The Respawn / Activision Soap Opera is back and Activision are painting Zampella and West in a very bad light

And here you thought that Activision had forgotten about Vince West and Jason Zampella being fired from Activision, starting up their own companies and aligning with EA.

In fact things just got a whole lot juicier with Activision legally now attempting to add EA to the current lawsuit hanging over West and Zampella’s head.

That was pretty much expected however what wasn’t was some of the things they have said about the duo.

The most shocking one for me is that Activision is claiming that when they asked Vince and Jason who in the Infinity Ward team deserved to benefit from an equity payout with millions of dollars the duo simply replied

“You can give all the options to Vince and I”

Apparently this wasn’t the first time that the two had refused to allow Activision to pay bonuses to their staff and is something that’s going to make the pile of employees who left Activision for Respawn sit up and take notice. As nice as the guys may appear to be it can’t be comforting to hear they refused to pass on your well earned bonus.

In other not so flattering news it is claimed that the two also went out of their way to sabotage Treyarch and to ensure they continued to be the top COD developer in the stable. The example given is when Treyarch released a trailer for some upcoming World at War DLC Zampella ordered one of his own staff to release a new Modern Warfare 2 trailer to ambush the marketing effort.

Zampella then stated it was Treyarch’s fault for not informing them of their timing only to be shown up by a slew of text messages proving that he was well aware of the timing and did it on purpose in an attempt to “Crush them”.

This isn’t going to die down anytime soon and I suspect we are going to see a massive corporate cat fight exploding overflowing into the media as soon as Respawn announces what they are working on.

Check out even more information over at Kotaku

Last Updated: December 22, 2010