Last week, Nintendo Power (via NeoGAF) revealed that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars would feature “tasteful” minigames. Today, Edge Magazine (via CVG) has revealed exactly which tastes Rockstar was referring to.
According to Rockstar’s Dan Houser, the first GTA for the Nintendo DS will include a minigame, tangentially related to the plot, where players can buy and sell six types of drugs to earn scads of in-game money. But before you accuse Rockstar of providing DS-toting teens a gateway drug… to drugs, know that the game’s developers are not exactly shooting for an E10+ rating.
Houser told Edge Online:
“No one disagreed with Sam’s very clear edict that GTA has to be an M rating.”
“It can’t be softened to make it family-friendly – that’s not the game we’re making. We’ve never not done well by sticking to our guns.”
Apparently, Nintendo is also A-OK with the decision:
Houser added that Nintendo was on-board with the direction of the product, telling us, “Nintendo wanted us to make GTA, and we wanted to make a game on their platform. They didn’t want us to make a GTA for kids, and we weren’t interested in making a game we wouldn’t normally make.”
Honestly, we should have seen this coming — among the typical Rockstar passions of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, only one has yet to make it big in Liberty City.
We look forward to seeing how this story is treated in the mainstream press. Should they level accusations at Nintendo for allowing such a title on the “kid-friendly” DS, we’ll be right here to remind them that Drugwars (above) has been running on curriculum-required school graphing calculators for about a decade.
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