Raiders of the Lost Archive: Inside the 20,000-tape discovery that’s brought EA classics back to life

0:02Hello and welcome back to the Game Business Show. This is the second part of this week's news analysis show. Our first part was on piracy and whether or not next year is a good time to release new video game consoles. And we had a chat with Digital Foundries' Richard Ledbetter about those things. Do check that one out if you've not watched or listened to it already. Now, the reason why this episode is in two parts is because the interview we have for you here was embargoed for a later time. And we didn't want to delay the whole episode just for this. But at the same time, this is such a, I think, great story.

0:33We didn't want to wait until next week either. So what story am I talking about? Well, EA has just announced it's launching 25 PC classics on Steam, including seven anniversary editions of games such as Road Rash, Wing Commander and Privateer. The anniversary editions aren't straight ports. They're preserved the original look and feel and creative intent of the game, but have a whole bunch of quality of life updates, including your modern controls, modern systems, improved performance, that kind of thing. the other games are all just being released on steam and those games include titles such as theme hospital strike commander crusader and pretty much every game in the ultima series loads of stuff and the anniversary editions all cost 9.99 and the straight ports for 4.99 if you already own the wing commander games on gog or the ea app you can upgrade to these anniversary editions for free of course this is somewhat you know unfavorable timing for ea i know that this wasn't the plan but obviously they've ended up putting these classics out alongside two major nostalgic releases in the form of the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time remake and World of Warcraft Forever so there's a chance this story's going to get drowned out a little bit but hopefully it'll get out there still this is a great week for retro fans let's just say that and the story behind how these games were found and how they've ended up coming to be I think is fascinating what's more earlier this month EA announced that it was cancelling some projects including Mass Effect it closed Bioware, it's focusing in on its big franchises and there may have been an assumption, including from me, that they weren't necessarily interested in their old IP anymore.

2:06And in fact, I even said I hope they'll make this IP available to other developers. Well, it turns out that EA is actually looking to support their older IP. Obviously, we're not talking new AAA versions of Wing Commander here, but we are talking about lovingly sort of re-released and updated versions of games being made available to fans with all community mods and loads of other cool things involved look i can go on about this for ages i think it's a cool story but the person you need to hear from is senior producer jim versella now jim has worked on some really great things at ea he was the producer on the recently released star wars zero company but he's also behind the command and conquer reissues and remasters that happened just a few you know few years ago that went on to do extremely well on steam now i actually met jim at summer game fest back in june and we had a lovely conversation and i'm pleased to be able to welcome him onto the show today and so here he is Hello, Jim.

2:57Welcome to the show. Hi, Christopher. Thanks for having me. Great to finally have you on. It's been quite the, I would just say before I press record, had quite a year with Star Wars Zero Company, which I know you worked on. Yeah, a huge congratulations to BitReactor for Zero Company. It was a wonderful project. I'm a lifelong Star Wars fan, a huge strategy gamer, and so it was a dream project for me, and it's such a pleasure to work with that team. And we put out the 1.2 patch a few weeks ago, and it's just been a great launch. Well, as I mentioned to Lucasfilm when they came on a couple of weeks ago, I'm just waiting for the Switch 2 version.

3:36No, Colin. Well, let's talk about what we'll actually talk about. Obviously, this is a fantastic story. So 25 games sort of coming back, being re-released, some of them in anniversary editions. I've already shared all this with the listeners, but I'm surprised... Okay, this is fascinating. So considering the focus from EA on Apex Legends and Battlefield and The Sims and all the sports games, how does Wing Commander and Road Rash and Ultima fit into that? What's the business case that's being made here? Well, I mean, I think it starts from a place of passion first off. I mean, I think there's those of us who grew up in the 90s playing games.

4:16These are some of our favorite franchises. And you find a small group of people who just love these games. And you want to celebrate them, see what we can do to bring them back and make sure that they can be playable for the long term. And that's more of just a gift to the community and just something for kind of ourselves is kind of where it kind of starts. Um, and when I was, I discovered our EA physical media vault about four years ago and is a storage closet that happened to have like 20 ,000 old physical media assets. So beta cam tapes and film reels and CD-ROMs and just all this stuff. and I really wanted to digitize it because as I was digging through the boxes, I started seeing, you know, tapes that had like, you know, Master Edit Wing Commander 3 or, you know, Master Edit Road Rash.

