‘Call Of Duty Modern Warfare’ Creators vs. Activision

A star-studded trial of a different mode kicks off Friday here.

Jason West and Vince Zampella may not be household names, but as the creators of first-person shooter video games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, they are true celebrities in the $25 billion game industry.

Over the past two years, the duo and their attorneys have been gearing up for modern warfare of a different kind: butting heads in Los Angeles County Superior Court with one of the industry’s leading men, Bobby Kotick, the CEO of the largest game company Activision, which publishes, markets and distributes Call of Duty games.

In a lawsuit filed in March 2010, West and Zampella charge Kotick and Activision unfairly fired them from their jobs as chief technology offer and chief creative officer, respectively, at the Activision-owned Infinity Ward studio in Santa Monica. The action happened just before Activision would have to pay them millions in bonuses for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which set industry sales records of more than $1 billion and became the top-selling game of all time until it was surpassed by 2010′s Call of Duty: Black Ops.

In response, Activision filed its own suit saying it was justified in terminating West and Zampella, even though they spearheaded its biggest money-making franchise, because they had become disloyal and breached their contracts. “They were small-minded executives almost obsessed by jealousy of other developers,” the lawsuit says.

At stake is as much as $1 billion in damages should the jury decide against Activision, which in 2011 posted a record $1 billion annual profit. That included the release of Modern Warfare 3, developed by West and Zampella’s former studio, Infinity Ward, along with Sledgehammer Games. The game set a new first-day sales record of more than $400 million.

Activision almost certainly owes West and Zampella cash from bonuses, says Jack Lerner, director of the University of Southern California Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic. “But the harder question is who will have a stake in future games in the Modern Warfare franchise,” he says. If the court rules that Activision wrongly terminated the two, they “may be able to get a lot more money based on what they could have expected to earn.”

An outcome in favor of Activision could shift more power to the publisher side of the game-development equation. “It may send a message about just how far a large studio can go with respect to its employees,” says Mark Methenitis, a Texas attorney and editor-in-chief of The Law of the Game blog.

‘Project Icebreaker’

In the court filing, West and Zampella’s legal team says there is evidence that Activision’s chief legal officer, George Rose, wanted to break into West’s and Zampella’s computers and e-mail accounts to dig up dirt on them.

Those efforts, called “Project Icebreaker” in court filings, occurred in 2009, a year after West and Zampella extended their contracts and only a few months before the release of Modern Warfare 2 suggesting, according to court filings, that “Activision began preparing to terminate them once the game was delivered.”

For its part, Activision insists, in its court filings, that the designers were “conspiring” with competing game publisher Electronic Arts to leave and siphon off much of the Infinity Ward talent.

The case “has got all the elements of a great Greek drama,” says Roxanne Christ, an attorney who teaches a course in video game law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of money at issue. A lot of money and a lot of pride.”

Earlier this month in an unusual move, Activision added superstar attorney Beth Wilkinson, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. Most recently, she was appointed by the Federal Trade Commission to lead its investigation of Google.

Along with Wilkinson’s appointment, Activision asked Judge Elihu Berle to postpone the trial for a month so that she could have more time to prepare. The judge’s refusal — jury selection is slated to begin Friday — won’t hinder Wilkinson, who can “master a lot of material in a short amount of time and get down to what is most important,” says Christ.

Married to Meet the Press host David Gregory, Wilkinson “is something of a celebrity now, which should play well in Los Angeles” and could help Activision’s case, Christ says. To counter Activision’s move, West and Zampella have added noted entertainment and intellectual property trial lawyer Daniel Petrocelli who won the wrongful death lawsuit against O.J. Simpson in 1997.

Case has entertainment factor

The case is being followed closely by the game industry, as well as Hollywood and the legal profession. Kotick, who had a small role in the baseball movie Moneyball as the Oakland Athletics owner, “is a legend in the industry, and he is known for having a very big personality, like most CEOs do. And the guys from Infinity Ward have good egos to go with them,” Christ says. “It’s like Ultimate Fighting Championship. People just get something out of watching others duke it out.”

Still, the case might not result in changes at all. “At the end of the day, unless the verdict is enormous, it may just be seen as the cost of acquiring rights to a hugely successful series,” Methenitis says. “Jason and Vince are already on to new projects.” Some firms in the agile industry may have already taken steps to shore up the developer-publisher relationship based on the case’s existence, Christ says. “This is no question a learning lesson for everybody.”

At their new studio Respawn Entertainment in Van Nuys, Calif., West and Zampella say the legal haranguing has been worth it. “We get a lot of support from people in the industry that say, ‘We want you to set things right,’ ” Zampella says.

They hope that a jury decides that they were unjustly treated and render a verdict that gives them justice. “If not now, when?” says West. “If not us, who?”

Source:Tucsoncitizen

Tags: Pc games, Call Of Duty, Activision Tech News, News