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

Electronic Arts on November 5 released 25 of its classic PC games on Steam, where they are available for the first time, as well as on GOG and the EA App. The lineup covers some of the best-known PC series of the 1990s, including Wing Commander, Ultima, Crusader, Road Rash and Theme Hospital.

Seven restored editions

Seven of the games are new Anniversary Editions with quality-of-life updates for modern hardware and higher-resolution full-motion video (FMV) taken from the original master tapes:

Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition
Wing Commander and Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, both 35th Anniversary Editions
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom and Wing Commander Prophecy, all 30th Anniversary Editions
Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition

The other 18 titles, such as Strike Commander, Theme Hospital, both Crusader games, Ultima I to IX and the two Ultima Underworld games, are straight ports of the originals. According to The Verge, the Anniversary Editions cost $9.99 and the rest $4.99. EA says all 25 games have special pricing on Steam and GOG from November 5 to 19.

It started with a storage room

The project goes back to March 2022, when EA senior producer Jim Vessella found a physical media vault at the company’s Redwood Shores campus. In a post on EA’s site, he describes nearly 20,000 archival items there, including Betacam, VHS and D1 tapes. By April 2026 the team had digitised 6,000 of them, preserving an estimated 2,500 hours of footage, including the master tapes for Wing Commander and Road Rash.

For Wing Commander III and IV, EA says more than 1,000 FMV scenes were re-edited frame by frame from those tapes and put back into the games, with optional upscaling on top. Fan work is part of the release too: the restored Wing Commander games bundle patches made by the community, such as an Enhancement Patch that adds 60 FPS gameplay, better controller support and widescreen cockpits.

Many games from the 1990s are hard to buy or run today. Putting these on Steam, with fixes for modern PCs and with the original video restored, makes a large part of PC gaming history easy to reach again, and shows a big publisher working with modders instead of around them.

Reported by EA, EA (Jim Vessella), The Verge. Compiled with AI tools.