EA brings 25 classic PC games to Steam with restored Road Rash and Wing Commander

Electronic Arts has released 25 classic PC games on Steam alongside GOG and the EA App, headlined by seven newly restored Anniversary Editions of Road Rash and six Wing Commander titles. Senior Producer Jim Vessella previously teased the Wing Commander III restoration during the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in October 2026, before the full 25-game lineup launched on November 5.

While many of these MS-DOS and Windows 95 games have lived on GOG and EA's own storefront for years, this is their first arrival on Steam. Eighteen of the releases are standard legacy ports, covering Richard Garriott's entire mainline Ultima series (Ultima I through Ultima IX: Ascension), both Ultima Underworld dungeon crawlers, Strike Commander, Bullfrog Productions' Theme Hospital, and Origin Systems' isometric shooters Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret.

The other seven games got a much deeper overhaul.

Four Betacam players, one VCR, and 20,000 archival items

In March 2022, Vessella (who previously led the 2020 Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection) walked into a floor-to-ceiling physical media vault at EA's Redwood Shores campus. According to Vessella's behind-the-scenes account, the room held nearly 20,000 archival assets across Betacam, VHS, D1, D2, Umatic, film reels, and CD-ROMs. After six months of unpacking boxes after hours, Vessella teamed up with Greg Roensch from the EA Story initiative, who spent the next year organizing the shelves chronologically.

In early 2024, EA bought four Betacam decks and a VCR, hired a small contracting crew, and ran 17-hour swing shifts for eight weeks straight to capture the footage. Vessella personally drove another 500 rarer D1, D2, Umatic, and film assets to a specialist vendor in San Francisco. By April 2026, the team had digitized 6,000 assets, totaling roughly 2,500 hours of historical video, including the original source master tapes for Origin Systems' Wing Commander games and the 1996 PC port of Road Rash.

Finding the tapes was only half the problem. A single uncompressed D2 tape capture could run 60 GB and hold 30 to 40 separate scenes back to back with no file markers. For Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger alone, Vessella spent six months of lunch breaks and evenings slicing up roughly 475 full-screen cinematic clips, fixing frame-level interlacing errors, and matching them against a giant spreadsheet so filenames like "sc_061a" and "sc_061b" wouldn't play out of order. Then the team found the master tapes for the in-flight communications, adding another 460 clips and restoring over 40 unique line deliveries per character that Origin originally cut in 1994 to save CD-ROM space.

Modders in the Slack channel and Digi8 tapes in a UK attic

Rather than building new wrappers from scratch, EA went directly to the fans who had been maintaining these games for decades. In late 2024, Vessella contacted modder Matt "Mash" Wells, whose community Enhancement Patch already allowed 1996's The Kilrathi Saga compilation to play higher-resolution MP4 files. EA set up a Slack channel with Wells and other community figures, spending the next two years trading builds and hunting down crashes.

That collaboration shaped all six restored space sims: Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition, and the 30th Anniversary Editions of Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, Wing Commander: Prophecy, and Privateer 2: The Darkening. Depending on the game, the packages bundle community work from Wells, Lance "AllTinker" Burns (whose WCAT patch replicates authentic 386 and 486 CPU timing for the DOS releases), James Touton and Pat Caron (creators of the Wcdx modernization patch for The Kilrathi Saga), Mario "HCl" Brito, and OpenGL modders Alex Miyamoto and Pierre Deshaies. They also mark the first digital release of the 1996 Windows 95 Kilrathi Saga builds for the first three games.

Each of the 30th Anniversary FMV games lets players toggle between the newly digitized master footage, the original compressed 1990s video, and an optional AI-upscaled pass developed with advisor Owen "ODVS" Davies. I'm usually skeptical of AI upscaling on 1990s live-action video, since aggressive smoothing tends to turn Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell into wax figures, so keeping the raw master tape captures and original 1990s encodes on a toggle is the smartest call EA could have made here.

Privateer 2 didn't even come from the Redwood Shores vault. When the 2024 audit came up empty for that game, a community member remembered an old video uploaded by Steve Hilliker, the original UK cinematics director on the 1996 shoot starring Clive Owen, John Hurt, and Christopher Walken. Hilliker checked his attic, found the complete set of Master Digi8 tapes, and was commissioned by EA to digitize the footage and assemble a color-corrected Director's Cut.

Soundgarden is back in Road Rash

While the Origin space sims have been sold digitally in older states for years, Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition is the first digital release of the 1996 32-bit PC conversion. It adds 60 FPS support, controller configurations, windowed mode, and digitized master FMVs, but the real surprise is the audio.

EA relicensed the entire 1990s A&M Records grunge and alt-rock soundtrack, including Soundgarden, Paw, Hammerbox, Monster Magnet, Swervedriver, and Therapy?. Unlike the 1996 CD-ROM, which only played the licensed vocal tracks in menus and post-race cutscenes while swapping to MIDI during races, the new build lets you play the licensed songs during actual gameplay. Vessella noted that tracking down one missing band member took until September 2026, just days before his team would have been forced to strip that band's songs out of the final build. Between expired music rights and master tapes rotting in corporate storage rooms, most publishers just let their 1990s catalogs quietly vanish, and I want to see whether EA gives this same treatment to the rest of those 6,000 digitized tapes.