5:16And I'm just like, wait a minute. Is this the stuff that the fans have been looking for for 30 years, you know, just sitting here? And so as a fan myself, went on this whole journey to digitize it. And once we discovered that we had the source master footage, it kind of started to click of like, oh my gosh, could we actually combine this into an official release, collaborate with the community on that? And then you start to put together a little bit of a business case of why it's not just an amazing, positive moment, but can also make good business. And so that's kind of been the four-year journey on trying to put it all together.

5:59So how did you discover this cupboard of whatever this is? Was it just someone who goes, what's in there, by the way? I mean, a little bit. It goes back to my work on the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection back here, because on that project, I'd been pointed to another storage closet down at EALA where I discovered the old Westwood cache of Betacam tapes, which had literally been rescued by an admin almost 10 years ago, and had been shoved back in a corner in the storage closet for safety. And I went down there, found the cache, digitized all those assets, and we incorporated a lot of that footage into the remastered collection.

6:40So, you know, when I came back from the pandemic in spring of 2022, I had this giant shelf in my cubicle of like 200 Betacam tapes. And I was like, I need a place to store this. and 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. And so he took me over there, and then you open it up, and it's like Indiana Jones, you know, just whoa. And knowing kind of what I'd discovered off the CNC tapes, you know, I really felt like we had to find out what was on all these other tapes. And how was, what was the condition of these tapes like?

7:19Were they all, was it all freshly preserved? The good news is that yes, it was in a climate-controlled environment. And so, yeah, the tapes were actually still intact. And that was one of the first things I did, is I found... I was unpacking some stuff, and I found a Wing Commander 3 tape. And so I took it over to one of the local shops that could digitize stuff, and I was validated, like, oh, the footage is still good to go. And so, you know, spent the next year or so kind of organizing the room and unpacking the boxes and found another colleague who was doing some similar work. And so we kind of got the room in a really good shape, got it all organized in like chronological order.

7:59I mean, there's stuff going back to the 80s. And so then we were able to put together a proposal of like, here's how much stuff we think there is, here's kind of what sort of budget we would need. And we kind of took that up to the leadership and they were more than happy to endorse it. What a wonderful moment that must have been. Are you wondering if there's any other secret EA stashes which is hidden around the organization somewhere. Well, it's funny because as I've told this story over the years, I've done like internal presentations and we now have all that content preserved up on kind of our network share and I'll share it with people that love the legacy stuff.

8:35And then all of a sudden we'll get a box shipped in from one of our other studios, like the Vancouver studio or Tiburon. And they're like, hey, can you, we found this in one of our closets, can you digitize this too? And so it started to kind of rally, you know, people kind of looking for these items and so that we can start to preserve them in a better way. Remarkable. Could you possibly get on the case of trying to find the lost Doctor Who episodes while you're at it? They're still missing quite a few of them. I'll keep an eye on it. If you find that in an EA closet somewhere, that'd be great.

9:08I mean, we'll come back to the games in a moment, but is this an isolated thing, or can we expect more? I mean, it suggests to me you are thinking more about internal preservation projects and remastering efforts and potentially more down the line? Or is that case by case? Well, I mean, this kind of goes back a few years because in, I think it was in 2024, a small group of us from EA Partners, we put out another batch of games out on Steam. So we took a lot of the Bullfrog games like Populous and Dungeon Keeper, and we moved the C &C Ultimate Collection over to Steam just to get the games into the hands of more players.

9:45And those were really positively received by the community. And so then in 2025, we open sourced all the source code for Command & Conquer and, you know, added in Steam Workshop support. And then that was really positively received by, honestly, the entire industry, which was a great moment. And so it's kind of been, you know, these steps in this kind of direction of, you know, let's continue to invest in our legacy IP and let's keep, you know, getting these games into the hands of more players. And this one, we bit off a lot. 25 games at once turns out is a lot of work. Yeah. And so, you know, we're in this moment and we're really eager to see how the reception is and, you know, how they do.

10:27Because Command & Conquer Remastered, I was surprised to see that, you know, I remember when I did the European charts back when they used to share them a few years ago, and they were in the top ten. And I was like, how did, hang on, what's Command & Conquer doing in the charts here? And it was because of those remastered sort of, sort of Steam Workshop editions, all the stuff that you did to it. It was for the fans, but like it really resonated with people in a big way to the point where it was, it seemed at least by charts measures, commercially successful. So that's, that's, uh, it wasn't really a question.

10:58I was just pleased to see it. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's the best combination, right? Is that you put something out and I think, you know, CNC Remastered still has one of our highest player rated ratings on Steam, in the past 15 years in the portfolio. And we really, yeah, took some new steps with the Steam Workshop and things that, you know, was kind of a first for EA. I think it was the first Steam native game as well in our portfolio. And so it can kind of be this kind of recon project, you know, some of these smaller games, we can try some new things that then, you know, other games in the portfolio can adapt.

