Hobbit
Senior Member
I don't know if any of you have heard about this, but I don't remember seeing anything about this whole controversy on the boards. Disregard if this has been posted elsewhere (but post a link).
Anyway, Jack Thompson is a lawyer who's been showboating since the late 80s, when he called Janet Reno a "closet lesbian" and probably "prone to blackmail." As many of you may have heard, his latest scheme has been to blame video game violence with all bad things associated in this world. He's repeatedly stated that video games have "trained" kids for things like Columbine. Well, he finally hit the jackpot on bad publicity. After all his showboating and claiming that companies like Rockstar were 'on the run' now that they were 'exposed,' he made an interesting offer. He offered a $10K reward to the winner's charity of choice for anyone who made a video game starring Osaki Kim, a man whose son was beaten to death with a baseball bat. The 10 grand would go to the person or persons who made a game in which you played as Kim taking 'revenge' on the video game companies for 'killing his son' by doing horribly graphic things like decapitating them and then pissing on their brain stems. Well, Thompson, being the dolt that he is, didn't actually think somebody would do it.
A mod team named "GTA Junkies" made a mod for GTA: San Andreas called "Defamation of Character: A Jack Thompson Murder Simulator" which fit the bill exactly, and was pretty fun to boot. Well, now ole' Jack's gone back on his word, claiming the reward was "just satire." Anyway, the boys at Penny Arcade thought this was a big sham, so they e-mailed him saying how much of a jerk they thought he was for not coming clean on the reward. He e-mailed back saying they'd be sued if they e-mailed him again. Well, their forums exploded and hundreds, if not thousands of fans started following up by calling and writing Jack Thompson, so he called the Seattle DA and asked them to file criminal harassment charges against Tycho and Gabe, the comic's creators, which started ANOTHER flood of mail and calls in to the Florida DA's office to go after Thompson's law liscence for misuse. Now, he's under investigation, and he better hope he's found guilty, or over a decade of video game training (since DOOM) will come to fruition.
Anyway, Jack Thompson is a lawyer who's been showboating since the late 80s, when he called Janet Reno a "closet lesbian" and probably "prone to blackmail." As many of you may have heard, his latest scheme has been to blame video game violence with all bad things associated in this world. He's repeatedly stated that video games have "trained" kids for things like Columbine. Well, he finally hit the jackpot on bad publicity. After all his showboating and claiming that companies like Rockstar were 'on the run' now that they were 'exposed,' he made an interesting offer. He offered a $10K reward to the winner's charity of choice for anyone who made a video game starring Osaki Kim, a man whose son was beaten to death with a baseball bat. The 10 grand would go to the person or persons who made a game in which you played as Kim taking 'revenge' on the video game companies for 'killing his son' by doing horribly graphic things like decapitating them and then pissing on their brain stems. Well, Thompson, being the dolt that he is, didn't actually think somebody would do it.
A mod team named "GTA Junkies" made a mod for GTA: San Andreas called "Defamation of Character: A Jack Thompson Murder Simulator" which fit the bill exactly, and was pretty fun to boot. Well, now ole' Jack's gone back on his word, claiming the reward was "just satire." Anyway, the boys at Penny Arcade thought this was a big sham, so they e-mailed him saying how much of a jerk they thought he was for not coming clean on the reward. He e-mailed back saying they'd be sued if they e-mailed him again. Well, their forums exploded and hundreds, if not thousands of fans started following up by calling and writing Jack Thompson, so he called the Seattle DA and asked them to file criminal harassment charges against Tycho and Gabe, the comic's creators, which started ANOTHER flood of mail and calls in to the Florida DA's office to go after Thompson's law liscence for misuse. Now, he's under investigation, and he better hope he's found guilty, or over a decade of video game training (since DOOM) will come to fruition.
