EA has just 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."
" 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.
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