"I don't know that I would have wanted it either," Jon Bon Jovi told the BBC.
"To hear someone else's voice coming out of a cartoon version of me? I don't know. It sounds a little forced."
Okay, "a little forced" rather than "stinks", but it's the same sort of thing.
However, Jon does offer something that leans towards collaborating Courtney's claims that she didn't know how the characters - by which I mean 'real people' - would be used in the game:
"I had the paperwork, they wanted me to be on that game and I just passed," he said.
"But no-one even broached the subject with me that I would be singing other people's stuff. I don't know how I would have reacted to that. I don't know that I would have wanted it either."
The paperwork probably mentioned it; and - had you been going ahead and signing - 'how will this avatar be used' would be an essential question to ask. But it doesn't look like Activision were being upfront with the information.
This is what? Number 5 in the Guitar Hero series? I'm guessing it's not a radical departure gameplay-wise...
ReplyDeleteI've never played Guitar Hero. I'm not a businessman signing off my own appearance in it. But even I can see that the term "fully playable character" might mean, you know, fully playable. As in "doesn't just appear for one song but allows the player to be the character through the full progression of the game".
I'm guessing Courtney didn't sign over the entire Nirvana catalogue, so surely there's the vaguest hint even to my non-legal brain that the character might sing other people's songs.
Anyway, fuck her. It's only a game. Nirvana were only a
band. The less musicians worried about image rights, the better the world would be.