Richard Garriott, the creator of the legendary Ultima series, just announced that he’s made a breakthrough in his quest to get the rights back to his series, and the deal might be sealed as early as next year.
Ultima is one of the most important video game series of all time, not only for its portrayal of rich gameworlds filled with deep gameplay options, but also for pioneering most aspects of CRPGs, with influences that can be seen all the way to Baldur’s Gate 3. And the same can also be said about MMOs, with the ’97 spinoff, Ultima Online, proving as influential and memorable as the main series. At the height of the series’ success, creator Richard “Lord British” Garriott sold his company, Origin Systems, to EA in 1992.
If it feels like I might be making up this entire legendary series that you’ve never heard of, fret not. Despite a critically uneven but still usually very successful run of nearly ten mainline titles that stretched from the ’80s to the late ’90s, the entire series has been dormant since the release of the very divisive Ultima IX: Ascension, way back in ’99. A few spinoffs tried to revive the brand in the 2010s, but those bore no fruit. As caught by PC Gamer, Garriott just told Inside Games that he’d tried to revive Ultima “every decade or so”, but, despite initial signs of interest by the rights’ owner, said interest quickly died out. The alternative? Trying to get the whole thing back.
And Garriot is about to succeed, as a US copyright law allows for creators (or descendants) to reacquire the rights to properties 35 years later, and, since Garriot had sold the rights way back in 1992, he’s liable to get them back in 2027. He said, “and so, I have been waiting… finally, the time has come!” The only thing is that Garriott cannot get the trademark back, only the copyright, meaning that he cannot use just the Ultima name in his game, a problem he’ll easily fix by calling it “Lord British’s Ultima.”
That’s great, not just as a mark of reclamation for Richard Garriott, the developer, but also a great comeback for “Lord British” himself. That’s Garriott’s in-Ultima alter ego, who’d accidentally perished back in ’97 at the hands of a vile assassin in one of the most famous and hilarious tales of old online gaming.
So yeah, he fell victim to the only regicide in the history of gaming, but he’s doing better now, and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next
