[Mazryonh]

Movies advertising guns? U.S. Marshals is nothing if not a feature-length Glock commercial!

Still, there's something that has been bothering me for a while now, and I'd like to see if anyone here has the answers. What does it take for game developers and movie makers to use real gun names in their media?

The fee to use real gun names must be steep (anyone have a ballpark figure?), or otherwise more game developers would deign to use the real names of (realistic-looking) guns rather than using assumed names or creating fictional weapons. One of the pages I've created for a game, SWAT 4, even has the rather interesting situation of having real gun names only for Colt, Benelli, and AK firearms. Another page (not created by me), Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, has the real name for the Colt Anaconda and the Steyr AUG, but not the Colt Police Positive or any other firearms. I take it that each company has to be consulted before you can use the real names for its products, then? Do you have to negotiate with each company separately too? Are the requirements different for movie makers than they are for game developers?

Finally, sometimes I feel that super popular games such as Metal Gear Solid 4 or Modern Warfare 2 sell so much as to be advertisements for firearms companies themselves. Do those companies then offer the game publishers a discount for using the real names of certain weapons? There's still that strange feeling I get when I see in the MGS4 page that there are no Colt weapons but still M1911 pistols and an M4A1 carbine, since those count as types of firearms and are not copyrightable terms.