Independent video game developers have a reputation for responding to and being involved in the communities that love their games. Perhaps no single developer embodies this more than Markus “Notch” Persson. Notch, along with others at Swedish developer Mojang, developed the hit indie title Minecraft. As today’s saga demonstrates, when interacting with the fans of your indie game, especially one that encourages users to create much of the game themselves, things get weird.

It started when Notch was made aware of a pirate who had set up a website distributing Minecraft for free. Notch sent the pirate a message requesting that the site be taken down. The pirate not only replied, but challenged Notch to a Quake 3 Arena deathmatch.

Only an hour later Notch reported that the pirate had already taken the site down. In this tweet, “q3dm17” refers to a Quake 3 Arena deathmatch in the multiplayer arena called dm17.

Lest anyone still believe the challenge a joke, Notch then confirmed a date and time for the deathmatch. Notch will battle the pirate on Monday, April 16th at 1:00 pm EDT.

In a Reddit thread discussing the event, Notch was slightly more specific about the challenge, saying, “We skyped about it and decided to do the match Monday 7PM GMT+1 (which is noon CST). 3v3, either q3dm6 if we want fun, or q3dm17 if we want insane.” It was in that same thread that Notch promised to live-stream the event.

Notch is currently working on a science fiction game titled 0x10c. That game will feature a fully-programmable 16-bit computer for every spaceship in the game. The graphics will be very simplistic, similar to Minecraft.