Atari buys rights to the first five Wizardry games, while Drecom clarifies the wider IP situation

Atari’s Wizardry announcement is exciting, but the rights situation needs careful wording. Atari says it has acquired rights to the first five Wizardry games, including Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Wizardry II, Wizardry III, Wizardry IV and Wizardry V, along with other related rights. The company plans expanded digital and physical distribution, remasters, collections and new releases around what it calls the Original Wizardry / The Llylgamyn Saga titles. However, Drecom has clarified that Atari has not acquired the overall Wizardry intellectual property. Drecom continues to hold the Wizardry trademark worldwide and still owns Wizardry VI, VII and 8, which belong to a different fictional universe. For RPG fans, this is still a big preservation story. Wizardry helped shape the foundations of computer RPGs and influenced Japanese RPG design heavily. If Atari and Digital Eclipse handle the early games well, players may get a better way to experience a historically important series that has been hard to access properly for decades.