EA Releases Remastered Versions of Wing Commander, Ultima, and More

EA opened the vault, recovered the source code for several classic games, and has now released them on GOG and Steam. Among the treasures are Wing Commander, Ultima, and Road Rash titles.

“As the years go by, the games industry is realizing that many classic games are becoming harder to access, with their histories lost through forgotten storage boxes, deprecating physical media, or incompatible modern hardware,” EA senior producer Jim Vessella explains. “So when an opportunity presented itself here at EA to make a positive impact on game preservation, several of us jumped at the chance.”

Vessella and others started combing through almost 20,000 archival media assets in EA’s Redwood Shores campus in early 2022 and began organizing the historical artifacts they found. In time, they arranged everything chronologically, digitized aging Beta, VHS, and even more obscurely formatted tapes, and preserved over 2500 hours of footage. Among that was the complete set of Wing Commander III master footage, which led to an obvious question: What should EA do with all this content?

For Wing Commander III, EA reached out to a modder who had already upscaled the video footage in the 1996 version of the game and asked if he could do similar work with the master footage for a 30th anniversary version, and he of course agreed. After two years of work, Wing Commander III: 30th Anniversary Edition was ready, with 60 FPS gameplay and high-resolution full-motion video (FMV).

It kind of goes from there and each game restoration has its own story. But the following remastered titles are now available:

• Crusader: No Remorse
• Crusader: No Regret
• Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition
• Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition
• Strike Commander
• Theme Hospital
• 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
• Wing Commander: Privateer
• Wing Commander: Academy
• Wing Commander: Armada
• 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 I
• Ultima Underworld II

On Steam at least, each game appears to cost $10, though they’re all 50 percent right now and there are a few bundles as well. Very nice.