Register Hardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/11/23/halo_california_court_microsoft/

Gamer takes Microsoft to court over Halo 3 'errors'

By James Sherwood
Published Friday 23rd November 2007 14:58 GMT

A Californian gamer has filed a class action lawsuit demanding damages in excess of $5m against Microsoft and software developer Bungie, all because his copy of Halo 3 allegedly doesn’t work properly.

Halo3_disc_unreadable2
UK gamers have complained of an unreadable error, when playing Halo 3

Whereas most gamers would simply take a damaged disc back to the shop, plaintiff Randy Nunez decided to become a champion for gamers’ rights. He's taking the two companies to court to battle it out on behalf of any similarly affected California consumers.

Nunez’s class action laqsuite, which was filed with the US District Court for Southern California earlier this month, alleges that the game consistently causes the Xbox 360 to “crash, freeze or lock up” while being played.

He also claimed that Microsoft and Bungie have “failed to recall” Halo 3 or remedy this alleged failure to function, despite “mounting consumer complaints and inquiries concerning this operational flaw”.

Microsoft admitted to Register Hardware last month that it’s aware of a problem which stops Halo 3 from loading correctly (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/08/microsoft_halo3_disc_error/), but it refused to reveal the cause.

At the time, we spoke to several similarly affected gamers, who each gave us a slightly different account of the problem. However, the common complaint trait was the appearance of a message on screen saying the disc was unreadable or that it couldn’t be loaded.