11:32And that's really cool. And then when, yeah, you know, when the commercial success is there too, That's, you know, a great validation as well and, you know, allows us to keep doing more of this, this type of kind of legacy work. I don't know if, I imagine there's lots of licensing hurdles on this one, but I know black and white is the most requested game on GOG. Yeah, that is the interesting thing, as we've, you know, we ran into this with Road Rash a little bit. So, Road Rash, we're like, what, could we bring back Road Rash? It hasn't been, you know, digitally available in 30 years, but one of our technical directors was just super passionate about it.

12:09He found the source code kind of in an archive and was able to really start tinkering with it and start to get it back kind of running. But when we start to get into it, we're like, well, I mean, the soundtrack is like so key to the experience of Road Rash. And so we're like, well, what do we do now? So we had to, we had to, we got to relicense this. And so we went to our worldwide music team. This is like a year and a half ago. And we're like, we want to put Road Rash back out. What would the process be for re-licensing these 14 songs across, I think it's seven bands? And they're like, well, we got to get in touch with all the band members and get their approval and get their endorsement.

12:50And so they went off on this quest, and it took like 12 months to track down, you know, every band member for these bands from 30 years ago and, you know, get them excited and get them on board. but we we got it done literally just in time for launch and so we were able to include the entire soundtrack which i think was really important to kind of celebrate the the authenticity and the legacy of the game must be immensely frustrating as well did you have to renegotiate likenesses as well with the other uh stuff and all those kind of things or was that i don't really know how that all works yeah i mean a lot of these games have been out there on like you know on gog and on the ea app for for a long time um but yeah the the music re-licensing was really the one that that we had to take on for this batch.

13:33I do remember there's a remarkable story. I'd love to fully get all angles of it. Have you heard about the GoldenEye remake? No, I haven't heard that story. So Rare remade, GoldenEye, fully remade it. This is for Xbox 360. They did it themselves, fully like HD remade of the remake of the game. It was 95 % finished, and then it got cancelled for some licensing reason. They weren't allowed to release it. And in the end, there is a HD release that's happened since then, but it's just, It's basically an enhanced port. And that fully remade game, I mean, it's leaked out there now. But it's basically a finished remake of the original 1997 GoldenEye game.

14:12And every time I speak to some of the people that worked on it, I hear different stories from everybody. But yeah, it's definitely a licensing. Yeah, I know. As we look back at our portfolio and the amazing games, some of the games even I worked on back in my early career, there's three or four different stakeholders in those games. And so I know there's other studios out there that do legacy products, and they've had to go through these sort of things, and sometimes they can thread the needle and find a way to get it all done, which is amazing. But yeah, sometimes these things are caught up in weird histories where sometimes there's not even a paper trail all the time about who owns what.

14:50Yeah, you find out that the license holder is some farmer, and, like, it's... You know, there are stories that Night Dive tell me. Yeah, Night Dive, exactly. Yeah, Steven over there. So let's talk about the games. Sure. Let's talk about the games. These 25 games... This is part of the story though, yeah. Some of them are sort of fully anniversary editions with all sorts of work on it. Some of them are not. What went into the decision around what games you were doing the sort of full anniversary approach to? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think it was inspired by this vault. So when we discovered and then when we digitized the full, like, master collection of all the Wing Commander FMVs and the Road Rash ones, that was kind of the inspiration of like, oh, well, could we reintegrate these into the game?

15:33And then it's like, how do we do that? And so that's when, you know, being myself kind of part of the Wing Commander community for the past 30 years, you know, I've been following their fan sites and in their discords, and I knew that there were mods that had already, like, done some of this, where, you know, they've already enabled you to play MP4 videos and they've improved some of the quality of life features. And so I reached out to some of those modders, and I was like, so, you know, can you walk me through kind of this mod? And like, you know, what have you done with it? And they're like, oh, we've already open sourced it, and we'd love to collaborate on, you know, making this all happen.

16:12And so we've got almost like a dozen modders from the Wing Commander community who are all working on different parts of the franchise. So there's a couple modders who work on Wing Commander 1 and 2, and there's someone who works on 3, 4, and Private Tier 2, and then another group that worked on Prophecy, and then GOG came in and helped work on Prophecy. And so, for the Wing Commander franchise, there was kind of this coalition of fans who just wanted to bring joy to this franchise. And so, for those, we had a path of, you know, if these mods are open sourced and the fans endorse that collaboration, you know, then we could really put some great quality of life features around those games.

