EA released 25 classic PC games on Steam, GOG and the EA App on November 5, and the most unusual part of the launch is who helped build the seven restored Anniversary Editions: fans. Almost a dozen Wing Commander community modders contributed open-source tools and fixes that EA folded into the official re-releases of six Wing Commander titles and Road Rash, with each modder’s explicit blessing before anything shipped.
In the newsroom post announcing the re-releases, EA wrote: “Each Anniversary Edition preserves the original look, feel and creative intent of the game, with quality-of-life updates to support modern systems, controls, improve performance and make the titles more approachable without compromising their authenticity.”
A stack of community tools under one roof
Senior producer Jim Vessella, who led the project, said in EA’s post that he never wants to use anything from the community without their endorsement and blessing, even when the work has been open-sourced. The named contributions span a wide range of fixes. Matt Wells (Mash) built the Enhancement Patch for the Kilarth Saga version of Wing Commander III that enabled higher-resolution video playback in the 1996 release. Owen “ODVS” Davies contributed optional AI upscaling of the cutscenes. Ben “LOAF” Lesnick, Lance “AllTinker” Burns, James Touton, Pat Caron, Alex Miyamoto and Pierre Deshaies each supplied patches or mods covering everything from the DOS version’s original timing to rebalanced combat.
Burns’s WCAT tool restores the DOS version’s original speed on 386 and 486-class hardware, per EA’s post. GOG engineers went further on Wing Commander Prophecy, combining several of the older community mods with GOG’s own tech to build a version that plays the updated full-motion video on modern systems. Vessella said those FMV sequences were long thought lost until EA recovered the master tapes, a discovery rooted in a storage vault at the company’s Redwood Shores campus that held nearly 20,000 archival media assets, from Betacam and VHS tapes to film reels and CD-ROMs.
The vault find did not clear every hurdle on its own. Vessella said EA spent roughly 12 months clearing the rights for the first Road Rash Anniversary Edition, including a licensed soundtrack with tracks from seven bands, among them Soundgarden. For Wing Commander III, the team cleaned and restored about 475 full-motion video cinematic scenes.
Free upgrades for existing owners
Anyone who previously owned a digital copy of the Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA App gets the Anniversary Edition upgrade free on the same platform, EA said. The seven restorations cover six Wing Commander titles plus Road Rash, which joins them alongside 18 other classic releases in the 25-game EA Classics batch that includes Theme Hospital and titles from the Crusader and Ultima franchises.
