Earlier this year, the developers of what used to be called The Minstrel’s Fable announced that they were changing the name of the game to Ultimax, and relaunched the playable demo of their expansive, retro-styled MMORPG. Soon thereafter — this wasn’t covered here on the Codex — they applied for a trademark for the name, and for a variant of the title graphic above that used a more Ultima-like font. (You can see the now-abandoned trademark application here.)

Well, it turns out that EA wasn’t terribly happy about that. According to a news update that the Ultimax team posted back in March:

We will be Rebranding, Yet Again!

We got a cease and desist notice from EA on the Ultimax title and proposed logo (currently at USPTO). It wasn’t official, but it was formal and stern enough to realize they mean business. So, we will just come up with another name and logo. I’m actually glad that I posted that we are trying to acquire the logo, because I think that’s what triggered EA’s response. If for some reason, we slipped through the cracks and was granted the rights, EA still could have come after us. And, if we already printed the box art with the logo and mailed those out, we’d be in deep water. So good we are flushing this out now. Again, not a huge deal. We’ll just rename it.

The team did attempt to offer an alternative; they would withdraw the trademark application for the name and logo, but would keep the Ultimax name for the game, and also added a notice to the website that Ultimax was not affiliated with EA or Ultima in any way.

Today, we asked EA if it would be ok for us to use the game title “Ultimax”, while agreeing to withdraw our application to trademark the name/logo. We’ve complied with EA thus far, as they told us to add a notice to our website to inform users that our game is not affiliated with EA or the Ultima brand. We’ve done that. We are listening to them, so I’m hoping they give us a little room here, and they allow us to use the title. We’ll see what happens.

That, too, was not answered favourably:

EA is requesting that we change the title. What doesn’t make sense is they also requested that we add a notice saying “not affiliated with EA” which we did, so we assumed that we’d be able to keep the title. If we change the title, then users will no longer be misled/confused by the title? So, why the notice? Games can look like other games. Game ideas cannot be copyrighted, they know that. It’s the “name” that they are concerned about. Makes no sense if we are displaying a notice. Oh well, not going to fight with them. We’ll just come up with a new name.

Still, this setback notwithstanding, development on the soon-to-be-renamed Ultimax proceeds apace, and the team are continuing to prepare to bring the game to Kickstarter:

Our artist is still working on the box art. We are close to having that done. We are also working on rebranding Ultimax. It’s getting a new name and new logo. Once we have the box art, we are going to prepare some mockups of what you’ll be getting in the box (books, map, etc.). After that, we will be launching our Kickstarter! Be sure to sign-up to be a “Future Backer” to get an exclusive in-game gift (scroll to the footer to see the sign-up)!

The artist mentioned above, by the way, is illustrator Tony Foti; if you’re a Star Wars fan, you may have encountered some of his artwork. So whatever this game ends up being called, you can at least expect that its box art will be quite expertly crafted.