Dear Gaming Community,

My name is Jim Vessella and I’m a Senior Producer with the EA Partners team at Electronic Arts. 

I’ve been making games now for over 20 years, and like many of you, I’ve been a devoted gamer since I was a little kid. Many of my favorite games, including the ones that inspired me to become a game developer, are from the 1990s.

But as the years go by, the games industry is realizing that many of these classic games are becoming harder to access, with their histories lost through forgotten storage boxes, deprecating physical media, or incompatible modern hardware.  So when an opportunity presented itself here at EA to make a positive impact on game preservation, several of us jumped at the chance.  And with that, I would like to tell you a story about game preservation at EA and how it led to restoring some of our favorite games.

Table of Contents

• Opening the Vault: The Beginnings 

• Wing Commander III Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition

• Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: 30th Anniversary Edition

• Privateer 2: The Darkening

• Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition

• Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition

• Wing Commander Prophecy: 30th Anniversary Edition

• Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition

• Thank You

Opening the Vault: The Beginnings 

In March of 2022, I discovered EA’s physical media vault at EA’s Redwood Shores campus. Imagine a giant storage room containing nearly 20,000 archival media assets including Betacam, VHS, and D1 tapes among other media like Film Reels, CD-ROMs, and more. Having discovered a much smaller storage cache during my time on the Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection in 2019 (and understanding the value of that material), I was determined to discover what was on these assets. 

So over the next six months I dedicated time outside my full-time role to unpack boxes, eventually realizing the breadth of historical content present in this room. From there, Greg Roensch from the EA Story initiative raised his hand and volunteered to completely reorganize the room. By the summer of 2023, Greg had the room chronologically arranged, upon which I started putting together a proposal to start digitizing the vault. The fun began in early 2024. We hired a small contracting team, purchased 4 Betacam players plus a VCR, and over the next eight weeks we were feeding tapes into the machines on swing shifts for roughly 17 hours every day. I catalogued and drove another 500 tapes of rarer formats (D1, D2, Umatic, and Film Reels) off-site to get digitized by a professional vendor in San Francisco.

By April 2026, we had digitized a combined 6000 media assets and preserved an estimated 2500 hours of historical footage. It was only then that we could truly appreciate what we had saved, which led to the next chapter of this story. Because amongst all the incredible content, we were able to confirm we recovered the Master Source tapes for two iconic franchises—Wing Commander and Road Rash. 

Wing Commander III Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition

Wing Commander III is honestly where this story begins, both personally and professionally. From a personal standpoint, Wing Commander III was the first Wing Commander game I played when I was eleven years old. (I only discovered Wing Commander and Wing Commander II via the Kilrathi Saga years later). As such, I remember Wing Commander III blowing my mind, and it became an inspiration for me wanting to make games when I grew up. Fast forward nearly 30 years to the spring of 2022, and there I am digging through EA’s physical media vault, and discovering tape after tape labeled with variations of “Wing Commander Master XYZ”. These tapes became our guiding light. I knew from that moment we needed to find a way to get these tapes digitized and share them back with the community.

Over the course of those next two years, we were able to get over 600 Wing Commander tapes digitized. So during the Summer of 2024, I reached out to key members of the Wing Commander community, told them what I’d found, and we began sifting through the footage. After months of cataloging, we determined the tapes had provided a near full set of Wing Commander III master footage. So the next question became, what can we do with this discovery?

This is where the dedicated Wing Commander modding community comes into the story. It turns out a modder by the name of Matt Wells (Mash) had already created an Enhancement Patch for the Kilrathi Saga version of Wing Commander III, which, among other things, had enabled the playback of higher resolution mp4s within the 1996 version. In late 2024, I reached out to Matt and walked him through our entire vault preservation journey, and asked if we could incorporate his Enhancement Patch into an official Anniversary Edition. Matt loved the idea. 

We started a Slack channel with a small group of key community members, and for the next two years, we iterated on Wing Commander III. If you revisit Matt’s Enhancement Patch GitHub page, you can see where this iteration picked up steam in the spring of 2025. The cycle became that Matt would release a new build, let us know, and I would playtest that build to pass along feedback, technical notes, and suggestions. In between, we would troubleshoot items over Slack and brainstorm further design ideas. I remember one Saturday night in 2025, we spent hours trying to hunt down a crash, replaying the same mission dozens of times under different parameters and reviewing the log files. I think we got that one, but if you happen to run into a crash, please understand it wasn’t due to lack of trying.

