“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.’”

Richard Garriott is officially regaining control of the Ultima series
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.”

Click to expand...