Spark sues Activision for $10 million

Spark Unlimited, creator of Call of Duty: Finest Hour, is suing publisher Activision for $10 million, alleging that the company not only reneged on a deal between the two for Call of Duty sequels, that it also owes Spark money. According tothe lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Activision and spark cemented a deal in late 2002 (whihc was officialy annouced in the spring of 2003) for the developer to create three Call of Duty console titles. The first of which, Cod: Finest Hour, was delivered last year. However, the suit alleges that for the second title in the deal, Activision took Spark's proposal for that would become Call of Duty 2: Big Red One and handed it to internal developer Treyarch. Using some pretty aggressive languge, the lawsuit claims, "Activision had already decided bring the devlopment of the sequel in-house at Activision so it could realize an even higher level of profit on the sequels than it had on the original game."Big Red One, set to release in November could be prevented if Sparks lawsuit is successful. Monetary compensation is being sought by the devloper over a variety of disputes. Spark says that not only did it lose money for not being able to develop Big Red One, but that Activision redcued its royalty rate and failed to provide funding between projects (known as bridge funding). The lawsuit also contends that the publisher tried to hire key employees away from spark "hoping that if Spark was sufficiently crippled, [it] would be unable to protect its rights." Part of this monetary compensationwould be for Finest Hour's multiplayer portion, which Spark says was not in the game's original design, but was created at the last minute out of the developers own pocket. Activision has not commented on the lawsuit.