Image credit: EA
In March 2022, senior producer Jim Vessella found a physical media vault at the company’s Redwood Shores campus containing nearly 20,000 archival assets, including videotapes, film reels and CD-ROMs. Four years later, EA released seven Anniversary Editions alongside 18 other classic PC games on Steam this month.
The collection included master recordings for Road Rash and Wing Commander, according to Vessella. EA’s restored classics began with a storage-room discovery. Recovering that material helped launch a restoration effort involving EA employees, community modders and GOG engineers. The restored editions combine recovered cinematic footage with improvements that let the games run on modern computers while preserving their original presentation. The wider Steam release includes Theme Hospital, Crusader and Ultima titles. Existing digital owners of the restored Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA App receive the corresponding Anniversary Edition upgrades free on those platforms.
Modder Matt Wells had already developed a Wing Commander III enhancement patch supporting higher-resolution video. He agreed to incorporate it into an official Anniversary Edition and worked with EA on further improvements.
The recovered videos needed software changes before the games could play them.