Prior to the release of Skyrim, Bethesda Software generated some buzz by filing a lawsuit against the creator of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson. Basically, Notch was making a game called Scrolls and wanted to file for a copyright on the name, which made Bethesda worried that he might make a copyright claim against their flagship Elder Scrolls series. So Bethesda filed a pre-emptive copyright claim against the new game. Notch, being a mere game programmer and not a digital copyright mastermind, offered to play against Bethesda in a game of Quake 3 rather than go to court, to which Bethesda declined.
With the two parties fighting it out in the courts, you might think that Mojang and Bethesda would hate each other, right? Well, they actually seem to be pretty friendly:
Thats the "Notched Pickaxe," which bears a striking resemblance to the tool of choice in Minecraft. It supposedly can be found in Skyrim's "Throat of the World," though I have not been able to check for myself. Apparently, even in spite of the lawsuit, Skyrim developers were big Minecraft fans and frequently played it during their breaks. It's nice to know that, even in the midst of all the copyright silliness, game developers can still pay homage to each others' work.
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