Last month, Mojang, the developer of MineCraft, received a lunatic cease and desist letter from Bethesda, claiming that Mojang can't name its upcoming title "Scrolls" as it infringes on their trademark "The Elder Scrolls." Mojang laughed the matter off as a lawyer's mistake and went as far offering to settle the matter through a Quake 3 Arena deathmatch.
Today, Mojang received the official Swedish court notification that Bethesda has went on with filing the lawsuit.
"Yeah, we got a notice from the Swedish court," Mojang business developer Daniel Kaplan confirmed.
Kaplan then affirmed that Majong isn't going to surrender easily, even though they are much smaller than Bethesda. "We are going to do as much as we can," he said, "since I really hate it how the big boys always get their own way."
Scrolls is a turn based card game but the documents filed by Bethesda's lawyers pulled no punches trying to prove that gamers are likely to get confused into believing that it is part of the Elder Scrolls franchise. For example, Bethesda's lawyers used user comments on Scrolls trailers as well as excerpts from articles to prove their point.
"They even took screenshots from our trailer and said we copied them... we have mountains in the Scrolls trailer, and they have that too in Skyrim," Kaplan noted. "It is really silly believing our game will be confused with their FPS-RPG with realistic graphics... They have dumped everything they could find about Scrolls."
If Bethesda won the lawsuit, Majong will be forced to change the name of its upcoming game.