Alongside the enhancement patch iteration, I then had to get to work on the Full-motion videos (FMVS). During the cataloging work in the Summer of 2024, we had a giant spreadsheet with every cinematic scene listed out. For reference, in Wing Commander III, there are about 475 individual full-screen cinematics. Each one has a unique filename the game is looking for, such as “sc_013a”. The next step was to identify what specific source tape contained the master scene. Sometimes a lesser quality “master” would be on a Betacam SP tape, but the dream was to find the scene on a D1 or D2 tape, which provided the highest possible quality. For “sc_013a”, that scene was on D2 tape called “WingCommander3_BriefingRoom_09231994”, alongside most of the other briefing room scenes in the game. The next step was to load that uncompressed video file (about 60 GB!) into video editing software.

Because the raw tape capture just plays the scenes back to back to back, the first step is to find and cut every scene. For example, an hour-long tape might contain 30-40 individual scenes; some tapes would have only a couple. So during my lunch breaks and after hours, I would begin chopping up these tapes (digitally) to isolate each scene. Once all the scenes on a tape were laid bare, the next step was to cross-reference back to the spreadsheet to identify and rename every scene. For example, Blackmane “sc_061a” is the intro when Flint is reinstated, “sc_061b” is when Flint is grounded, and “sc_061c” is the actual briefing. Get them backward, and the game won’t be happy. 

You then begin to realize for some scenes, certain frames would be corrupted or interlacing issues would present themselves due to the tape age or format. These would require meticulous frame-by-frame corrections, with some being more solvable than others. At the end of the day, it took about six months to isolate and clean up the roughly 475 full-screen cinematic scenes. 

But the job wasn’t complete because, after finishing the full-screen cinematics, we discovered several tapes containing all the master footage for the in-flight comms messages. An exciting moment to say the least, but at the time, Matt’s patch didn’t allow for the replacement of these videos. But Matt persisted, and through his efforts, implemented a technical solution. This emboldened me, which meant going back to the editing timeline to cut/rename these scenes…and turned out to be another 460 of them. But the extra cool thing here is that in the original game, only a few scene variations were shipped per character and reused for multiple responses (likely due to storage space). Now we had about 40+ unique variations per character in much higher fidelity, representing the actors’ specific delivery of each line. Worth it.

After the initial FMV work was completed, our focus turned to quality-of-life features. Matt implemented a host of wonderful improvements, ranging from 60 FPS gameplay to a powerful input calibration tool, and a handful of .INI settings each player can tweak to their preference. I worked on designing a control scheme for controllers and used Matt’s tool to set up default configurations for about 20 different controllers and joysticks. For those interested, please check out the Controller and Joystick setup guides in the Extras folder of your install directory to learn more.

After over two years of iteration and collaborative effort, we are so excited for players to finally experience the Wing Commander III: 30th Anniversary Edition. Thank you to Matt for his contribution of the Enhancement Patch to the 30th Anniversary Edition.

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: 30th Anniversary Edition

Wing Commander IV serves as a unique inspiration in this story, as I think many Wing Commander fans would hold the Wing Commander IV DVD version as the franchise’s definitive cinematic experience in terms of visual quality. I remember buying the DVD version from a neighbor for $5 in 1997 or 1998, who had received it bundled with their new DVD-ROM hardware. I later cobbled together my own DVD-ROM setup, and seeing those first Wing Commander IV videos in DVD quality on my 21-inch CRT monitor was just glorious. It looked SO good. And while the Wing Commander IV DVD version has now been available on GOG for over a decade, my hope is that when fans boot up the other 30th Anniversary Editions, it provides the same “wow factor” we all felt when we first saw the DVD version in the late 90s.

But where did that leave us with Wing Commander IV? When I first found the tapes, I wasn’t sure if the Master source material would provide any visual improvement over the DVD version. Luckily, to my surprise, for scenes we were able to recover from D1 tapes (about 240 of the roughly 280 scenes), there was a noticeable little upgrade. What’s more important is that this provided an even stronger foundation for some of the upscaling efforts. 

