EA producer found 20,000 archival media assets in secret physical vault at its HQ

Jim Vessella, a Senior Producer at the EA Partner teams at Electronic Arts, stumbled upon EA’s secret physical media vault at the company’s Redwood Shores campus. This wasn't just any storage room containing copies of old games; instead, it held nearly 20,000 archival media assets stored in various media, including Betacam, VHS, D1, Film Reels, CD-ROMs, and more. Vessella discovered it in 2022 and spent the next six months outside of his working hours unpacking the room. He was eventually joined by Greg Roensch, who worked with the EA Story initiative, which is the company’s own preservation project, and reorganized the room chronologically. From there, EA shared how this effort turned from an archival project into a remaster of several classic titles.

Vessella, who also worked on the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection in 2019, built a proposal to digitize the room once it was organized, with efforts starting in 2024. Two years later, the team working on the project had digitized 6,000 media assets and 2,500 hours of historical footage, including the Master Source tapes for the Wing Commander and Road Rash franchises. This has allowed the team to build Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition using those original master tapes. But more than just putting in new footage in the game, Vessella reached out to the Wing Commander community to help make the game playable on modern systems. This included Matt Wells (Mash), who built an Enhancement Patch for the Kilrathi Saga version of the game released in 1996, Owen “ODVS” Davies, who advised the EA team on full-motion video (FMV) restoration for some damaged tapes, and Ben “LOAF” Lesnick, who tweaked the game to fix the infamous insta-kill missile spam in Wing Commander IV.

EA also released Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition with the help of Steve Hilliker, the original Cinematics Director of the game. It was actually a community member who said that they saw a video of Hilliker saying that he still has some of the master footage for the game stored on Digi 8. The team then reached out to the director, who found the entire collection in his attic. The team then commissioned Hilliker to digitize the tapes and create a “Director’s Cut” of the game’s cinematics. Matt once again stepped in and created an Enhancement Patch for Privateer 2, delivering a lot of quality-of-life improvements to the original game.

There was also a ton of work done on the original Wing Commander and the Wing Commander II sequel, plus the Road Rash retro titles. While purists might decry the “improvements” made to these titles that allowed them to be played on modern systems, the combined efforts of Electronic Arts, its passionate employees, GOG, and the community at large have allowed these games to be brought back to life. You could now get the entire Wing Commander collection and Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition on Steam, allowing you to reminisce about your favorite titles from the ‘90s and even allow your kids to see what gaming was like 30 years ago.

The recent release of these retro titles and the effort behind preserving them is a refreshing move after Sony announced that it will ditch physical games by 2028. While online game libraries like Steam are often more convenient for gamers, it has also raised the issue of ownership, with GOG taking a jab at Steam after the latter added a banner clarifying that you don’t own the games you buy on the platform. Despite Sony’s move away from physical media, other game companies have iterated their support for it. Nintendo says that fans like physical games, while Microsoft introduced the Xbox Disc to Digital feature that gave gamers the best of both worlds. GOG is even considering reviving physical game releases, although it admits that it still has to figure things out before it can start printing out physical game media.

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