Legal Battles

Bethesda Softwork's existence has not been with out some hardships. During these few past decades, Bethesda has had to sue rival companies to secure it's own valuable trademarks. The most noted of these was against the Minecraft developer, Mojang. Which in 2012 trademarked the game title "Scrolls" to which Bethesda's patent company ZeniMax media replied with a lawsuit claiming Mojang infringed on their Trademark, "The Elder Scrolls"

Mojang is the creator of the Indie game Minecraft, created by Markus "Notch" Persson.

Logo design for Mojang's "Scrolls" Videogame.

Despite baring no similarities to each other in game play mechanics, or concept, Bethesda claimed it created confusion with their best-selling title, "The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim" 

Excerpt of ingame footage of "Scrolls"

Excerpt of ingame footage of "The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim"

Markus "Notch" Persson suggested the lawsuit be settled via a multiplayer deathmatch game of Quake 3, as a jest to ZeniMax effectively buying out id Software, the studio responsible for creating the Quake franchise. Zenimax declined.

ZeniMax effectively dropped the lawsuit, on the conditions that Mojang use the "Scrolls" name only for this game, which means a sequel is not allowed, or follow-up content like merchandise.

Another major win for Bethesda was over the rights of the "Fallout" Trademark.

Interplay, (The original creators of the Fallout franchise) disputed that they still had some claim to this trademark, despite selling all Fallout intellectual properties to Bethesda in April 2007, This conditionally licensed Interplay, with certain trademark rights to create a Fallout MMO (On the condition that Interplay collected $30 million to finance it, and Commenced work by April 2009)

Unfortunately, Interplay failed to secure either of these objectives, defaulting the all intellectual rights back to Bethesda. ZeniMax payed Interplay $2 million "As consideration in the settlement".