Well, lately in my gamedesign course, I've had a lot of classes on using Unreal Editor to build levels and custom stuff, and when I started using the textures from the unreleased Jazz Jackrabbit 3D, I thought to myself, a fanmade Jazz 3D game might not be so far away.

I was just wondering though, if I do plan to begin with this, and say I'd want to charge people 5 dollars for example to buy it online, would that be illegal? Really hypothetically speaking here, but still. Who currently owns the copyrights to Jazz Jackrabbit? As far as I know, it hasn't been used since 2002 (JJR Advance). Is the copyright still held by Epic Games? Or has it already expired and is it free for anyone to use?