Artist Dave Beck produced a website called "The Highest Score" featuring a looping clip of a downed, bleeding woman being kicked over and over by a thug. Each kick incremented a counter in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen by one. The clip had been recorded inside Rockstar game The Warriors and was intended by the artist to address "unchecked violence and sexism in video games and the onset of video games as a new fine art medium," according to website The Daily Page and blog GamePolitics.
Rockstar didn't like this artistic expression all that much, and decided to send Beck a cease-and-desist letter that warned of an imminent lawsuit that would seek to recover "compensatory and punitive damages, attorneys fees and costs" according to the site.
If this is true, it's unfortunate that Rockstar would choose to threaten a lawsuit over what appears to have been perfectly fair use of a short, looping clip filmed in game, but we applaud the artist's savvy use of controversy to get his own message out. Without the heavy-handed lawyer action that Beck goaded Rockstar into taking, it's unlikely that this story would have gotten the play it's now getting.
So we guess this means that this art project is out of the running for next year's Rockstar Upload competition? Drat!
