Professional wrestler Booker T. Huffman is suing games publisher Activision for allegedly putting his comic book character “G.I. Bro” in
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Huffman
filed a copyright complaint today based on similarities between G.I. Bro and the
Black Ops character David “Prophet” Wilkes. “They could have drawn him any way they wanted. But they chose to steal Booker T’s ‘G. I. Bro,’” the complaint reads.
Huffman’s lawsuit seems based essentially on visual similarities between G.I. Bro and Prophet. (That’s G.I. Bro as depicted in Huffman’s comic book
G.I. Bro and the Dragon of Death, as opposed to his 1990s “G.I. Bro” wrestling persona, and Prophet as depicted in
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, as opposed to an older version of the character in
Black Ops III.) Specifically, it compares a picture of Huffman’s character with a promotional image of Prophet, stating that “there is no doubt that [Activision] copied ‘G.I. Bro.’”
G.I. Bro vs. Prophet
The complaint describes Huffman’s character, which is based on his old alter ego, as “a retired special operations soldier, fighting an old enemy he thought he had finished off years before, with the support of his old military friends.” Prophet, a multiplayer “specialist” character in
Black Ops 4, is a cybernetically enhanced soldier who eventually replaces most of his body parts with mechanical upgrades. While the two men sound almost nothing alike, at least a couple of Redditors have commented that Prophet
looked like Booker T.
Huffman isn’t the first celebrity to sue over having their alleged likeness in a video game. Lindsay Lohan famously sued Rockstar Games over a
Grand Theft Auto character she claimed had been
based on her, but a court
shot down the complaint. Actor Alfonso Ribiero, among
other internet celebrities and musicians, has sued Epic Games over
Fortnite — in Ribiero’s case, for basing a
Fortnite emote on a dance he’d invented for Carlton Banks, his character on
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Ribiero has argued that “the Carlton” is a distinctive mannerism associated with his likeness — although that’s
a dicey claim.
Activision didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment
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