Video Games Are Damaging To The Health Of Flat Screen TVs

By Eriq Gardner

Class action lawsuits alleging video game equipment malfunction seems to be all the rage this holiday season.

A Colorado resident Molly Elvig has filed one alleging that the wrist strap associated with Nintendo Wii's remote breaks easily. She says the Wii remote went flying in the air and wrecked her 52 inch flat screen TV. The plaintiff goes on to allege that Nintendo tried to replace the wrist strap with a better version, but that it failed in identical fashion to the first version.

The complaint says, "Strap II was so unsatisfactory that it broke and snapped while being used by three year old child, resulting in a shattered flat screen TV, and property damage and/or personal injury continued unabated."

So evidently, the first strap ruined one TV and the second strap ruined a second TV. The plaintiff includes photos as evidence.

But wait! It gets more strange.

Nintendo issued a third version of the strap. And guess what? Yup, it allegedly failed too. No specific allegations of more damaged flat screen TVs, but "the replacement's replacement continue to fail in numbers thereby causing property damage and or personal injury."

The plaintiff alleges that Nintendo knew about the problems and sold them anyway, violating Colorado's consumer protection laws.

A couple weeks ago, the makers of video game Rock Band were sued over a faulty bass drum petal.

Gee, no wonder video games are such a hot ticket legal practice. Firms like Sheppard, Mullin and Greenberg Glusker are said to be raking in the cash from repping video-game makers.

"For a long time, video games flew under the radar," Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton partner Shawn Foust recently told the LA Times. "That's no longer the case. The number of consumer class-action lawsuits filed against game companies has gone up pretty dramatically over the last three or four years. The pot [of] money is now big enough for plaintiffs attorneys to become interested."