As many in the community know, Owen “ODVS” Davies has been at the forefront of AI upscaling the Wing Commander FMVs for years. I reached out to Owen back in 2024, and he has been an instrumental advisor on the FMV restoration over these past several years. For example, due to the age of the tapes, some of the digitized footage was suffering from artifacting or corrupted pixels. Owen’s previous upscaling efforts served as a strong inspiration to experiment with our own AI upscaling solutions. We’ve now done this upscaling pass as an optional enhancement on each of the 30th Anniversary Editions, and for Wing Commander IV, it helped clean up many of the artifacting issues while increasing the visual fidelity. But we understand the look of AI upscaled material isn’t for everyone, which is why for each of the 30th Anniversary Editions, you can still play with the Master source, or even the original videos from the 1990s. It’s worth noting Owen has now had access to the source material for a while, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s able to provide some even more impressive upgrades for the community in the future. I personally can’t wait.

On the gameplay side, the Wing Commander IV: 30th Anniversary Edition runs off the Enhancement Patch created by Matt Wells (Mash). Matt released his initial patch for Wing Commander IV six months after we first spoke, and it opened up the game to all sorts of improvements similar to Wing Commander III. Since early 2025, Matt has added gameplay up to 60 FPS, an advanced input calibration tool, and plenty of .INI settings to tweak preferences. 

In addition to Matt’s work, community leader Ben “LOAF” Lesnick dug deep into the IFF files to generate a new Objects.tre file with one specific goal in mind—to re-balance the infamous insta-kill missile spam from enemies. Ben and I tested many revisions of this “hack”, and the best compromise was to make it so most enemies do not fire missiles, or the missiles act as dummy projectiles instead. In our opinion, the result is a much more vibrant Wing Commander IV, where your ship’s health throughout the mission matters, and you’re not constantly in fear of losing a 20-minute run due to one unavoidable missile. However, if you prefer the original missile behavior, we’ve included the previous Objects.tre, which you can copy over from the Extras folder.

With the combination of the Wing Commander IV Enhancement Patch, the Master and Upscaled FMVs, and re-balanced gameplay, there has never been a better time to relive the cinematic experience of Wing Commander IV (or discover it for the first time). We hope it provides that same emotional spark many of us experienced throughout the 1990s. Thanks to Matt, Owen, and Ben for their contributions to the 30th Anniversary Edition.

Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition

The restoration process for Privateer 2: The Darkening is one of my favorite stories of this initiative. After our FMV audit during the summer of 2024, we realized that Privateer 2 was the primary hole in our Wing Commander collection. We had found and preserved a portion of the Privateer 2 footage off Betacam SP and Umatic tapes, but not every scene was present and the quality paled in comparison to the D1 / D2 footage of Wing Commander III and IV. After digging through every box, it felt like a dead end.

Then one of the community members mentioned that years back, they had seen a video uploaded by Steve Hilliker, who happened to be the Cinematics Director for the original Privateer 2 shoot in the UK. In the video description, Steve claimed to have some of the master footage on Digi 8 tapes and had uploaded a few scenes to celebrate the crew who had performed the film shoot. I needed to reach out. We jumped on a call to discuss the media vault and some of the goals we had for restoring the FMV footage. So Steve went hunting.

About a week later Steve wrote back….and said he had found the entire collection of Privateer 2 Master Digi 8 tapes in his attic! Steve said it had always been a dream of his to revisit Privateer 2 and do a proper color correction of the footage. So we commissioned Steve to both digitize the tapes, and create a “Director’s Cut” of the cinematics. And boy did Steve deliver. He combined his lifetime of film experience with the latest video upscaling tools to create an entirely new visual tone for Privateer 2, in the way his crew had envisioned back in 1996. Alongside this Director’s Cut, you can also play the game with the Source Masters that Steve digitized, or an alternative upscaled option on these masters which maintains the original color tone of the game. But we had a significant issue. Steve was in the process of creating all these amazing new FMVs, but there was no way to play them in the game! 

