Jack Thompson, silenced by a permanent disbarment? No wai. Everyone's favorite non-lawyer is back and noisier than ever, this time over Bethesda's last-minute pullout of Fallout 3 gameplay footage. Hm, guess "ambulance chaser" is off his list of titles.

If you missed the hullabaloo over Fallout 3 (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3), Bethesda ordered all of its gameplay footage taken down with respect to ESRB's advertising guidelines. It's suspected that the cause was over this piece of footage, which shows a rather graphic clip of a guy getting his head shot off his shoulders:

And what's got old Jack's feathers ruffled? Here's a letter from him addressed to the Federal Trade Commission, targetting the ESRB. No, he didn't target Bethesda. And since Jack has such a great relationship with Take-Two over Grand Theft Auto 4, he didn't forget to mention them as well:

The ESRB’s [advertising] Principles and Guidelines are not intended to protect the public. They are obviously intended to protect the video game industry from the public backlash prior to a hyperviolent game’s commercial release. The ESRB, by allowing such violence in games but not in the advertising is institutionally mandating the cloaking of a game’s real content from the public in advertising.

Thus, the ESRB is actively using its “watchdog” muscle to intimidate game developers into participating in the ESRB’s long-standing shell game by which it has tried to hoodwink Congress and the American people into thinking that the video game rating system is working, that the ratings are reliable, and that minors are being protected from the sale of “Mature” games...

Take-Two, for example, knows that if it adhered to “truth in advertising,” most of its Grand Theft Auto games never would have made it out of the warehouse. Take-Two has figured out how to collaborate with the ESRB in this shell game by which false advertising cloaks the real nature of their games until the games are released, and then it is too late...

 

Bethesda’s only sin was that it advertised truthfully what its game Fallout 3 is all about. The ESRB’s idiotic but telling response has fashioned a noose that I expect either the FTC or Congress to slip around the ESRB’s neck...