Activision are being sued by the family of Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in a €1million lawsuit over his portrayal in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, with the family being unhappy with how he was portrayed.
Jonas Savimbi appears in the mission Pyrrhic Victory, which sees the player attempt to rescue Frank Woods from Raul Menendez who is in Angola during the countries bloody civil war. Throughout the mission, Savimbi encourages his men to kill as many of the MPLA soldiers as possible, which seems to be why the lawsuit has been filed.
As reported by The Guardian, three of Savimbi’s children are unhappy with how he was depicted during the level, saying that he was shown as being a “barbarian” and doesn’t reflect positively on what he was actually like.
According to the family’s lawyer Carole Enfert, Savimbi is represented in Black Ops 2 as being a “big halfwit who wants to kill everybody”. Therefore she has said that the lawsuit will argue that he was in fact a “political leader and strategist”.
However Activision have rejected the claim made by the Savimbi lawyer, stating that Black Ops 2 represents him as a “good guy” and that he was portrayed fairly in the game. Activision lawyer Etienne Kowalski said that he was depicted “for who he was … a character of Angolan history, a guerrilla chief who fought the MPLA”.
This isn’t the first time that Activision have been the subject of a lawsuit regarding Black Ops 2. Manuel Noriega, who featured in the game as a the Panamanian dictator during the US invasion, attempted to sue Activision back in 2014 over his appearance in the shooter, however his claim was rejected with the judge siding with Activision.