Written by Juan Devis

After achieving cult status for cleverly weaving stories of gang violence and redemption, and for pushing the envelope to gain some serious street-cred in the gaming industry, Rockstar Games found themselves in the middle of a national controversy when they released the last installment of their inner city saga: San Andreas.

Story goes that a fan of the game in Holland began to mess around with the code and "uncovered" a series of pornographic sequences hidden in the main directory of the script. The producers maintained that the gamer wrote the new code, but the gamer insisted that the scenes were already written into it, they simply needed to be unlocked.

San Andreas became an Adults Only game in a matter of days, and the PC version was taken off the market and replaced by a closed console version available only for Playstation and X-Box. To avoid any future controversy, many game producers and developers are beginning to take the same steps.

It's a dangerous road to follow, because some of the most daring media produced in and about gaming exists because users - fans, artists and aficionados - can modify the content of an already existing game to create their own. The Mod community, as it is commonly called, has grown so fast in the last few years and their influence so strong, that many of the "new" games produced by modders have become even more popular than the originals.