EA releases 25 older games on Steam with seven restored editions

EA has released 25 back-catalog games on Steam for the first time, including seven Anniversary Editions featuring restoration work. Six of those editions are Wing Commander titles; the seventh is Road Rash's 1996 PC version, which has never previously been released digitally.

The lineup is also available on GOG and the EA app. Steam and GOG are selling the games at half price until November 19. Owners of Wing Commander titles purchased through GOG or the EA app can upgrade to the corresponding Anniversary Editions without charge.

For Wing Commander III and IV, EA reconstructed more than 1,000 cinematic scenes using frame-by-frame edits of the original master tapes. Players can select either AI-upscaled footage or the older videos. Both editions include Matt Wells' Enhancement Patch, adding controller support, 60 fps gameplay and other fixes.

The restoration effort followed EA senior producer Jim Vessella's discovery of nearly 20,000 archival items in a Redwood Shores campus storage room in March 2022. Privateer 2's cinematic masters were absent from that collection, but its original cinematics director subsequently found them in his attic, according to Vessella.

Community patches address speed issues in the first two Wing Commander games, while GOG engineers assembled existing modifications for Wing Commander Prophecy. EA also renewed licenses covering Road Rash's 14 soundtrack songs, including music by Soundgarden.

Most other titles received straightforward ports rather than restoration work. These include all eleven Ultima RPGs, the two Crusader games and Theme Hospital.