Jack Thompson offered $10,000 for a game about killing game developers, then refused to pay. Penny Arcade paid it instead

If you were around games in the 2000s, you knew Jack Thompson's name. He was a Florida lawyer who went after GTA for years, blaming it for real crimes and suing to get it pulled. And in October 2005 he made a bet he really shouldn't have.

The dare

On 10 October 2005, Thompson sent an open letter to the press and to the head of the Entertainment Software Association. He said he'd give $10,000 to charity if someone would make and sell a game in 2006 based on a scenario he'd written, in which a grieving father called Osaki Kim goes after the people who make violent games.

His point was that the industry would never make a game about killing its own people. People took him up on it almost straight away. A San Andreas mod by a group called the Fighting Hellfish did the rounds within days.

Then he backed out

Thompson said the mod didn't meet his conditions. Then he said the whole proposal had been satire and that he wasn't paying. He later went back and forth on whether the offer still stood, which didn't help.

Penny Arcade's cheque

Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, the two behind Penny Arcade, decided to pay it for him. On 17 October 2005 they donated $10,000 in Thompson's name to the ESA Foundation, the games industry's charity, and handed the cheque over at its fundraising dinner in San Francisco.

The memo line on the cheque read: "For Jack Thompson Because Jack Thompson Won't."

And then he called the cops

Thompson's response was to fax Seattle's police chief asking him to stop Krahulik and Holkins, and then to write to the US Attorney alleging extortion. The police took a look and decided it was a civil matter, not a criminal one, which is a polite way of saying there was nothing there.

(You'll sometimes see the money described as going to Child's Play, Penny Arcade's own charity. It didn't. It went to the ESA Foundation, which made the joke land harder.)

How it ended for him

Thompson kept going after games, including Rockstar's Bully, which he called a "Columbine simulator". A Florida judge watched the game in 2006 and refused to block it, then referred Thompson to the Florida Bar. He was permanently disbarred in 2008.

It's a funny story, but it's also a useful one. GTA has drawn this kind of anger from the very start, sometimes on purpose (see the 1997 PR stunt) and sometimes over content you needed a mod to even see, like Hot Coffee. GTA 6 will get its own round in November. It's hard to imagine it going worse for the critics than it did for Thompson.