If the embed won’t play, EA’s launch trailer is also here on YouTube.
Every large company has one: the room at the end of the corridor that nobody opens, because nobody is entirely sure what’s inside. At EA’s Redwood Shores campus in California, that room turned out to hold almost 20,000 archival items, among them the master tapes for Wing Commander and Road Rash. Senior producer Jim Vessella came across it in March 2022, and the fruits are now on sale: 25 classic PC games, released on 5 November across Steam, GOG and the EA App, and on Steam for the first time.
Seven of them are restored Anniversary Editions, and they’re the headline act. Wing Commander and Wing Commander II get 35th anniversary editions that fold in the Kilrathi Saga versions, restored with the help of the series’ fan community, whose mods have been worked into the official releases. Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV, Wing Commander Prophecy (with its Secret Ops episodes) and Privateer 2: The Darkening get 30th anniversary treatment, as does Road Rash, in the first digital release of the 1996 PC version with its soundtrack relicensed. The tapes are the clever part. The team digitised Betacam, VHS and D1 masters, preserved an estimated 2,500 hours of footage and restored more than 1,500 FMV sequences, over 900 of them from Wing Commander III alone.
Which means you can once again watch Mark Hamill’s Colonel Blair, Malcolm McDowell’s Admiral Tolwyn and John Rhys-Davies’ Paladin giving it everything in front of a blue screen, at something close to the quality they were shot at rather than through a fog of 1990s compression. Wing Commander III was the moment the industry decided that games should really be films, with Hollywood actors, proper sets and some very expensive cat costumes for the Kilrathi. The industry later had second thoughts. The cutscenes remain glorious all the same, in the way a Gerry Anderson model shot is glorious: you can see the strings, and you love it more for them.
The other 18 are straight ports, but what a list. All nine mainline Ultima games and both Ultima Underworlds reach Steam for the first time, so you can follow Lord British’s realm from the tile graphics of 1981 all the way to the troubled Ultima IX. There’s also Wing Commander: Privateer, Academy and Armada, Strike Commander, both Crusader games and, flying the flag for Britain, Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital, still the only management sim in which Bloaty Head is treated with a pin and a pump. Anniversary Editions list at $9.99 and the rest at $4.99, with half price on Steam and GOG until 19 November and bundles for the Wing Commander and Ultima sets. Anyone who already owns the Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA App gets the Anniversary upgrades free on that platform.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we approve of this sort of thing loudly and often. Game preservation usually depends on fans, emulators and archives of uncertain legality, so it’s rare to see a publisher go into its own cupboard and pay people to do the job properly. There’s a pleasing irony, too, in Origin’s space operas, built by Chris Roberts long before Star Citizen, coming back finished, polished and on sale in 2026. That’s more than can be said for some of his later projects.
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