Exult Forum

I'm going to do a programming master with the Unity engine. I've always wanted to make a game of Ultima VII. I made my first steps to make a graphic adventure with the Adventure Game Studio, using the graphics of Ultima. I have the game half done (21 finished rooms and an advanced plot, it should be 40% when I left it). But now I will be able to make a real RPG game with Unity! My question is: can I legally use the Ultima VII graphics to make the video game? I could commercialize it? If I can not, I do not care, I want to do it anyway, I have a great idea, but it would be an incentive.
Regards, see you in the streets of Britain!

No, you cannot use the U7 graphics. If you use them expect Electronic Arts to sue you fully. It's a waste of your time if you do this especially if you want to do a commercial game.
Also please do not post here anymore if you go ahead with your copyright enfringements

Has anyone formally asked EA to release the graphics only into the public domain or otherwise make them free to use?

Even for Exult this would make it easier to do a free game with the existing artwork.

It's a shame the Arthurian Legends artwork is considered lost.

The way to handle EA is not to poke the bear. Regardless of how one views EA's business model and bearings, you can respect them for turning a blind eye towards most fan projects.
But giving away IP and copyrighted material is not on their (or most other companies') agenda.
And as it is a huge company it's not even easy to figure out who to ask...

don't. just don't it's not worth the risk of a lawsuit and will damage whatever reputation you were hoping to build. only ever use art from sources you know you have permission to use

If previous posters haven't removed your doubt yet:

If you're looking to sell that game, you can be 100% certain that EA will find you and sue you. You'd be selling assets that they own. They are not a nice company and will probably destroy you financially. (Although any company in their right mind would sue you for this.)

But even putting it out there for free is a huge risk, since that is illegal too.
EA might not notice if your game flies under the radar, but if it does turn out to be popular, you can be sure that they'll find out about its existence and sue you, even when you didn't make any money off of it.

It's really simple: Don't use someone else's stuff when making a game. You didn't make it, it's not yours to take.
You'll either need to make your own assets, hire people to make them for you or contact the owner of certain assets to ask permission to use them.

It's worth mentioning there is a legal component. Copyright that is unenforced can be lost, so the law compels them to take action.

https://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

5) "If you don't defend your copyright you lose it." -- "Somebody has that name copyrighted!"

False. Copyright is effectively never lost these days, unless explicitly given away. You also can't "copyright a name" or anything short like that, such as almost all titles. You may be thinking of trade marks, which apply to names, and can be weakened or lost if not defended.

Exactly. And even if it were true, do you really want to fight against EA in court? You would need a really good case and tons of money... (and that money would be better spent outsourcing for original art)

I get it. thanks for your sincere words. I thought that the creative company was Origin. Maybe my next step is to look for a graphic artist to continue with my dream with new graphics

That's one area I'm having trouble with as well. I don't even know where to look for help with original art.

There is a remake of U5, the Lazarus project. They remade all graphics. Maybe you can find help from them..

Lazarus has been a while ago

Making new faces is a challenge. I can down-convert images to a usable size, and grayscale them before putting them into the 256 color palette, but then manually colorizing them is more challenging than I had guessed.

When I switched PCs, it looks like the map mods I made didn't make it. I'll have to boot the old one back up.