(As of 07/23/2005, this post can be found over at JIVE.)

It’s a tale of two sets of idiots, really.

The premier idiot of the first flock of idiots — let’s call him King Idiot — is the chucklehead game developer at Rockstar who actually coded the now-infamous Hot Coffee minigame into the core content of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Actually, since developers rarely act entirely alone, we need to consider instead a small coterie of idiots. So now we have King Idiot and His Clown Princes. I can just imagine how it all came to pass.

King Idiot was bored, you see. Maybe he was tired of writing artificial intelligence rules for just how the Ballas gangmembers are going to react when Carl rolls through their ‘Hood. So he put on his thinking cap — possibly the kind made from a baseball helmet that features a beercan-holder on either side and a convenient tube from each — and came up with this presumably hilarious minigame to amuse his fellow codeboys. “Look,” he yelled over the surrounding nest of cubicles. “Come over here and check it out … you can see Carl doin’ it! With a girl! He’s doin’ it! Hehehe…” His co-workers wandered over, leaned into his cube and smirked. Some might’ve giggled. But most probably said, “Dude … that’s cool and all, but damn, you need to get some real work done.” Once he regained his composure and stopped snarfing Jolt Cola out his nose, King Idiot nodded his head and said something like, “Yeah, you’re right … but wasn’t it awesome?” His Clown Princes just stared and shuffled back to their cubes.

Of course, King Idiot was very proud of his little bit of artistic license, so he couldn’t bring himself to actually delete the mischievous code from his working copy of the game. Instead, he probably just commented it out, leaving the potential of his work of art if not the actual. He went back to programming vocal cues for Rider and Sweet or designing new threads for Carl to buy at the Zip store in Los Santos. The Clown Princes forgot about the whole thing. King Idiot never mentioned it again. And since nobody in Quality Assurance was looking for a minigame featuring an actually fornicating Carl, they missed that part entirely. The game went gold. The game went to retail for the PS2 in November.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, like Vice City before it and GTA 3 before Vice City, was tremendously successful. For the first quarter of this year, Take-Two Interactive (the company that owns Rockstar) reported net sales of $502 million. That’s half a billion dollars, kids. While it isn’t certain that every one of those dollars came from GTA:SA sales, it certainly isn’t a huge leap of faith. At $50 a box, that’s 10 million games sold. And from day one, every GTA:SA box has featured a very convenient label courtesy of the ESRB. That label shows us a big M for mature and offers a handy low-end age limit for prospective players: 17. Remember that number.

So how did a game that is marked as Mature get into the hands of children younger than the recommended age? I can remember just how much planning went into sneaking into an R-rated film when I was but a teenager, so gaining access to a game that costs about six times the price of a kid’s movie ticket would take months of careful strategy and allowance saving. Of course, I suppose a determined little boy could be terribly persuasive. With enough pleading and promising of chores, I guess mom might see it in her heart to fork over $50 and change. After all, it would make the boy so happy and the dishes would never be dirty again. But wait … what about that warning label? Or for that matter, the fact that the box itself depicts various acts of general thuggery and mayhem, both drawn and rendered graphically? I mean, if it were me and I were paying $50 for a new distraction that was coming into my house, I think I’d take an interest. Wouldn’t I?

Given the self-righteous uproar from shocked and appalled parent groups, I guess not. But let’s be honest. Here’s our second set of idiots: the parents who just weren’t paying attention. Even without the magic modification that finally reveals just what goes on when they get behind closed doors (and when she lets her hair hang down), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is unapologetically violent and crude. Even before you pick up the joystick to start playing, the opening cutscene has exposed your waiting ears to a solid double-handful of F-bombs and N-words. When critics evenly compare San Andreas to the movie Pulp Fiction, they’re not just talking about the intrigue and the gunshots. This is Tarantino-gauge dialogue.

And once you start running as Carl Johnson, every step turns up the ultra-violence just a little bit more. At first, you have a baseball bat. Soon, you’ve got a pistol. Then a Tec-9. Eventually, you’ll pick up a chain-saw. If mom and dad just happen’d to stroll past Junior’s door while he was playing GTA:SA, they wouldn’t even have to look at the screen to know that something a bit rougher than basic cable television was flashing before his dear little eyes.

Now, some inventive and curious modders — dudes who were probably looking for a way to change all of the cars in San Fierro into helicopters or to let Carl walk on water like some kind of Grove Street Messiah — have stumbled upon the remaindered code from King Idiot. Naturally, they’re curious. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be modders. And hey, guess what they found? They found a way to see Carl getting his simulated (and cartoonish and indeterminate) freak on. Wow. So naturally, they did what anyone does when they find something cool and/or interesting:

They put it on the Internet.

So after many months of this game being available on the PS2, with all of the foul language and criminal situations and caps being popped into asses … and after just a few weeks of a new release for the Xbox and the PC, both containing the same incredibly raucous content … the world-at-large has a justifiable reason to be absolutely livid with Rockstar: Pixellated Humping.

Oh, but we can be so grateful today. Because the ESRB has decided to revoke the previous rating of M for Mature. From now on, all copies of GTA:SA will bear the mark of shame known as AO. Adults Only. That will stop them, right dead in their naughty little tracks. Before now, children were defended from this horrible electronic beast only up to the age of 17. But with the application of an indelible and shameful AO, we can sleep safely and soundly, knowing that the old dope games peddler will fined heavilly and scorned for selling our Junior a single copy of GTA:SA …

At least until he’s 18.