Now, through our ongoing collaborations in 2025 for Wing Commander III and IV, modder Matt Wells was well aware of these FMV ambitions with Steve. So on December 8, 2025, Matt surprised everyone by uploading his first version of the Privateer 2 Enhancement Patch. Not only did this patch provide a host of gameplay improvements, but just like Wing Commander III and IV, it allowed us to swap out the cinematics for high quality mp4s! I remember the first time booting the game with some of Steve’s restored video, and my jaw almost hit the floor. We hope you try all the cinematic versions to see the difference in quality and visual presentation.

Over the past year, Matt has continued to improve the Enhancement Patch. Smooth framerates when flying across planets, improved controller and joystick support, remappable keyboard hotkeys, and of course now the full collection of restored FMVs. Matt even added the ability through his .INI file to display cinematic subtitles, a feature / piece of content lacking in the original game. So I spent a few dozen hours transcribing the original scripts into subtitles, and timing those across all 90+ cinematic scenes. We even had our EA localization team translate them into French, German, and Spanish to match the VO languages. We hope this makes the game even more approachable for players.

The overall combination of Steve’s Master FMVs and Matt’s Enhancement Patch has delivered the most definitive version of Privateer 2 ever seen. We hope you love it, and thanks to Steve, Matt, and the greater community for their contributions to the 30th Anniversary Edition.

Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition

After about a year into the restoration of the FMV games, we started to dream how awesome it would be to collaborate with the community on Anniversary Editions for Wing Commander and Wing Commander II.  For the 35th Anniversary Edition of Wing Commander, we wanted to put together a compilation that celebrated all PC versions of the game. For historical context, Wing Commander was released on DOS in 1990 and this is the version which has been available via GOG and the EA App for the past decade. If you play this version (which is still included in the 35th Anniversary Edition) you will notice it has not held up well. The gameplay speed is a challenge, and the audio does not reflect Wing Commander’s pioneering efforts to utilize the best hardware of the time. So the community stepped in.

Lance “AllTinker” Burns has been a prominent member of the Wing Commander modding community for many years. The culmination of Lance’s work has resulted in WCAT (Wing Commander AllTinker) which aims to restore the experience of playing the DOS version of Wing Commander on a proper 386 or 486 system of the time. The results are brilliant. The game runs smooth, offers multiple audio options, and even enables some balance adjustments (like fewer asteroids!) to streamline the gameplay experience. WCAT is the perfect “time capsule” to experience what it would have been like to play Wing Commander on a top-tier rig circa 1990. We greatly thank Lance for contributing WCAT to the 35th Anniversary Edition.

This then brings us to the Windows era of Wing Commander. In 1996, Origin Systems released a limited physical edition called The Kilrathi Saga, which included the first three Wing Commander titles. For the first Wing Commander, this version added digital music and sound, a re-orchestrated soundtrack, optional drop-away cockpit support, and gameplay speed fixes for Windows 95-era computers. But over time this version has become difficult to find, lacks some modern elements, and has become more unstable on recent operating systems.

This is where Wcdx comes in. Authored by James Touton, with further binary edits and development throughout 2026 by Pat Caron, Wcdx is a community mod built to modernize the Kilrathi Saga version. It keeps all the original Kilrathi Saga content, but surrounds the game with updated quality-of-life improvements. This includes sustainable gameplay speed fixes, controller support, optional cheats, windowed mode, and more. Wcdx supports both the base game and the Secret Missions 1 & 2, which can be selected at launch. This Wcdx version is the most definitive way to experience the Kilrathi Saga edition of Wing Commander. We thank both James and Pat deeply for contributing Wcdx to the 35th Anniversary Edition.

Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition

For the 35th Anniversary Edition of Wing Commander II, we had the same goal of putting together the best compilation of the game as possible. By the start of 2026, Wcdx already supported Wing Commander II, but James was quick to highlight features that he was never able to complete in his latest 2.2.1 version from 2021. This included the infamous “fast flappy mouths” during cinematics and the controls being difficult to handle. When Pat received James’ blessing to continue working on Wcdx, he took on this challenge in full force. Throughout 2026, Pat iterated on dozens of builds and we exchanged over 60 feedback emails aiming to hone in the feel of Wing Commander II. Thanks to Pat’s tireless work, he was able to improve many of these items for Wing Commander II, along with adding features like Controller Support, Optional Cheats, and more. Many of these improvements were then rolled back into Wcdx for Wing Commander to ensure game parity. We hope Wcdx for Wing Commander II is the best rendition of the Kilrathi Saga version you’ve been able to experience. We again thank James and Pat for their combined efforts and contribution of Wcdx to the 35th Anniversary Edition.

