Key facts
- EA released 25 remastered or re-released games from its 1990s catalog on Steam and GOG.
- The list includes several Wing Commander games and nearly the entire Ultima series.
- Jim Vessella, a senior producer at EA, described the remastering work in a blog post.
- Vessella wrote that he visited an archive room at EA's Redwood Shores campus containing poorly labeled physical media.
- He wrote that contractors digitized footage 17 hours a day on swing shifts to label and digitize it.
- Vessella wrote that he coordinated with community member Matt Wells, who made enhancement patches for some Wing Commander games.
EA has released 25 remastered or re-released games from its 1990s catalog on Steam and GOG, including several Wing Commander titles and nearly the entire Ultima series. The list includes Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: 30th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander Prophecy: 30th Anniversary Edition, Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition, and other titles.
In a blog post published this week, Jim Vessella, a senior producer at EA, described the efforts that went into remastering Wing Commander I-IV and Prophecy, Privateer 2, and Road Rash. After working on Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection in 2019, Vessella wrote that he learned about and visited a room at EA's Redwood Shores campus that contained a large archive of poorly labeled or sorted physical media. In his free time, with the help of others, he began cataloging the archive and discovered it contained virtually the entirety of the original masters of Wing Commander III and IV's full-motion-video cutscenes.
Vessella wrote that the effort involved building a small team of contractors, poring through the footage 17 hours a day on swing shifts to label and digitize it, and coordinating with several key community members, particularly Matt Wells, who has made community enhancement patches for some of the Wing Commander games.