Jack Thompson Still Has a Grudge
A new profile of Jack Thompson, the notorious anti-violent video game crusader of the mid-2000s. The Verge: When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don't remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on. [...] Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After all, he explained, Take-Two is headquartered in Manhattan. Thompson is never going to betray his heart, for better or worse. "Americans are famous for moving on," he told me. "We have the attention span of a mosquito. Churchill said that when most people stumble across the truth, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on as if nothing happened. What pissed people off about me is that I didn't do that. I'm 70. I'm still here. I haven't died yet." [...] Thompson anticipates a reckoning. Someday, he says, the defense team in a murder trial is going to argue that their client was revved into a frenzy due to, in part, an inveterate video game habit. The jury will buy it, and the suspect will escape the death penalty. At last, all of Thompson's warnings come home to roost, and the real villains -- Tommy Vercetti, Niko Bellic, and Carl Johnson -- will be unmasked for all to see. It's hard for me to even conceptualize the scenario that Thompson describes, but I suppose that anyone still committed to dismantling Grand Theft Auto in 2022 must engage in some degree of magical thinking. "It's going to work, and that's going to get people's attention," said Thompson. "People are going to freak out. They're going to say, 'Wait a minute, somebody can kill somebody and only be convicted of manslaughter by virtue of a video game defense?' ... [they'll want to] do something about the games and their distribution."
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