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Minecraft Creator Markus 'Notch' Persson Eradicated From Splash Text (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has removed a trio of references to Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft, from the game's opening menu screen. Random messages known as "splash text" are printed in yellow on this screen, and they used to include "Made by Notch!", "The Work of Notch", and "110813!" (a reference to the day Persson got married), but now all three mentions are gone. Notch is still included in the game's credits, but the change means that Minecraft players will no longer be randomly referenced.

Persson first released the blocky building game in 2009. Five years later, after the game had become a global smash hit, he sold his company Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, giving Redmond ownership of Minecraft. The references to Notch have remained a feature until their removal in this latest patch. They're reported to have been removed both from the original Java edition played on PCs and the legacy console edition used on PlayStation 4. No official rationale has been offered for the change, but Persson has become something of a polarizing figure on Twitter...

9 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. He got paid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So it's ok if they do whatever they want with the game. They own it. He's still in the credits and they're not trying to say he didn't make it so... This isn't much of a story. For $2.5 billion you can take my name off my birth certificate, I wouldn't care.

  2. News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Informative

    I love Minecraft but Why is this even news??

    Founders leave their companies all the time. Is the company under some "moral obligation" to keep a reference to the founder for all perpetuity??

    He's still listed in the credits, so who gives a fuck if his name has been removed from the Splash page?

    Is Bill Gates listed in the credits for Windows, Excel, Word, etc?

    --
    The Lie of Judaism: God commanded his children to kill one another.

    1. Re:News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You use the word "wrongthink" like you've read Orwell but, if you have, you've clearly got no fucking idea what he was on about.

      1984 is scary because the party is controlling everything you do and changing society so that you can't think any other way.

      This is a company ditching an association with someone they don't think fits their brand.

      No-one is controlling what Notch is doing. He *literally* sold his right to control what happens to Minecraft.

      It's kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting. Everyone involved in this story is exercising their freedom. Notch is still free to say whatever it is he says on Twitter (I don't follow him so I've no idea what it is). MS is still free to say (or not to say) whatever it wants on its software.

  3. Re:Well... by Jarwulf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    'little shit'= having a different opinion than me.

  4. Re:I don't like him because he's dabbling by Kohath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    in white supremacist rhetoric and memes

    Totalitarians like to proclaim guilt-by-association, just like that. Regardless of truth, they proclaim guilt. And if anyone questions them for proclaiming guilt, that makes the questioner guilty too.

  5. Re: Well... by Jarwulf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The police gun down whoever's in the way. Its not a racial thing, its a militarized society thing. If it was Asians predominantly around wherever crime and police tend to hang around, they'd be gunned down in similar numbers. Men are gunned down far more than women, yet you'd never admit that as a sign that society favors women. Plenty of whites get gunned down, the other day a white man was shot for playing with a garden hose and nobody cried for him.

  6. Re:RedPill by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do you know what TERF stands or? The "R" is for "radical", as in not part of the mainstream movement.

    I would hardly call Martina Navratilova a "radical." Until about 5 minutes ago, she was considered a popular mainstream lesbian, a moderate feminist, and a darling of the LGBTQ community. Now suddenly, she's being called a Nazi-transphobe "radical" for daring to suggest that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  7. Re: Well... by phlinn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, not per capita. Per violent criminal, possibly, depending on which stats you use. We don't have good statistics on police shootings OR violent crime rates though. Using numbers from the NCVS for 2012-2015 and The Guardian's list of police shootings in 2015-2016
    . 4,847,887 total violent crimes with a perp group of pers with a single known race.
    1,324,270 violent crimes committed by blacks.
    2,557,910 violent crimes committed by whites.
    307 + 266 = 573 Blacks shot by cops, rate is .00043
    584 + 574 = 1158 whites, rate is .00045

    Those rates are close enough that I'd say the police are fairly even handed in their brutality, and mostly aren't gun happy. Not even 1 in a thousand violent criminals get shot. Unfortunately, numbers over 3 years shouldn't be directly combined with numbers for 2 years of which only one overlaps, but that's what I've got. 2015 alone has roughtly the same, while 2016 is wildly different. I used to use an older measure of violent crime, because prior to 2017 the last time violent crimes by race were included in the NCVS was 2006 IIRC.

    I could go to the UCR, but then I have to limit it to homicides to get race of offender, and relative homicide rates did NOT track relative violent crime rates the last time I checked. The latter is measured by victim surveys, the former is for crimes where the victim obviously can't answer. That doesn't even get into simpson's paradox issues, where certain areas have different crime rates and shooting rates, and it's possible for the overall trend to be magnified OR reversed in every jurisdiction. And of course the fact that counting crimes does not count criminals, since one person can victimize multiple people. And not all violent crimes are the same.

    --
    "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
  8. Re: Well... by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We can all agree, cops are fucking murderers.

    No, we most certainly can't all agree with that. The vast majority of cops are decent people just trying to do their jobs. Every day they have to deal with some of the shittiest human beings on the planet, so that the rest of us don't have to. And most of them--despite getting regularly beaten, spit on, attacked, screamed at, and threatened by said shitty human beings--will never murder anyone in their entire careers.

    You try being a cop for a while and see if YOU can maintain that level of professionalism, loudmouth. It's always easy to play armchair quarterback on every police shooting when you're not the one having to go out there and put YOUR life on the line every single day, isn't it?

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.