While the iteration on Wcdx in 2026 was in full swing, AllTinker was not sitting on his hands. Lance had always dreamed of getting WCAT to support Wing Commander II, but wasn’t sure if he’d make it for our official launch of the 35th Anniversary Edition. Well, in September 2026, literally weeks before we had to finalize the Anniversary Edition, Lance let us know he had completed his 1.0 version of WCAT for Wing Commander II. We were ecstatic about this news, and our Technical Director (Brian Barnes) quickly moved to incorporate WCAT into the build. WCAT for Wing Commander II continues the tradition of optimizing the experience of the DOS version, allowing you to enjoy the game as it was originally intended on a 386 / 486 PC. And to sweeten the pot, Lance added the ability to adjust the troublesome “dynamic difficulty”, which has been a thorn in players’ sides for decades. We again thank Lance for contributing WCAT to the 35th Anniversary Edition.

Wing Commander Prophecy: 30th Anniversary Edition

Wing Commander Prophecy was honestly a game we didn’t think was going to be feasible for a proper restoration. There was no universal community patch like Wcdx, WCAT, or Matt’s Enhancement patches, which would make the game smoother to play on modern systems and allow the higher resolution FMVs to play. Despite this, I still wanted to see what the digitized tapes could provide.

It turns out on the FMV content side, everything was great. All the Wing Commander Prophecy scenes came from a mix of D1 and Digital Betacam tapes, which provided a fantastic quality, even stronger than the unreleased DVD videos which have floated about the community for years. And since Wing Commander Prophecy is a fairly linear game without any dialogue choices, it was admittedly a little easier to edit, rename, and piece together compared to Wing Commander III and IV. By the end of 2025, I had completed the same FMV restoration process for all 140+ scenes for the game. And then the videos just sat there, waiting for a spark.

That spark came at GDC 2026 when I met with our partners at GOG to update them on the initiative. When I mentioned the challenges with Wing Commander Prophecy, they said “Why don’t you send over a few of the videos and our engineers will take a look.” So I did. A few weeks later their team said “I think we can do this…” The GOG engineers had determined that if they combined several of the older community mods together, in conjunction with their tech on the GOG side, they could generate a build that would both play the updated FMV videos and run the gameplay beautifully on modern systems. 

The first mod was Mario “HCl” Brito’s DVD Enhancement Patch for Wing Commander Prophecy, last updated in September 2013. So I reached out to Mario and walked him through the Wing Commander journey thus far. He was eager to dust off the mod, and agreed to release it under the MIT License so we could incorporate it into the release. The second mod was the Open GL mod created by Alex Miyamoto and Pierre Deshaies, which enabled a host of enhancements related to how the game would render on modern systems. I spoke with both Alex and Pierre, who were also both eager to contribute their mod to the project. Alex went back to his patch and generated an MIT License friendly version, and was instrumental in troubleshooting compatibility issues well into September 2026.

GOG spent months combining all the elements together, constantly fixing weird little issues, and made significant improvements of their own, adding features like improved controller support and even a gorgeous launcher for configuration setup. I’m writing this note on October 20, 2026, and we are just verifying the final build this week, that’s how close we were. But it’s now so darn cool. In the end, we hope the 30th Anniversary Edition is the best experience you’ve had playing Wing Commander Prophecy, and a celebration of how far the genre had come by the late 90s. Thank you to GOG, Mario, Alex, and Pierre for their contributions on the 30th Anniversary Edition.

Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition  

The Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition is a special project for those of us focused on preservation and restoration at EA. It’s the first project undertaken where we’ve attempted to restore a game which has been unavailable on digital platforms for over 30 years. The restoration became a passion project for Brian Barnes, our veteran Technical Director at EA Partners, who has spent nearly two decades behind-the-scenes at EA supporting retro titles. If there’s a retro EA title on GOG or the EA App, there’s a good chance Brian helped make it happen, along with initiatives like open-sourcing the Command & Conquer source code in 2025. Brian happened to unearth the Road Rash PC source code around the same time I digitized the Master FMVs in the vault, so the title became an ideal candidate for this inaugural restoration project.

