Take-Two is up there with Nintendo when it comes to publishers that hand out takedowns and DMCA notices like candy, but its latest legal venture has resulted in it having to reveal figures that had previously been kept under wraps for years. Rockstar’s parent company recently went after a sandwich shop with Vice City in its name, revealing unknown sales data for Vice City Stories in its filing.
Typically, Take-Two’s takedowns revolve around mods it doesn’t like or people leaking things about GTA that they really shouldn’t be leaking. Going after a sandwich shop might be new territory for the studio. As reported by Game File, the trademark complaint was filed last month, against the owners of a sandwich shop who, had they managed to fly under Take-Two’s radar, planned to call their new eatery Vice City Subs.
Take-Two Won’t Let Anyone Use Vice City, Not Even Sandwich Shop Owners
You hear the term Vice City, and you think of GTA. I imagine that applies to a lot of people, and I’d hazard to guess that the sandwich shop owners are aware of that, hence their attempts to piggyback on the name. That will presumably no longer be happening as I can’t imagine the owners will be attempting to fight back against Take-Two’s complaint.
As part of the complaint, Take-Two was tasked with providing historical background regarding its use of the term Vice City to show how relevant it is to its, and more importantly, GTA’s, brand. That part of the filing points to how many copies of GTA games containing the terms Vice City have been sold since the original game bearing its name was released on the PS2 in 2002.
It Has Been 20 Years Since The US Government Launched An Investigation Into GTA Over The “Hot Coffee” Incident
It has been two decades since PS2 character models awkwardly grinding against one another was enough to get the US government’s attention.
Vice City Stories Sold A Lot More Copies Than We Were Led To Believe
Take-Two noted in the filing that Vice City has sold 17.5 million copies, a figure that has interestingly remained unchanged since 2008. That clearly doesn’t include sales of the game as part of the remastered trilogy that bundles it with its predecessor GTA 3, and the follow-up, GTA San Andreas.
Even though Vice City’s numbers have remained unchanged for almost 20 years, according to Take-Two, sales of the PSP spinoff Vice City Stories have risen significantly. The last we heard, Vice City Stories had sold 4.5 million copies. According to the trademark complaint filed against Vice City Subs, that game kept on selling until it his seven million copies.
That’s notable because there’s a chance it makes Vice City Stories the best-selling PSP game of all time. That information is still difficult to parse as the PSP spinoff was ported to PS2. Not only do Take-Two’s final figures almost certainly account for the PS2 version of Vice City Stories, but I imagine a significant chunk of those sales were thanks to the home console rather than the portable one.
It’s been a rough few weeks for big video game companies attempting to force small stores to change their names. Last month, Nintendo reached out to a TCG store to let the owners know it could no longer be called Poke Court. To make matters worse, it seems likely that the only reasons the store formerly known as Poke Court even found itself in Nintendo’s line of legal fire was because it had been the target of a high-profile armed robbery.
- Released
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October 31, 2006
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e
- Engine
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unity
