Yes, I was not informed about it. But I think that's fair. I didn't ask them either before I published the project. Please, don't make it a license issue. I developed it for fun.
Most likely, it is included in some kind of ThirdPartyNotices.txt that ships with the game. It's actually pretty hard to sneak third party F/OSS under the radar in the company of this size - there's automated code scanners, among other things, and while they can't catch everything, they sure can flag a copy of a public project on GitHub.
I'm pretty sure that declaring https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory/tree/master/data to be MIT-licensed does not actually make it so... (these are disk images of the relevant FS releases, which are still under copyright as well as provided under a proprietary MIT-incompatible license)
TL;DR: A Microsoft contractor basically endorsed piracy, in a weirdly-recursive-enough-to-be-legal way...
Unfortunately, all things must become a license issue if licenses are to be taken seriously. License compliance is a binary condition, you either comply completely or fail.
I don't really know the scope of easter eggs, is the whole team supposed to know about them or just the few programmers that introduced them? Maybe they didn't want to spoil the surprise (?)
In any case, congratulations to op for having their project reach the original franchise. It's a sign of a job well done!
No credit is owed, no thanks are due. This is an unavoidable effect of usuing the MIT license over something like GPL.
Andrew Tanenbaum on choosing MIT for the MINIX project, which was used by Intel + the IC as a base for the Intel Management Engine (emphasis mine):
"The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all."
If you'd like to avoid a large company profiting off your work without attribution, don't use MIT.
You can put that clause in your license! Something like:
If you use this software in a commercial product, you are required to
make an attempt to send me an e-mail letting me know about it,
because it's just nice to know.
Of course that would piss off the lawyers because now if a developer uses your software and doesn't e-mail you, you could sue them. But it's not like big companies always respect licenses anyway :)
Credit is certainly owed under MIT, a copyright notice must be included.
(I wonder where Intel shows this copyright notice; in principle, it should come with every processor or product based on the processor. Probably in the same place where IME itself lives…)
Considering they fully own all of the IP present in the OPs work, I would imagine they are within their full rights to just take it without asking.
OP is lucky not to get a takedown notice and judging by his attitude he knows it.
Good to see people playing nicely together :)
The games were already playable online on archive.org [1]. My project is just focussed on the old flight simulators.
Especially I wanted to have a very light-weight emulator which starts within milliseconds. The major part of the emulator downloads with just 24kB compressed. I suppose I have reached the goal.
This is kind of the nature of open source though; I use tons of open source software and libraries every day, also for my clients, without letting the maintainers of the software and libraries know.
That said, I do advocate for companies doing financial contributions to open source where possible.