Ultima is a foundational RPG series that’s long been left in the past by rights holder EA, but according to series creator Richard Garriott, that could all be changing as early as next year.
Garriott sold Origin Systems, the studio he co-founded with his brother and father, to EA back in 1992 along with the rights to the Ultima IP. He would continue working there for years to come, directing several Ultima RPGs and serving as producer on the seminal MMORPG, Ultima Online. In 1999, EA canceled all of Origin’s in-development projects partly due to poor reception to Ultima IX: Ascension, and Garriott left the company shortly after that. After a few years maintaining Ultima Online and working on another online Ultima game that would eventually be canceled, Origin was shut down by EA in 2004. 22 years later, Garriott says he’ll soon own the rights to the series once again.
“There’s a really weird United States copyright law that says, if you are the original holder of a copyright and you assign it or sell it to any publisher or any other entity, after 35 years you can just take it back,” Garriott tells Jesse Petrilla in a new interview. “There’s no money that you need to transfer, all you need to do is tell them a year before you take it back.
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“And so, in April of this year, I told Electronic Arts, ‘by the way, I’m gonna take the copyrights to Ultima back,’ and they wrote back and said, ‘yeah, we know that’s the law, we will act accordingly.’ And so I’m now in discussions with them actively right now as to, ‘is there anything we should do together or not?'”
As EA is still the rights holder as of now, there’s no guarantee on what form this potential Ultima revival will take. Garriott says “we’ll figure it out,” but “at the very least it means I could re-release the early Ultimas, but it also means I could sequel them… the point is, I have control again of the future of my seminal product line.”
“Sequel them,” you say? As in, the official steampunk Ultima Online 2 that was announced in 1999 and canceled in 2001? Ultima Online is probably the game I’ve put the most hours into in my whole life, and a sequel would be utterly surreal at the very least.
Assuming Garriott’s correct and he regains ownership of Ultima next year, I’ll be nervously excited to see what comes next. Simple remakes or remasters of early Ultima games would be easy winners as long as their core systems remain mostly untouched, but a whole new game with Garriott at the helm could go either way. While his influence on the RPG genre is undeniable, Garriott has occasionally tripped his way through controversy in his decades-long career, which includes attempts at an NFT-based MMO and a string of post-Ultima releases that haven’t all been well-received.
Regardless, I’d argue Ultima is in better hands with Garriott than it is under EA’s umbrella, where it would probably never be touched again.