News out of an unlikely source today, it appears that there will be a reference to the player doing the unthinkable in the much acclaimed Obsidian fall release, Fallout: New Vegas. GameInformer reported yesterday in an article that the protagonist (referred to in the well received Fallout 3 as The Lone Wanderer) in the much awaited New Vegas will engage in questionable acts with no other than a friendly, neighborhood robot. Yes, you can consider this an official part of the game as the news comes straight from the ESRB, and you can put faith into not having to unlock hidden portions of the game’s source to “enjoy” this feature.

Interestingly (and to probably maintain a rating which will allow New Vegas to be sold in store chains) there will be no physical, on-screen depiction of the act which presumably includes the player and a robot named “Fisto”. However, there will be an obvious suggestion at the act, going so far as to request that the player “assume the position.” What this command means when talking of sex in relation to machinery will hopefully be determined at a later time. More after the jump.

This brings up an interesting memory I’m sure you have all sorrowfully brought back from the depths of the first half of the decade, the Hot Coffee mod from GTA San Andreas. If you were actually absent for the controversy surrounding the 2004 release then here is the basics of the debate. The “Hot Coffee” minigame is one in which the player uses a quicktime-based style to please a date which he has been successful with thus far. The scene depicts an admittedly cartoony naked woman and a confusing clothed male having at it in one of a few different locations. This, pre-release, was deemed a bit too far by the development team and therefore a small portion of the code that caused and controlled the game was removed. After trolling the code for countless hours, a group of gamers found this hidden gem and produced an editor that would restore functionality. This, although not an intended feature, caused the ESRB to redact their Mature rating for the game and issue a new Adult Only rating for any copies of the game which included the incomplete code. This caused a huge PR disaster for publisher Rockstar and caused the game to be pulled from many store shelves until a new copy could be printed. This was, in a way, its own form of viral marketing; it goes by the old saying that any news is good news. Of course, the controversy extended into the media networks and soon grand opposing sides had dug into their dirt and were prepared to lob legal grenades in the other’s direction.

This was the same phenomenon that was seen soon after the release of Bioshock. This holds true for the airport scene in the current Call of Duty release: Modern Warfare 2. In fact, this seems to be how games get marketing anymore (not as much with Bioshock, which managed to contrive a piece of art from different components to produce a bit of a provocative image). Games seem to rely of their little bit of offensiveness to provide enough talk to get more people to buy the game. But how will this hold out for New Vegas? Classicly the Fallout games have never seemed to try and exploit this factor. But in an everchanging and economically tough world such as this, more and more companies work in whatever devices they can for the good of profit. So could the robot sex be a ploy to get you to buy the game, or is it truly the product of the messed up imaginations which let us blow up Megaton not a year before. I guess we’ll have to buy the game to find out, and in that case it has worked on me.

Source via Alex