EA has just released seven new remasters across Steam and GOG, bringing classics like Wing Commander and Road Rash back to life in greater fidelity than ever before. These remasters were made possible by pure happenstance, when a random EA employee stumbled on an archive of tens of thousands of classic game assets sitting in a storage room.
Producer Jim Vessella had helped shepherd Command & Conquer Remastered to life which, among other things, involved restoring a host of Betacam tapes containing the game's original cutscenes. Those tapes then sat untouched throughout the pandemic, but when Vessella returned to the office in 2022, he suddenly had to figure out where to put all these tapes.
"When I came back from the pandemic in spring of 2022," Vessella tells The Game Business, "I had this giant shelf in my cubicle of 200 Betacam tapes, and I was like, 'I need a place to store this.' One of the facilities people were like, 'oh yeah, I think there's a room over in the other building that has a couple items like that.' So he took me over there, and then you open it up and it's like Indiana Jones. Just woah."
As Vessella explains in a blog breaking down the restoration process in detail, this was "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 soon started spending his off hours unpacking these boxes, working with other EA employees to organize it and begin the arduous process of digitizing it all.
"The fun began in early 2024." Vessella says. "We hired a small contracting team, purchased 4 Betacam players plus a VCR, and over the next eight weeks we were feeding tapes into the machines on swing shifts for roughly 17 hours every day. I catalogued and drove another 500 tapes of rarer formats (D1, D2, Umatic, and Film Reels) off-site to get digitized by a professional vendor in San Francisco."
By the time it was all done, the team "had digitized a combined 6000 media assets and preserved an estimated 2500 hours of historical footage." That included the master source tapes for Road Rash and much of the Wing Commander franchise. Vessella started reaching out to members of the Wing Commander community to work together on what would become a series of remasters.
One of those modders was Matt Wells, who had already created an Enhancement Patch for Wing Commander 3. Communicating over Slack, Vesella explains, "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. 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."
As modders worked "volunteer hours in the spirit of bringing joy to the greater community," EA also partnered with GOG to work on restoring Wing Commander Prophecy, which didn't have the same level of existing community support. "GOG spent months combining all the elements together, constantly fixing weird little issues, and made significant improvements of their own, adding features like improved controller support and even a gorgeous launcher for configuration setup," Vessella says.
Wing Commander 1, 2, 3, 4, Prophecy, and Privateer 2 have all gotten Anniversary Edition remasters as part of this initiative, which are available on both Steam and GOG. But for my money, Road Rash is the most impressive part of this whole endeavor. Unlike the Wing Commander games, Road Rash had never previously been released on digital platforms, and on top of the remastering work, EA also had a legal nightmare to unpack.
Road Rash – specifically, the 1994 game originally released for 3DO – features an extensive licensed soundtrack, including Soundgarden, Paw, Hammerbox, Monster Magnet, Therapy?, and Swervedriver. In order to make this re-release happen, EA would have to go and relicense all that old music.
"Successfully pulling this off would require connecting with the music label and every band member who controlled a 'side' of the 14 tracks. By the summer of 2026, we had agreements in place with 6 of the 7 bands (including the most prominent band on the list), but after months of searching we still could not find one of the members for a specific band," Vessella explains.
"No contact equals no license. 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 of Road Rash, breathing a sign of relief in the process."
