EA has put 25 of its old PC games on Steam for the first time, and they are also on GOG and the EA App. Seven are rebuilt “Anniversary Editions” (Road Rash and six Wing Commander-era titles), while the other 18 are plain ports of the originals, including every Ultima game.
The restoration started with a find. In March 2022, EA senior producer Jim Vessella opened a storage room at the company’s Redwood Shores campus and found a media vault with almost 20,000 archived items, among them the master tapes for the Wing Commander and Road Rash cutscenes. EA says a small team digitised about 2,500 hours of footage from it.
The seven restored games are Road Rash (the 1996 PC version), Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV, Wing Commander Prophecy and Privateer 2: The Darkening. EA’s launch post says the full-motion video scenes were rebuilt from those tapes and cut again by hand, with a sharper upscaled option on top. Wing Commander III and IV gain 60 FPS play and widescreen cockpit layouts through the community’s Enhancement Patch, which EA has now bundled in.
Road Rash gets its own changes: a relicensed soundtrack that brings back songs from Soundgarden, Paw, Monster Magnet and others. It also runs at up to 60 FPS and adds controller support, a windowed mode and cloud saves. The first two Wing Commander games come with the Kilrathi Saga editions and fan-made patches that fix game speed and improve controls.
Privateer 2 has two takes on its video scenes: the original cut and a director’s cut that the game’s cinematics director colour-corrected and re-edited himself. The cast includes Clive Owen, John Hurt and Christopher Walken. For the DOS-era Wing Commander games, a community patch called WCAT restores how they felt on a 386 PC, while Wing Commander Prophecy gets the higher-resolution scenes and better detail levels.
The other 18 are Theme Hospital, Strike Commander, three spin-offs (Privateer, Academy and Armada), the two Crusader games, Ultima I to IX and both Ultima Underworld titles. EA calls them faithful ports and has not listed changes for them.
The launch comes with a sale. EA says all 25 carry special pricing on Steam and GOG from 5 to 19 November, and Video Games Chronicle reports the discount at 50%, with the Ultima and Wing Commander bundles 55% off.
Vessella, who led the restoration, said in EA’s post that it was a passion project done alongside the team’s regular work, and thanked the community modders for their expertise.
Anyone who already owned a digital Wing Commander game on GOG or the EA App gets the matching Anniversary Edition free on that same platform. The release is also a small bright spot for EA at a bad moment for its fans, many of whom are currently campaigning against the company over the shutdown of BioWare.
