On April 1, Ubisoft filed a new trademark for Beyond Good & Evil in what could turn out as the cruelest April Fool's Day joke in the history of video gaming.
Hopefully, though, this signifies that Ubisoft is finally prepared to bring a sequel to the cult classic title to the masses, something gamers have waited for since the company first announced that it wanted to make a second game way back in 2008.
The trademark filing is for classes 9, 16, 25, 28 and 41. Class 9 refers to software, 16 is paper products, 25 is clothes, 28 is games and toys and 41 refers to online features for game software.
So, what does this mean? It could mean nothing, but it could also mean that Ubisoft is preparing something with the franchise. That doesn't necessarily mean a sequel, but the trademark does include clothes, as well as games and toys. Why would Ubisoft want trademarks for merchandise without a new game to market?
The good news is that such trademark filings do often come before major announcements about new game titles, so here's hoping this signals a future official announcement by Ubisoft that, not only is a sequel in the works — which gamers have already heard before — but that the company has an idea of when that game will get a release.
Beyond Good & Evil, which originally released in 2003, is an action-adventure game that takes place in the year 2435. Its story follows a young photojournalist, Jade, and her companion Pey'j, as they travel across their world to uncover information about an evil that threatens its people.
This trademark filing follows various reports that Nintendo plans on funding Beyond Good & Evil 2, and that Ubisoft plans on launching it as an NX exclusive title.
"According to the supposed leak, the game is currently assigned the working title Beyond Good & Evil: The Prejudices of Philosophers," wrote Destructoid last month. "This is apparently a reference to a specific chapter in the philosophical text 'Beyond Good & Evil' by Friedrich Nietzsche, which details how morality can be altered by authority, and the ways black-and-white morality overlooks the larger complexity of the nature of morals."