I remember when Brian first got the game up and running on a modern PC. The game was essentially identical to the 1996 PC release, although promisingly Brian did have the racing gameplay up to 60 fps. However, the software crashed constantly, the new FMV movies couldn’t play, the audio options were limited, and the controls were archaic. Over time Brian started to tackle each issue. When he finally figured out how to get the high definition Master FMVs playing in the game, it was a moment of jubilation. Then one Monday Brian came in and said “So yea dude, I kinda spent the whole weekend adding native Xbox and PlayStation controller support to Road Rash.” And then a minute later, added “Oh, and also Vibration support if players want it.” It’s this type of dedication that makes the 30th Anniversary Edition feel like a true love letter to the franchise. This dedication was perhaps most abundant when a few weeks before launch, Brian surprised me with one of our oldest wishlist items, “Hey dude, the rock music can now play over the racing gaming.”

One could argue nothing defines Road Rash as much as the soundtrack. Featuring 14 incredible songs across 7 iconic bands, the 30th Anniversary Edition just wouldn’t be complete without these tracks. So in 2025, we kicked off the relicensing effort with our EA Worldwide Music Team in an attempt to fully relicense the soundtrack. Successfully pulling this off would require connecting with the music label and every band member who controlled a “side” of the 14 tracks. By the summer of 2026, we had agreements in place with 6 of the 7 bands (including the most prominent band on the list), but after months of searching we still could not find one of the members for a specific band. No contact equals no license. So by September 2026, we were days away from needing to pull the rip cord and begin extracting the band’s music from the 30th Anniversary Edition. And then like out of a Hollywood movie, we tried one more lead which was somehow able to put us in touch. We turned around the final license in mid-Sept, allowing us to celebrate the full legacy of Road Rash, breathing a sign of relief in the process.

So when Brian said “Hey dude, the rock music can now play over the racing gameplay,” it made it all that much more worth it. This was a feature from the Sega CD version of Road Rash, and it just completes the journey for the 30th Anniversary Edition on PC. Thanks to Brian and our Worldwide Music Team for all their efforts on restoring this title, and we hope you enjoy every ounce of attitude in the Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition.

Thank You 

Alongside the specific Wing Commander franchise modders mentioned earlier in this article, I wanted to highlight the efforts of several Wing Commander community members who contributed universally to this restoration initiative. In 2020, Nicky Werner created an amazing set of vectorized logos for the Wing Commander franchise to share with the community. Months into this restoration project, I realized EA didn’t have the source logos for several of the Wing Commander games. I reached out to Nicky to explain our situation, and he was happy to contribute his logos to the initiative. So, as you see the logos amongst key art and blog posts, please join me in extending a thanks to Nicky for contributing such an authentic touch to these titles.

And finally, Ben “LOAF” Lesnick, Chris Reid, and AD were the first community members I contacted in 2024. They have run the Wing Commander CIC over the past 28 years, keeping the spirit of the Wing Commander franchise alive during all that time. They have been instrumental to this restoration project—guiding us toward assets, playtesting features, connecting us with modders, and more. I want to thank them for their passion, dedication, and collaboration during these years. I look forward to the 30th Anniversary of the Wing Commander CIC in 2028.

This restoration initiative was a passion project for everyone involved. For the community modders, their contributions were generated by volunteer hours in the spirit of bringing joy to the greater community. For the folks at EA, the vast majority of this work was done alongside our ongoing full-time projects. We did our best, and hope you will please forgive anything that may have slipped through cracks. Our collective goal was to honor the legacy of the developers who created these iconic games, the communities who have kept them in their hearts, and to contribute a small part to the preservation of this medium we all love. 

And this is why anyone who previously owned a digital copy of the Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA App will receive the Anniversary Edition upgrade for free on their respective digital platform. We thank you for your dedication to the Wing Commander franchise for all these years.