16:53And so, those ones have, you know, depending on, again, the type of game, it's got, you know, you know, frame rate increases and game speed fixes, and we can do the new FMVs, and then we added controller support, and we were able to do all these things because these modders were, you know, had done amazing stuff on their mods. And so that kind of led to the anniversary editions for the six Wing Commander games. And again, like I was saying, for Road Rash, you know, Brian, our technical director, was just really passionate about doing that one. We actually found the source code for it, which allows you to make a lot of these adjustments, like, again, adding controller support, the increased frame rate, allowing you to hot swap the rock music now in the race and all that sort of fun stuff.

17:33And so that was kind of the capacity we could take on for those seven anniversary editions. And then for the other 18 games, those ones made sense, like, well, at least get those into the hands of more players. And so, you know, bring those over to Steam for the first time. And now once we get them out there, we can kind of see which franchises kind of get heat and, you know, see how players reacted to each one. I do find it remarkable that this sort of scene generally, because I do dip into it from, you know, from time to time. I got the Shadow Man remaster they did a little while ago, Night Dive did, and they put in the levels that were cut from the game.

18:09And, you know, when you see Bethesda and Night Dive actually deal with the Doom and the Quake, and they sort of include like John Romero's expansions that he did as a sort of basically as a mod that's now been clearly officially recognized. And it's sort of, it's really wonderful when you see that sort of community, because ultimately it does come from the community that this thing is. And I know that you can just put these things out, but a lot of people can access these stuff in maybe illicit ways. And so if you want to get people to actually engage in this and buy these things, you sort of need to give them something extra, I guess.

18:37And it's just, anyway, I am. Yeah. I mean, one of our goals there was to make it just kind of, you can just play it. It just works. You know, you just install it. I mean, a game like Wing Commander 1 will take you like 30 seconds to download it. And then you just hit the play button. And the other fun thing about it is that we've included all these different launch options. So it's like a game like Wing Commander 1, we've bundled in the Kilrathi Saga version, which was this very rare version from 1996 that made it more Windows compliant and added digitized music and all these fun things. And so there's that version with this mod called WCDX on top of it.

19:13So it makes that version almost like the definitive Windows version of Wing Commander 1. And then there's another mod called WCAT, which tries to like time capsule the 1990 experience of like running the game on a DOS like 386, 486 PC. And like, what did that feel like and was supposed to feel like? And then we also include the like vanilla DOS version, as you would find on say GOG or the EA app right now, which you'll notice doesn't run that great. And so you can kind of see as kind of a historical time capsule, like where the game went. and you can then choose as a player how you want to play it.

19:51And then for all the FMV ones, the same thing. We include the master source FMVs straight off the tapes. We've also done like an upscaling pass to help with a lot of the artifacting. And then, or you can play with the old cinematics at 15 frames per second at 320 by 200 if you choose. So we love giving those options to players and make sure that we also keep the historical version for both that kind of modding community and then like kind of historical purposes. So, yeah, it's fun to be able to provide that kind of history. Did you find any sort of cut scenes, like any bloopers? Yeah, no, I mean, there were over 600 tapes related to Wing Commander that we digitized.

20:33And I'd say maybe about 75 of those were related to the Masters. The other 500 were the green screen shoots, random trailers, you know, like just a bunch of working stuff, you know, different versions of the kind of working tapes. And so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff. We weren't able to include all that in kind of this release, as you were kind of talking about, like, for the CNC Remastered Collection, that was like a full, kind of a fully funded thing, you know, a big project. We were able to kind of put a little more meat on that bone. For these ones, it's much more of a little kind of skunk's work kind of passion thing.

21:09And so, you know, we were able to kind of do this with the master stuff. But yeah, we found a lot of fun stuff in the archive. It's really great that you can do this at an organization such as EA, where this sort of thing, it's not a priority, right? They've got these multi-billion dollar franchises to work on, and then this can crop up hidden in the corners of the business. I just think that's just cool. I'm wondering, because obviously, though, because of some of that, was there legal issues about working with fans and mods and all this sort of stuff where they think you had to, the hoops you had to jump through in terms of what the lawyers at EA would allow you to do?

21:49No, we worked really closely with our legal team and, um, you know, because the modders open sourced all their mods under the MIT license, that's, that's kind of, you know, the way that it can kind of combine together. And, and we were very transparent with all the modders, uh, about that. You know, when we reached out, we, you know, talked about what our goals were and what we wanted to do and our passion for it. And, you know, my kind of philosophy is that I never want to use anything from the community without their endorsement and their kind of blessing, even if they have open sourced it. And so, you know, we had a really good relationship with each of the modders who contributed.

