25 classic games from Electronic Arts’ vault are back up for sale on Steam and GOG. They include foundational works like Wing Commander and the Ultimaseries. Why is the company doing this? Some people at EA found a trove of materials, including master copies, sitting in a random room in the company’s Redwood Shores office in 2022. What followed was a four-year journey to share it with everyone else.
The new collection includes seven enhanced releases that come with improvements:
- Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition
- 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
- Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition.
And 18 ports that bring the original experience to modern platforms:
- Wing Commander: Privateer
- Wing Commander: Academy
- Wing Commander: Armada
- Strike Commander
- Theme Hospital
- Crusader: No Remorse
- Crusader: No Regret
- 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: The Stygian Abyss
- Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds
EA Senior Producer Jim Vessella had returned to the office after covid and was doing clean-up on leftover Betacam tapes from his work on the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection project. A facilities person directed him to a room elsewhere in the office that he’d never been in but which stored similar artifacts, Vessella told The Game Business.
“I discovered EA’s physical media vault at EA’s Redwood Shores campus. Imagine a giant storage room containing nearly 20,000 archival media assets including Betacam, VHS, and D1 tapes among other media like film reels, CD-ROMs, and more,” he wrote in a new blog post. A small team was put together to begin cataloging and digitizing everything. A business case was made to EA leadership to commercially re-release some of the re-discovered games. And Vessella worked closely with the existing fan community forWing Commander to work on restoring it for an eventual remaster.
“We started a Slack channel with a small group of key community members, and for the next two years, we iterated onWing Commander III,” he wrote. “If you revisit Matt’s Enhancement Patch GitHub page, you can see where this iteration picked up steam in the spring of 2025. The cycle became that Matt would release a new build, let us know, and I would playtest that build to pass along feedback, technical notes, and suggestions.”
He continued, “In between, we would troubleshoot items over Slack and brainstorm further design ideas. I remember one Saturday night in 2025, we spent hours trying to hunt down a crash, replaying the same mission dozens of times under different parameters and reviewing the log files. I think we got that one, but if you happen to run into a crash, please understand it wasn’t due to lack of trying.”
The sci-fi series is renowned for its prodigious use of FMVs and cinematics to tell its stories. Vessella documents at length the painstaking and often frustrating process of trying to reassemble everything so it was not only working but up to the quality standards fans would expect. Collaboration with GOG’s game preservation team engineers helped. And in the case of games like Road Rash, Vessella’s team even went out of its way to contact every band whose music was featured in the game to get the licensing cleared.
“After months of searching we still could not find one of the members for a specific band. No contact equals no license,” he wrote. “So by September 2026, we were days away from needing to pull the rip cord and begin extracting the band’s music from the 30th Anniversary Edition. And then like out of a Hollywood movie, we tried one more lead which was somehow able to put us in touch. We turned around the final license in mid-Sept, allowing us to celebrate the full legacy ofRoad Rash, breathing a sign of relief in the process.”
You can purchase the entire 25-game collection for over 50 percent off right now on Steam and GOG.
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