If you are new to all these games, the full classics collection is available now across Steam, GOG, and the EA App, with special pricing on Steam and GOG available November 5–19. You can learn more about each game released in our Announce Article.

Thank you for your support, and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Cheers,

Jim Vessella (Jimtern)

Twenty-five blasts from the past have officially resurfaced from the EA vault and are now available on Steam for the first time, alongside GoG, and the EA App! 

Ready to play? We’ve restored seven of these legendary EA games with robust quality-of-life updates and higher resolution Full-Motion Videos (FMV) from the Master tapes. Dive back into these beloved ’90s gems, now optimized to play better than ever before on modern hardware:

• 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. 

If you are looking for the purest trip down memory lane, the rest of the lineup features faithful ports. These games are perfect if you’re looking to rediscover the groundbreaking worlds and pioneering gameplay that defined a generation:

• Wing Commander: Privateer

• Wing Commander: Academy

• Wing Commander: Armada

• Strike Commander

• Theme Hospital

• Crusader: No Remorse

• Crusader: No Regret

• Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness

• Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress

• Ultima III: Exodus

• Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

• Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

• Ultima VI: The False Prophet

• Ultima VII: The Complete Edition

• Ultima VIII Gold Edition

• Ultima IX: Ascension

• Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

• Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds

Get all 25 games with special pricing on Steam and GOG from November 5–19. Bringing these iconic franchises to modern platforms was more than a technical upgrade—it was a journey that began with an incredible discovery right here at EA. Read about it below.

Table of Contents

• It All Started With the Vault

• What’s New About These Games?

• Thank You

It All Started With the VaulThis ambitious restoration effort began in March 2022, with a discovery by EA Senior Producer Jim Vessella at EA's Redwood Shores campus: a vast physical media vault. The room was filled floor-to-ceiling with almost 20,000 archival assets, including master tapes for the iconic Wing Commander and Road Rash franchises. Recognizing the immense historical value, Vessella and a small, dedicated team launched a massive digitization project. They successfully preserved an estimated 2,500 hours of historical footage, laying the groundwork for bringing these classic games back to life for a new generation.

Read more about how the Anniversary Editions were discovered and brought to life in this article by Jim Vessella.

What’s New About These Games?

Here’s a full rundown of what makes the seven restored Anniversary Editions extra special. 

Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition 

Widely regarded as one of the most advanced PC games upon its release in 1990, Wing Commander defined the space combat genre and pushed the boundaries in terms of PC visual and audio quality.

Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition

Wing Commander II continued the evolution of the franchise and pushed the boundaries for storytelling in games upon its release in 1991.

Both Wing Commander and Wing Commander II are now celebrated in these special 35th Anniversary Editions, where they have been restored with the support of the dedicated Wing Commander community to deliver the most dynamic versions ever released.

• The Kilrathi Saga: The coveted Kilrathi Saga versions of Wing Commander and Wing Commander II come integrated directly with their installations, for the first time ever available as digital releases. The Kilrathi Saga provides digital music and sound, a re-orchestrated soundtrack, and optional drop-away cockpit support.

• Wcdx Integration: For the Kilrathi Saga versions, bundled with the Wcdx patch built by the Wing Commander community, offering features like gameplay speed fixes, improved controller support, planetary space backgrounds, optional cheats, windowed mode, and more.

• WCAT Integration: For the DOS versions, bundled with the WCAT patch built by the Wing Commander community, restoring the gameplay / audio feel of a 386 PC, improved controls, asteroid adjustments, and more.

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is one of the most iconic games of the 1990s. Featuring a beloved Hollywood cast, Wing Commander III is widely regarded as the game which defined interactive storytelling and cinematic presentation.

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: 30th Anniversary Edition

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is the legendary sequel to Wing Commander III. Also featuring an all-star Hollywood cast, Wing Commander IV is a signature representation of historical PC gaming.

Both Wing Commander III and IV are now celebrated in these special 30th Anniversary Editions, where they have been restored with the support of the dedicated Wing Commander community to deliver a must-see experience.

• Source Master FMVs: In 2022, the Source Master tapes were discovered in the EA physical media vault. These tapes have been digitized and meticulously re-edited frame-by-frame to restore over 1000 FMV scenes between both titles, and integrate them back into the game.