22:29And they were all, you know, willing and eager to open source their content so that it could be incorporated into this official release. You know, I think we went through the proper kind of, you know, open sourcing kind of attribution stuff that you do when you use that kind of software. And so we think it's a win-win for everybody. You know, the modders are able to share their creations with, you know, thousands and thousands of more people now and get that kind of wide distribution of their creative expression. And then, you know, we can make these games a lot more approachable. And we've done some cool things, I think, where, you know, if you owned any of the Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA app, you're going to get the upgrade for free.

23:13And so we thought that was because, you know, we want to make it that these mods were a gift to the community in the first place. And so if you've been a dedicated fan for all this time, you'll just see, you know, the new version pop up in your library with all the new FMVs and all the enhancements as well that, you know, that we put into it. And so we thought that was hopefully a good gesture to kind of show that we're trying to do this in the right way. Jim, that was my next question. Thank you for being me to it. And asking about the fact the free upgrades. And so the point was you actually...

23:46I'm actually out of questions. But it was... This is a great thing, and I just hope that you're becoming like the EA Museum curator. I just think it must be a fun and satisfying thing to do on top of making games like Star Wars Zero Company. I was just thinking, you know, Command & Conquer is the highest rated on Steam, and you've just had Zero Company, which is the second highest rated Star Wars game in the last 20 years. That's quite a good batting average you've got going for years before you're there. No, I'd say it's been a great year. I mean, it's been a lot of work, obviously, and a lot of Zero Company playtesting and a lot of playtesting these legacy games.

24:20And so it's been busy, you could say. But, you know, it's really fun to be able to, you know, work on these big titles, you know, like Star Wars, which, you know, I've wanted to do my entire career. But then, you know, alongside that, you know, put in hours to do these legacy games for these communities. And it's kind of a love letter to my childhood. And, you know, we're hoping that it's a really cool moment for obviously longtime fans who, you know, get a chance to kind of go back and play these games and have that nostalgic moment for gamers who've maybe heard of these franchises like Road Rash or Wing Commander, but have never had a chance to actually kind of play them in an approachable way.

25:01and now they're just, you know, right there and a lot more approachable. And then, you know, maybe some new generation of players who will discover these games, you know, when they're 11, 12, 13 years old, and be like, oh my gosh, these games are amazing. And, you know, this is what the medium can be, because that's the experience I had when I was 11, booting up Wing Commander 3 for the first time and being like, oh my gosh, this is what gaming can really be. I'm optimistic. I think this has got to trigger a return to Wing Commander as a modern video game franchise. I'm looking at Ultima thinking in the Baldur's Gate 3 age, that's prime for a comeback as well.

25:39Yeah, it's great. It's great to get Ultima out there in front of more gamers. We've got Crusader in here, Theme Hospital. Theme Hospital. Yeah. I remember when I started in this industry, which is 20 years ago, I would talk to the people behind, they're on the Two Point Hospital now, so the development team who made that and they would say they were like being told that theme hospital was still charting like 15 20 years after it after it came out it just has that um longevity to it and i bet you i bet you know it'll carry on i think that will do well um uh it's the sort of game that uh uh sort of somewhat timeless in a way um but jim i'm out of questions um unless you have something that i i didn't touch upon that you wanted to share because I'm conscious that finding this treasure trove of goodies is quite the event by the sound of it.

26:37Yeah, no, we're really excited. I want to say thanks for helping to tell the story, because I hope that gamers who love retro, gamers that love these legacy IPs, that love preservation, give it a thumbs up. Just help let us know that they are fans of this and appreciate it. And, you know, so that we as an industry can all continue to advocate for preservation and, you know, try and continue this kind of work. Brilliant. Thank you, Jim. Thank you so much and good luck with the launch. Thanks so much. Thank you to Jim for joining us. That ends this week's two-part episode of The Game Business Show.

27:15Now, if you missed the first part, you really should check it out. It's a great chat with digital foundry leader Richard Ledbetter, where we talk about piracy and the rise of AI recompilations. And we also chat about whether or not we really need new video game consoles right now so do check back for that one if you've missed it if you want to make sure you do not miss any future episodes of the game business show you can become a subscriber go to the game business.com put in your email address for free and you'll get an alert every time we put out an episode you can also become a paid subscriber where you'll get an extra bonus monday episode from us as well but that's it for me today until next time thank you for tuning in