Source: Eurogamer

The family of Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi have filed a €1m lawsuit against Activision over his portrayal in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

Three of Savimbi’s children claim Activision depicted their father as a “barbarian” during his appearance in the 2012 shooter, The Guardian reports.

“[He's portrayed as] a big halfwit who wants to kill everybody,” prosecution lawyer Carole Enfert explained. In reality, she continued, Savimbi had actually been a “political leader and strategist”.

Jonas Savimbi was the leader of an opposition movement against Angola’s communist-backed government (and thus had the support of the US) throughout the country’s bloody civil war that left 500,000 people dead.

He appears in Black Ops 2 during the level Pyrrhic Victory, where he encourages his troops to kill as many opponents as possible, while waving a grenade launcher.

Activision has, unsurprisingly, disagreed with the claims, and said its portrayal of Savimbi showed him to be a “good guy”.

It isn’t the first time Activision has been sued over someone’s appearance in Black Ops 2. In 2014, actual ex-Panama dictator Manuel Noriega complained he had been depicted as “the culprit of numerous fictional heinous crimes”, for which he wanted damages.

In that case, Activision sought to get the “absurd” lawsuit dismissed, and went to the lengths of hiring US Attorney and ex-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani to help. A judge agreed with Activision, and the case was thrown out of court.

Earlier this month we had Mean Girls and Freaky Friday star Lindsay Lohan suing Rockstar over allegedly using her likeness in Grand Theft Auto 5. Now, we have an ex-dictator suing Activision over allegedly using his likeness in Call of Duty.

Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is suing Activision over the use of his likeness in Treyarch’s first-person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

In the game Alex Mason and Frank Woods track Noriega, codenamed False Profit by the CIA, to the outskirts of Panama City. You can see the scene in which they find him in the video, below, taken from the level Suffer With Me.

Now, 80-year-old Noriega, who lives in Panama, is suing Activision for the “blatant misuse, unlawful exploitation and misappropriation for economic gain” of his image in Black Ops 2, which came out in 2012.

In the lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles County Superior Court and reported on by the Courthouse News Service, Noriega’s lawyers claim: “In an effort to increase the popularity and revenue generated by Black Ops 2, defendants used, without authorisation or consent, the image and likeness of plaintiff in Black Ops 2.”

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