• Upscaled FMVs: As an optional enhancement, the FMVs have been further elevated to sharper quality using the latest in video upscaling technology for the best Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV cinematics ever seen.

• Enhancement Patch Integration: Both games come bundled with the Enhancement Patch built by the Wing Commander community, offering features like 60 FPS gameplay, the higher resolution FMVs, advanced levels of detail, improved controller / joystick support, cockpit configuration for widescreen monitors, and more 

• The Kilrathi Saga (WC III only): The coveted Kilrathi Saga version of Wing Commander III comes integrated directly with its installation, for the first time ever available as a digital release. The Kilrathi Saga provides digital music and sound, a re-orchestrated soundtrack, and optional drop-away cockpit support.

Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition

Privateer 2: The Darkening is a definitive example of PC gaming expression during the mid-1990s. Featuring Clive Owen, John Hurt, and Christopher Walken in FMV cutscenes, Privateer 2 pushed the space combat genre forward with its unique blend of open-world gameplay, worldbuilding, and cinematic storytelling. 

• Source Master FMVs: In 2024, the complete Source Master tapes were discovered by the game's original Cinematics Director. These tapes have been digitized and meticulously re-edited frame-by-frame to restore the over 100 FMV scenes, and integrate them back into the game.

• Director's Cut FMVs: As an alternate version, the game's original Cinematics Director has color corrected, restored, and edited each scene to provide a fresh look for this 30th Anniversary Edition 

• Upscaled FMVs: As an optional enhancement, the FMVs have been further elevated to sharper quality using the latest in video upscaling technology for the best Privateer 2 cinematics ever seen.

• Enhancement Patch Integration: Bundled with the Privateer 2 Enhancement Patch built by the Wing Commander community, enabling features like smoother framerates, the higher resolution FMVs, improved controller / joystick support, and more

Wing Commander Prophecy: 30th Anniversary Edition

Wing Commander: Prophecy is an action-packed combination of one of the best sci-fi sim of the 1990s plus the amazing Secret Ops episodes.

• Source Master FMVs: In 2022, the Source Master tapes were discovered in the EA physical media vault. These tapes have been digitized and meticulously re-edited frame-by-frame to restore the over 150 FMV scenes, and integrate them back into the game.

• Upscaled FMVs: As an optional enhancement, the FMVs have been further elevated to sharper quality using the latest in video upscaling technology for the best Wing Commander Prophecy cinematics ever seen.

• Enhancement Patch Integration: Bundled with the Wing Commander Prophecy Enhancement Patch built by the Wing Commander community, enabling features like the higher resolution FMVs, advanced levels of detail, and more

Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition

Road Rash, the franchise which defined the combat racing genre during the 1990s, returns in the first ever digital release of the 1996 PC version. 

• Relicensed Soundtrack: A fully relicensed soundtrack featuring Soundgarden, Paw, Hammerbox, Monster Magnet, Swervedriver, and Therapy?, with the ability to now play their songs during the racing gameplay.

• Source Master FMVs: In 2022, the Source Master tapes were discovered in the EA physical media vault. These tapes have been digitized and meticulously re-edited frame-by-frame to restore the dozens of FMV scenes, and integrate them back into the game.

• Upscaled FMVs: As an optional enhancement, the FMVs have been further elevated to sharper quality using the latest in video upscaling technology for the best Road Rash cinematics ever seen.

• Gameplay Optimizations: Enhanced for modern systems, enjoy improved framerates up to 60 FPS, native controller support, windowed mode, cloud saves, and more

Thank You

To celebrate the Wing Commander community and its enduring passion for these games, anyone who previously owned a digital copy of the Wing Commander games on GoG or the EA App will receive the Anniversary Edition upgrade at no cost on their respective digital platform. Now, here’s a few words from EA Senior Producer Jim Vessella:

“This restoration initiative was a passion project for everyone involved. I want to thank the community modders for their creativity and expertise, as well as our colleagues at EA, where the vast majority of this work was done alongside our ongoing full-time projects. Everyone’s collective goal was to honor the legacy of the developers who created these iconic games, the communities who have kept them in their hearts, and to contribute a small part to the preservation of this medium we all love.” - Jim Vessella (Jimtern)