25 classic games from Electronic Arts’ vault are back up for sale on Steam and GOG. They include foundational works like Wing Commander and the Ultima series. Why is the company doing this? Some people at EA found a trove of materials, including master copies, sitting in a random room in the company’s Redwood Shores office in 2022. What followed was a four-year journey to share it with everyone else.

EA Senior Producer Jim Vessella had returned to the office after covid and was doing clean-up on leftover Betacam tapes from his work on the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection project. A facilities person directed him to a room elsewhere in the office that he’d never been in but which stored similar artifacts, Vessella told The Game Business.

“I discovered EA’s physical media vault at EA’s Redwood Shores campus. Imagine a giant storage room containing nearly 20,000 archival media assets including Betacam, VHS, and D1 tapes among other media like film reels, CD-ROMs, and more,” he wrote in a new blog post. A small team was put together to begin cataloging and digitizing everything. A business case was made to EA leadership to commercially re-release some of the re-discovered games. And Vessella worked closely with the existing fan community for Wing Commander to work on restoring it for an eventual remaster.

“We started a Slack channel with a small group of key community members, and for the next two years, we iterated on Wing Commander III ,” he wrote.

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