// ARS TECHNICA — GAMING
Re-releases of Wing Commander, Ultima titles hit Steam and GOG
It’s mostly bad news from EA lately, but preservation efforts are nice to see.
Many people are not big fans of game publisher EA right now for good reason, but for those who remember a better time in the 1990s, there’s a little good news. Twenty-five classic games from that EA era have been lightly remastered and updated, then placed for sale on Steam and GOG, including several Wing Commander games and nearly the entire Ultima series.
Below is the full list of remastered or re-released games:
In a lengthy blog post published this week, Jim Vessella, a senior producer at EA, described the efforts that went into remastering Wing Commander I-IV and Prophecy, Privateer 2, and Road Rash.
It’s a long, detailed story that’s worth reading yourself, but here’s a top-level summary. After working on the mostly widely acclaimed Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection in 2019, Vessella writes that he learned about and visited a room at EA’s Redwood Shores campus that contained a large archive of poorly labeled or sorted physical media from ages past.
In his free time, and with the help of others, he began cataloging this archive and discovered, among other things, that it contained virtually the entirety of the original masters of Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV‘s full-motion-video cutscenes.
The story that ensues involves building a small team of contractors, poring through the footage 17 hours a day on swing shifts to label and digitize it, and then coordinating with several key community members—particularly Matt Wells, who has made community enhancement patches for some of the Wing Commander games—to put together remasters of those games.
The flagship offering of those remasters is much, much higher-quality full-motion video sequences than have ever been available before, but other enhancements include 60 frames-per-second gameplay, a plethora of newly available .INI tweaks, and full controller support (though looking at the Steam forums for the games, some folks are having trouble with said controller support).
For Privateer 2—the little-remembered sequel to Wing Commander: Privateer—the crew couldn’t find the original, high-quality remasters of the FMV scenes, and ended up getting in touch with the game’s original cinematics director, Steve Hilliker, who had the tapes in his attic. Hilliker had always wanted to take a new color-grading pass, and he did just that, while also remastering and upscaling all of the cutscenes.
Similar updates were given to Wing Commander Prophecy. The blog post also details GOG’s involvement in restoring and remastering Prophecy and Road Rash. For the latter, EA re-licensed the entire original soundtrack for re-release.