CONNECT WITH US
Tech

Tech

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

Tom's Hardware logo

Published on

Add as a preferred source on Google
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.


Source link
Related Topics:Tech

Disclaimer

We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We TheMorningPulse.fyi want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It's possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.