Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Look closely at what this ad is promising and when. Coming June 7 to Xbox, with a Mature rating badge sitting right there along the bottom of the screen. That date is June 7, 2005, and that rating had roughly six weeks left to live.
Quick timeline first, because people mix this up constantly. San Andreas launched on PlayStation 2 on October 26, 2004, the same day Rockstar put GTA Advance out on Game Boy Advance. The Xbox and PC versions did not arrive until the following June, which is exactly what this spot is announcing. By the time Take-Two confirmed those ports were coming, the PS2 version was already estimated to have moved over five million copies.
Then came that summer. In June 2005 a Dutch modder named Patrick Wildenborg released a small file that switched back on content Rockstar had cut from the game but never actually deleted from the disc. It had been sitting there behind a disabled flag on millions of copies the whole time. On July 20 the ESRB pulled the M rating and re-rated San Andreas Adults Only, which in 2005 was effectively a commercial death sentence because console makers would not license AO titles at all. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, GameStop and Blockbuster cleared it off the shelves within days, and Australia refused it classification outright on July 29.
The bill was brutal. Take-Two reported twenty four and a half million dollars in costs from returns alone. Rockstar halted production, let retailers either re-sticker their stock or swap it out, and shipped a rebuilt version with the material properly removed to win the M rating back. The Federal Trade Commission later settled with both companies over how the rating had been advertised without disclosing what the discs contained, and the rules for how games disclose content in their marketing were tightened permanently because of it.
Here is the part only players ever notice. That same clean-up revision quietly fixed Supply Lines, the remote control plane mission that tortured everybody because the aircraft burned fuel even while gliding. It also dropped the points requirement on Life's a Beach and added HDTV support on PC. So the biggest scandal in Rockstar's history is the reason one of the hardest missions in the game got easier. San Andreas came out the far side of all of it as the best selling PlayStation 2 game ever made, with more than seventeen million copies on that console alone. Where were you when this one landed?
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Look closely at what this ad is promising and when. Coming June 7 to Xbox, with a Mature rating badge sitting right there along the bottom of the screen. That date is June 7, 2005, and that rating had roughly six weeks left to live.
Quick timeline first, because people mix this up constantly. San Andreas launched on PlayStation 2 on October 26, 2004, the same day Rockstar put GTA Advance out on Game Boy Advance. The Xbox and PC versions did not arrive until the following June, which is exactly what this spot is announcing. By the time Take-Two confirmed those ports were coming, the PS2 version was already estimated to have moved over five million copies.
Then came that summer. In June 2005 a Dutch modder named Patrick Wildenborg released a small file that switched back on content Rockstar had cut from the game but never actually deleted from the disc. It had been sitting there behind a disabled flag on millions of copies the whole time. On July 20 the ESRB pulled the M rating and re-rated San Andreas Adults Only, which in 2005 was effectively a commercial death sentence because console makers would not license AO titles at all. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, GameStop and Blockbuster cleared it off the shelves within days, and Australia refused it classification outright on July 29.
The bill was brutal. Take-Two reported twenty four and a half million dollars in costs from returns alone. Rockstar halted production, let retailers either re-sticker their stock or swap it out, and shipped a rebuilt version with the material properly removed to win the M rating back. The Federal Trade Commission later settled with both companies over how the rating had been advertised without disclosing what the discs contained, and the rules for how games disclose content in their marketing were tightened permanently because of it.
Here is the part only players ever notice. That same clean-up revision quietly fixed Supply Lines, the remote control plane mission that tortured everybody because the aircraft burned fuel even while gliding. It also dropped the points requirement on Life's a Beach and added HDTV support on PC. So the biggest scandal in Rockstar's history is the reason one of the hardest missions in the game got easier. San Andreas came out the far side of all of it as the best selling PlayStation 2 game ever made, with more than seventeen million copies on that console alone. Where were you when this one landed?
Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#gtasanandreas #grandtheftauto #gta #rockstargames #originalxbox #xbox #playstation2 #ps2 #2000sgaming #gaminghistory #retrogaming #openworldgames #videogamecommercial #2005 #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
