Electronic Arts has opened its back catalogue in a way it rarely has before. As of November 5, twenty-five of its 1990s PC games are on Steam for the first time, and they are also available on GOG and the EA app. Seven of them are not straight re-releases but restored Anniversary Editions of Road Rash and the Wing Commander series, rebuilt around full-motion video recovered from EA's own master tapes. The other eighteen, including the complete run of Ultima, Theme Hospital, Strike Commander and both Crusader games, arrive as faithful ports of the originals.
The 25 games, and what they cost
The seven restored releases are Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: 30th Anniversary Edition, Wing Commander Prophecy: 30th Anniversary Edition and Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition.
The faithful ports cover Wing Commander: Privateer, Wing Commander: Academy, Wing Commander: Armada, Strike Commander, Theme Hospital, Crusader: No Remorse, Crusader: No Regret, Ultima I through Ultima VI, Ultima VII: The Complete Edition, Ultima VIII Gold Edition, Ultima IX: Ascension, and both Ultima Underworld games, The Stygian Abyss and Labyrinth of Worlds.
On Steam, each Anniversary Edition lists at $9.99 and each classic port at $4.99. All 25 carry launch pricing on Steam and GOG from November 5 to November 19, which halves them to $4.99 and $2.49 respectively. That puts the entire Ultima mainline, from the 1981 original to 1999's Ascension, within reach for well under the price of a single new release during the sale window.
How a storage room started it
The restorations exist because of an archive project that ran for years before anyone knew it would produce a game. Jim Vessella, a senior producer on EA's Partners team who previously worked on the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, describes finding EA's physical media vault on the company's Redwood Shores campus in March 2022: a room holding close to 20,000 archival items, from Betacam, VHS and D1 tapes to film reels and CD-ROMs.
After the room was reorganised chronologically, digitisation began in early 2024. A small contracting team ran four Betacam players and a VCR roughly 17 hours a day for eight weeks, while around 500 tapes in rarer formats such as D1, D2 and U-matic went to a specialist vendor in San Francisco. By April 2026 the project had digitised about 6,000 media assets and preserved an estimated 2,500 hours of footage. Somewhere in that haul were the master source tapes for two franchises: Wing Commander and Road Rash.
Road Rash: the 1996 PC version, with its soundtrack intact
Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition is the 1996 PC version of EA's combat motorcycle racer, and EA says this is its first-ever digital release. The headline restoration is the music. EA's worldwide music team spent more than a year relicensing the original grunge and alt-rock soundtrack, so Soundgarden, Paw, Hammerbox, Monster Magnet, Swervedriver and Therapy? are all back. In a change from the original, those tracks now play during races as well as in the menus; it is on by default, and you can skip to the next song with R on the keyboard or the View/Create button on a controller.
The game's live-action cutscenes have been re-edited frame by frame from the recovered master tapes and reintegrated. Players get four choices in the graphics menu: no videos, the standard 1996 videos, high-resolution captures from the masters formatted for 16:9 screens, or those same masters run through AI upscaling, which EA says also repairs some artefacts from the tapes' age. Beyond the video, the edition supports up to 60fps, native Xbox and DualSense/DualShock controller support, windowed mode and cloud saves.
Because 90s PC games leaned on printed manuals rather than tutorials, EA has included scanned documentation, including a controller mapping guide, in an Extras folder in the install directory. That is worth knowing before you go looking for an in-game explanation of the controls that was never there.
Wing Commander III gets the Kilrathi Saga version and the community patch
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is the flagship of the set. The 1994 space-combat game is famous for its live-action cast, which includes Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell and Tom Wilson, and its 30th Anniversary Edition restores more than 900 FMV scenes from the master tapes, with the same optional upscaled versions offered for Road Rash.
Two other additions matter as much to longtime fans. The Kilrathi Saga version of the game, with digital music and sound, a re-orchestrated score and optional drop-away cockpits, is integrated into the install, and EA says it has never had a digital release before now. And EA has bundled the Wing Commander community's own Enhancement Patch, which brings 60fps gameplay, higher-resolution video, better controller and joystick support, cockpit layouts for widescreen monitors, and scenes from other versions of the game, such as news reels and planet sequences, reinstated on PC. Bonus material includes cast interviews, manuals, reference cards and player guides.
EA is upfront that this was largely a passion project built alongside the team's full-time work, with modders contributing volunteer hours, and its published known-issues list is worth reading. The game has no autosave, as was normal in 1994, so you save manually from the terminals aboard the TCS Victory; cloud saves do carry progress between devices. On Steam Deck, the Kilrathi Saga Enhanced version runs, but EA warns that FMVs can take several seconds to begin, which can throw off the timing of in-flight communications, and that it pulled its official Steam Input configuration days before launch because of a technical issue. Deck players will need to build their own control layout for now.
The rest of the Wing Commander line
The other four restored Wing Commander editions follow the same template of recovered FMV, quality-of-life fixes and bundled extras. For the original Wing Commander's 35th Anniversary Edition, EA says the included wcdx version is rated Steam Deck Playable, although some legacy menus, such as name entry and save slots, may still need the virtual keyboard. As with Wing Commander III, there is no autosave; saving happens from the beds in the barracks.
Privateer 2: The Darkening, the 1996 spin-off with its own live-action cast, gets the full Anniversary treatment too, while the earlier Privateer, Academy and Armada are among the unmodified ports.
Why this one matters
Many of these games have been on GOG for years, so availability alone is not the news. What is new is that EA went back to its own source material, recovered video that had been sitting on decaying tape, relicensed music that would normally block a re-release, and shipped the results on Steam and its own app as well as GOG. Road Rash in particular has had no legitimate digital release until now. With launch pricing running only until November 19, the next two weeks are the cheapest these restorations are likely to be for a while.
