In context: Wing Commander III's Mark Hamill cutscenes haven't aged well, mostly because they were squeezed into heavily compressed 240p video back in 1994. EA, as it turns out, still had the original master tapes. This week, a restored version of the game hit Steam for the first time, along with the rest of the Wing Commander series and all eleven Ultima RPGs.
In all, 25 classics from EA's back catalog made their Steam debut. GOG and the EA app carry the same lineup, too. Most of them are straight ports, including the Ultima games, both Crusader titles, and Theme Hospital. Seven, though, are new Anniversary Editions that got real restoration work – six Wing Commander games plus the 1996 PC version of Road Rash.
The Anniversary Editions sell for $9.99 each and the rest for $4.99. Until November 19, though, everything is half off on Steam and GOG. Anyone who already owns a Wing Commander game on GOG or the EA app also gets the Anniversary Edition upgrade for free.
All of this goes back to March 2022, when EA senior producer Jim Vessella came across a storage room at the company's Redwood Shores campus. It held nearly 20,000 archival items, from Betacam, VHS and D1 tapes to film reels. By April of this year, a small team had digitized about 6,000 of them. Among those were the master tapes for Wing Commander and Road Rash.
Privateer 2's cutscenes were the one big gap in the vault, though. As Vessella explains in a lengthy write-up, the game's original cinematics director found the full set of master tapes sitting in his attic.
For Wing Commander III and IV, EA then re-edited more than 1,000 cutscenes frame by frame from those tapes. Players can switch to AI-upscaled versions of each scene or stick with the original 1990s videos. Both games also ship with modder Matt Wells' Enhancement Patch built in. That adds 60 fps gameplay and proper controller support, among other fixes.
Fan-made patches also do the heavy lifting on the first two Wing Commander games. WCAT and Wcdx mainly sort out the speed problems the old code runs into on modern CPUs. Meanwhile, GOG's engineers stitched several older mods together to get Wing Commander Prophecy running smoothly. As for Road Rash, EA relicensed all 14 songs on its soundtrack – Soundgarden included – so the 1996 PC version could get its first-ever digital release.
The Ultima ports also land just months before their creator is set to take back the copyright. Richard Garriott has said he's getting the rights back from EA in 2027. He sold Origin Systems to EA in 1992, and a US copyright rule that lets creators reclaim their work after 35 years kicks in next year. EA would still keep the Ultima trademark, though. Garriott has also said the two sides are in active talks about working on something together.