Game news The dads of GTA attack their favorite development studio… for a story that is barely believable. This is unheard of !
Despite fruitful collaborations, the parent company of Rockstar Games (GTA, Red Dead Redemption) has decided to wage war on this studio. And all this for a single letter… We have rarely seen such an astonishing dispute.
Rockstar vs. Remedy?
In the world of video games, there are several major stories of plagiarism that have led to major lawsuits. We could particularly talk about Area F2, Alibaba’s mobile game, accused of being a carbon copy of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and then removed from online stores. It is even possible to go back to the premises of the medium. Pong isn’t just one of the first video games. He was also at the center of one of the industry’s first plagiarism legal cases. As you will have understood, there is no shortage of legal disputes in the world of video games. But then, we absolutely didn’t see this one coming.
It is Take Two Interactive, parent company of Rockstar Games (Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto), which has just launched hostilities against the Remedy studio. Why will you tell me? Well because Take Two Interactive wants to register the “R” brand. The letter actually serves as the logo for the Rockstar studio. The problem is that Remedy’s new logo (unveiled in April 2023) is also an R. A slightly different R, certainly, but an R all the same and that doesn’t please Take Two who consider that it could mislead the general public.
Take Two, accustomed to litigation
As you will have understood, we are therefore not in a matter of plagiarism but rather of a dispute concerning a registered trademark. And Take Two is accustomed to this type of business. If we take a look at the archives of the American Patent Office, we can see that the company has filed complaints against numerous companies (tattoo parlors, restaurants, etc.). In 2021, she also pushed Josef Fares and Hazelight to send a notice of abandonment of ownership of the It Takes Two registered trademark, again to the American Patent Office.
Here, the situation is all the more grotesque as Rockstar has already collaborated with Remedy (Alan Wake II) in the past. Better yet, the two studios will renew their partnership for the remakes of the first two Max Payne films. We therefore suspect that given their good understanding, the two companies should find an agreement as soon as possible. Especially since the dispute (which also concerns two logos) began last September. Or does it mark the beginning of the discord between Take Two, its little ones and Remedy. To be continued…