Richard Garriott is officially regaining control of the Ultima series
Ultima creator confirms he will soon regain the copyright from Electronic Arts
Game designer Richard Garriott has confirmed he will soon regain the rights to the influential RPG and MMO series Ultima from Electronic Arts.
Ultima is considered one of the most influential early RPG series, having established many genre norms, especially in world-building and exploration.
Garriott sold the series to EA in 1992, along with his studio Origin Systems, for $30 million. Although the publisher would go on to release several Ultima games in the 90s, including MMO Ultima Online, it canceled all of Origin’s projects in 2000, and Garriott left.
Now, the series Garriott created could soon be back in his control. Under Section 203 of the US Copyright Act, authors have the right to terminate past copyright transfers after 35 years. For Ultima, that window is months away – and the designer has already given EA notice.
“I sold Origin to Electronic Arts in 1992, and 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 confirmed to Jesse Petrilla.
“There’s no money that needs to transfer. All you have to do is tell them a year before you take it back. And so in April of this year, I told Electronic Arts, ‘by the way, I’m going to take the copyrights to Ultima back’, and they wrote back and said, ‘yeah, we know that’s the law. We will act accordingly.’”
Garriott said he’s currently in ‘active’ discussions with EA to explore if there are any Ultima projects they can work on together, after which the rights will revert to him.
“We’ll figure it out, but I get it back officially in 2027,” he said. “I’ve got most of a year to figure out what that means. But at the very least, it means I could re-release the earlier Ultimas, but it also means I could sequel them. And the point is I’m going to be I have control again of the future of my seminal product line.”
After leaving EA in 2000, Garriott founded Destination Games, which partnered with South Korean publisher NCsoft for the 2007 MMO Tabula Rasa, which closed in 2009 following disappointing sales. During this period, Garriott also became a private astronaut and spent 12 days aboard the International Space Station in 2008.
The last mainline Ultima game was 1999’s Ultima IX. In the decades since, EA has attempted to revive the series as a free-to-play title twice, most recently with 2013’s Ultima Forever.
