar called it a network intrusion and spent the week in headlines for a game
18:34that had no box and no date that meant anything yet.
18:38However, the footage was already everywhere,
18:41paused and passed around like a trailer the studio had forgotten to hold back.
18:45The press statement read like a company that had been robbed,
18:48which it had, and players watched unfinished scenes the way they used to watch the first teaser.
18:53Except the teaser was evidence in somebody's case.
18:56The footage was of a game nobody outside Rockstar was supposed to have seen,
19:00and represented the largest leak the series had produced.
19:03Years before Rockstar could formally reveal the game fans had waited over a decade for,
19:08and only months after confirming the game's existence.
19:12Clean this shit up!
19:22Hot Coffee
19:23Hey, you look pretty shook up, girl.
19:25You want me to take you home?
19:26Yeah, please.
19:28Thanks.
19:29A modder in 2005 unlocked a sex minigame Rockstar had left on the San Andreas disc
19:35everyone already owned and only switched it off instead of removing it entirely.
19:39The ESRB pulled the Mature rating and stamped the game Adults Only,
19:44which forced major American retailers to pull the game from shelves.
19:48A scene nobody could reach without an outside download still cost the rating and a recall,
19:53because the files had shipped on the disc regardless of the switch.
19:57Take-Two stopped the presses and shipped a clean build before the class action settlement arrived.
20:02The FTC called the marketing deceptive and settled for a warning.
20:06The defense was that the minigame was inaccessible in normal play,
20:10but the disc didn't back up the defense,
20:12and nothing else on this list moved finished product off a shelf and back onto a truck.
20:19I got five minutes.
20:21You want to grab a coffee?
20:23What do you think are some of the most ridiculous or deserved controversies the GTA series has endured over the
20:29years?
20:29Share your picks in the comments.
20:31Did you enjoy this video?
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