If you were conscious during the 2000s and even vaguely aware of the gaming industry, then the phrase “hot coffee” definitely has a very different meaning for you. This is because of theinfamous Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which restored a cut sex minigame.
By modern standards, it’s laughable. Our protagonist inGTA: San Andreas, CJ, simulates sex acts with his girlfriend while fully clothed. However, this was before game devs had pushed to get sex scenes in an M-rated game, let aloneinteractivesex minigames. Inevitably, advocacy groups and politicians who did not understand that this was a mod, and completely inaccessible through normal gameplay, became aware of this, withRockstarat the centre of the controversy.
20 Years Ago Today, The Hot Coffee Investigation Was Launched In The US
Ashighlightedby ResetEra user doops., it has now been 20 years to the day since the US House of Representatives voted in favour of the Federal Trade Commission launching an investigation into the hot coffee content. The purpose of the investigation was to find whether or not Rockstar and Take-Two duped the ESRB into getting an M rating, avoiding an AO rating, which would have seen the game pulled from store shelves.
On the same day, there was anArs Technica articleabout how a grandmother launched a lawsuit against Rockstar after buying San Andreas for her 14-year-old grandson. Eventually, a bunch of different lawsuits became a class action lawsuit, which was settled for $20 million, as perEurogamerin 2009. Anyone who purchased the original run of the game, which contained the Hot Coffee files, was entitled to a $35.
But of course, many of us remember it for the political pushback. Thefindingsof the FTC investigation were published on July 15, 2025, and concluded that Rockstar should have told the ESRB that San Andreas contained “potentially viewable nude female characters and a potentially playable sex mini-game”. In other words, game devs and publishers were on the hook for content that was on the disc, but typically only accessible with mods. Here, it was also claimed that Rockstar had spent $24.5 million on recalling and replacing copies of the games in stores, so it could get its M rating back.
Bizarrely, Rockstar initially tried to pin the whole thing on modders and denied that the Hot Coffee content was on the disc. This was, obviously, not true. It’s hard to argue that Rockstar and Take-Two’s relationship with its modding sceneis much better now.
All in all, this goes to show just how far we’ve come. Thankfully, this didn’t result in game devs avoiding sexual content altogether, nor did modders stop playing around with game files. In fact, modding has never been more mainstream, and sexual content in games is pretty much universally accepted in most regions. Hell,Larian advertised Baldur’s Gate 3 with bear sex. You love to see it.
Now, Rockstar is gearing up for the launch of GTA 6. Given that our two protagonists are a couple, there is a very good chance that we’ll get something a little hotter than Hot Coffee.
