The winds of copyright law blow strangely through Britannia. Richard Garriott, the man who built Ultima from Akalabeth onward and sold Origin to EA in 1992, is reportedly poised to reclaim the series' core copyrights next year under the U.S. 35-year termination rule. EA filed fresh trademarks recently, which prompted journalist Brian Gaar of Inside Games to ring Lord British directly; Garriott confirmed decades of on-again, off-again revival talks that always fizzled, and declared the time has finally come.
Copyright reverts to the creator, not the trademark. Garriott can take back the original work but EA retains the "Ultima" name, forcing any new project toward workarounds like "Lord British's Ultima." The series that birthed dynamic worlds, moral systems, and the MMO template in Ultima Online has sat mostly dormant under EA since the late '90s, save for the occasional forgotten experiment. Larian's success with deep, reactive CRPGs shows the audience still exists.
Garriott plans to share more at Dragon Con once he has "more thoughts together." Whether this ends in a triumphant return or another chapter of stalled ambition remains to be seen, but the legal clock is finally striking thirteen for the man who coined "Lord British."
The plot twist is that the rights were always terminable; it just took thirty-five years of dormancy for anyone to notice.
