In context: Mark Hamill’s cutscenes from Wing Commander III haven’t aged well, mostly because they were pressed into heavily compressed 240p videos in 1994. As it turned out, EA still had the original master tapes. This week, a restored version of the game debuted on Steam, alongside the rest of the Wing Commander series and all eleven Ultima RPGs.
A total of 25 classics from EA’s back catalog celebrated their Steam debut. GOG and the EA app also have the same product range. Most of these are pure ports, including the Ultima games, both Crusader titles and Theme Hospital. However, seven of these are new anniversary editions that have undergone a real restoration – six Wing Commander games plus the 1996 PC version of Road Rash.
The anniversary editions are $9.99 each and the rest are $4.99. Until November 19th, everything is half price on Steam and GOG. Anyone who already owns a Wing Commander game on GOG or the EA app will also receive the Anniversary Edition upgrade for free.
This all dates back to March 2022, when EA executive producer Jim Vessella came across a storage unit on the company’s Redwood Shores campus. It contained nearly 20,000 archival items, from Betacam, VHS and D1 cassettes to film reels. By April of this year, a small team had digitized about 6,000 of them. This also included the master tapes for Wing Commander and Road Rash.
However, Privateer 2’s cutscenes were the only major gap in the vault. As Vessella explains in a detailed article, the game’s original film director found the complete set of master tapes in his attic.
For Wing Commander III and IV, EA then re-edited more than 1,000 cutscenes frame by frame from these tapes. Players can switch to AI-upscaled versions of each scene or stick with the original videos from the 1990s. Both games also come with the integrated enhancement patch from modder Matt Wells. This one adds 60fps gameplay and proper controller support, among other things.
Fan-made patches also do the heavy lifting on the first two Wing Commander games. WCAT and Wcdx primarily solve the speed problems that old code brings with it on modern CPUs. In the meantime, GOG engineers stitched together several older mods to get Wing Commander Prophecy running smoothly. As for Road Rash, EA re-licensed all 14 songs from its soundtrack – including Soundgarden – allowing the 1996 PC version to be released digitally for the first time.
The Ultima ports also land just a few months before their creator wants to take back the copyright. Richard Garriott has announced that he will get the rights back from EA in 2027. He sold Origin Systems to EA in 1992, and next year a U.S. copyright law comes into force that allows creators to reclaim their works after 35 years. However, EA would still retain the Ultima brand. Garriott also said the two sides are in active discussions about working on something together.
