Yet Another Jack Thompson Game
Our old pal Jack Thompson is an inspirational figure to game designers - although probably not in the way the anti-game activist would have preferred.
Now comes word that yet another Thompson-themed game has been released. Beat Up Thompson looks to be a small-scale Flash game in which the player faces off against Thompson in a mano-a-mano battle to reduce one another's hit points.
The player fights as Mario, and has four video-game inspired moves such as "Tetristrike," "Dance Revolution," and "River City Kick." The JT character has only one attack, hurling copies of his book at the player.
This is at least the fourth Thompson game GP can recall since last fall. Others include the GTA mod, Defamation of Character: A Jack Thompson Murder Simulator. Most recently, gamers were impressed by the highly-detailed I'm O.K. - A Murder Simulator, modeled after Thompson's infamous Modest Proposal.
GP: A shout-out to GP reader Charlie Ly for the tip on the new game...
UPDATE, April 18th: The game has apparently been taken offline. We're not sure whether Jack Thompson complained to the host site, however we know he has complained (rather loudly) about GamePolitics reporting on this story. Frankly, we see it as a video game/cultural/political news item about a public figure who chooses to immerse himself in the video game/cultural/political arena. Thompson claims he sees it as a threat. Certainly, that's not how it is intended, any more than today's story about the racist game targeting Mexican immigrants is a threat against them. It is simply news.
It's all very confusing to GP since, while Thompson has called GamePolitics a "terrorist site," he continues to send us other stories, like one today about his ongoing battle with the Florida Bar Association. Are we only supposed to run the stories Jack likes? Should we cede editorial control of GamePolitics over to Jack Thompson?
It's even more perplexing since it was Jack himself who encouraged the design of an ultra-violent video game in his Modest Proposal. The following is a verbatim quote from Thompson's vision of the game to be created:
"O.K. first hops a plane... to reach the Long Island home of the CEO of the company (Take This)... O.K. gets 'justice' by taking out this female CEO, whose name is Paula Eibel, along with her husband and kids. 'An eye for an eye,' says O.K., as he urinates onto the severed brain stems of the Eibel family victims..."
"O.K. then... makes a stop at the Philadelphia law firm of Blank, Stare and goes floor by floor to wipe out the lawyers who protect Take This in its wrongful death law suits... With the FBI now after him, O.K. keeps moving westward, shooting up high-tech video arcades... O.K... must get to E3 to massacre all the video game industry execs with one final, monstrously delicious rampage."
What Thompson wrote - and encouraged game developers to create - seems quite a bit more violent than the silly little game this story covered.