Wizardry
Image: Digital Eclipse

Atari has just announced the acquisition of "the complete and exclusive rights to the first five Wizardry games and their underlying IP". This includes Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981), Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds (1982), Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983), Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (1987), and Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom (1988).

Often considered one of the most influential role-playing video games of all time, the original 1981 Wizardry was primarily designed and created by two people, Robert Woodhead and Andrew C. Greenberg, for the publisher Sir-Tech.

Along with its main competitor, Ultima, it had a tremendous influence on many popular Japanese creators in the 1980s, including Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, and has since been ported and remade for several platforms over the years.

In 2024, for instance, the Atari-owned developer Digital Eclipse released its own remake of the game, built on the original, featuring a new Grammy Award-winning score by Winifred Phillips, improved 3D visuals, and a number of other quality-of-life enhancements.

Robert Woodhead said about the acquisition in a press statement, “When Andrew Greenberg and I created Wizardry back in the 1980s, the video game industry was still in its infancy, and the original games were some of the first to bring the role-playing experience to PCs and consoles. As Atari continues to reintroduce the games on new platforms and to new audiences, I'll definitely be paying attention to the reactions of gamers who decide to take on a real old-school challenge.”

Wade Rosen, the CEO and chairman of Atari, meanwhile, added, “Wizardry is such an influential RPG franchise, yet many of the games have been unavailable for more than two decades. We are excited to have this rare opportunity to republish, remaster, and bring console ports and physical releases of these early games to market.”

Important to note is that the Japanese company Drecom still owns the rights to Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990), Wizardry VIII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992), and Wizardry 8 (2001), with the company having announced that it had acquired those rights, alongside the domestic and global trademarks, in 2020. This is something the company has sought to make clear in a statement on its Twitter/X account, after some headlines reported that Atari had bought the IP outright.

This essentially means that if Atari wants to sell further remakes under the Wizardry name, it will need to license the mark, as it did in the past with the 2024 release. It also means it cannot develop new original games under the Wizardry name without Drecom's permission.

In case you are confused, Norman Sirotek, one of the co-founders of Sir-Tech, explained the situation to us as follows back in 2024: "In my mind, the rights are very clear and simple. In others, maybe not so much. Wizardry 1 through 5 have always been owned by the Siroteks, in one form or another. And back in 2000, we sold off the Wizardry mark and the rights to 6, 7, and 8. Now the company we sold them to is no longer around, and they flipped it. And it's gone through, I guess, several flips ever since. And the current owners of those rights are [a Japanese company called] Drecom."