How EA found 20,000 lost tapes in a storage closet

Hello 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 Foundry's Richard Leadbetter 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. We 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've 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 will $4.99. If you already own the Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA app you can upgrade 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 we make and World of Warcraft Forever. So there's a chance this story is 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 canceling some projects including Mass Effect. It closed BioWare. It's focusing in on its big franchises there may have been the

assumption, including from me, that they weren't necessarily interested in their old IP anymore. And 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 those of other cool things involved. Look, I can go on about this for ages, but I think it's a cool story. But the person you need to hear from is senior producer Jim Vessella. 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 was also behind the Command & Conquer reissues and remasters that happened just a you know, a few years ago that went on to do extremely well on Steam. 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. Welcome to the show.
Hi, Christopher. Thanks for having me.
Great to finally have you on. It's been

quite the I say we were just saying before I pressed record um had a quite a year with with Star Wars : Zero Company, which you know you worked on and
Yeah, huge a huge congratulations to Bit Reactor for for Zero Company. It was a a wonderful project. Uh I'm a lifelong Star Wars fan, a huge strategy gamer, and so it was a dream project for me and such a pleasure to work with that team. And uh you know, we put out the 1.2 patch a a few weeks ago and uh it's just been a a great launch.
Well, as I keep as I mentioned to Lucasfilm when they came on a a couple of weeks ago, I'm just waiting for the Switch 2 version. [laughter] No comment. Um the um the uh well, let's let's talk about what here actually talk about. Um um obviously I I this is a fantastic story. Uh so um 25 games sort of coming back, being re-released, some of them the anniversary editions. I've already uh shared all this with the listeners, but I 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? Like, what's the 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, you know, there's those of us who who grew up in the '90s playing games. These are some of our favorite franchises, and you find a small group of people who just love these games. And you know, you want to celebrate them. See what we can do to, you know, bring them back and make sure that they can be playable for for the long term. And that's more of just a you know, a gift to the community and just something for kind of ourselves is kind of where it kind of starts. And when I was I discovered our EA physical media vault about 4 years ago, and it was this 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 III or, you know, master edit Road Rash. And 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 you know, and then you start to put together a little bit of a business case of of why it's, you know, not just an amazing positive moment, but can also make, you know, good business. And and so that's kind of uh been the 4-year journey on on trying to put it all together.

So what how did you discover this this cupboard of this this whatever this is this this oh it was it just someone goes what's in there by the way?
I mean it a little bit it goes back to the my my work on the Command and Conquer Remastered collection back here because on that project um I'd been pointed to another storage closet down at EALA where I discovered the old Westwood cache of beta cam tapes which had literally been rescued by an admin almost 10 years ago and it had been shoved back in a corner in the 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 so you know I when I came back from the pandemic in spring of 2022 I had this giant shelf in my cubicle of like 200 beta cam 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 I think there's a room over in the other building that has like 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
Oh wow.
whoa and knowing kind of what I discovered off the CNC tapes you know I really felt like we had to find out what was on all these these other tapes
Did it and how was what was the condition of these tapes like were they all was it all freshly preserved
the good news is that yes it was in a it was in a climate controlled you know 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 III tape and so I took it over to like one of the local you know shops that could digitize stuff and I was like 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 you know 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 I mean there's stuff going back to the 80s

and 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 and we kind of took that up to the leadership and and they were more than happy to to endorse it.
What a wonderful moment that must have been. Are you wondering if there's any other secret EA stashes [laughter] hidden around the organization somewhere?
Well, it's funny because as I've told this story over the years, I've done like you know internal presentations and you know we now have all that content preserved up on kind of our network share and I'll you know share it with people that love the legacy stuff. And then all of a sudden we'll get a box shipped in from one of our other studios, you know like you know the Vancouver studio or Tiburon and they're like hey can you you know we found this in one of our closets, can you digitize this too? And so it's started to kind of rally you know people kind of looking for these items and so that we can start to preserve them in 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 [laughter] they're still missing quite a few of them.
I'll I'll keep an eye out.
[laughter]
You find that in an EA closet somewhere that'd be great. I mean I'm we'll come back to the games in a moment but is this 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 this is this 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 on Steam. So we took a lot of the Bullfrog games like Populous and Dungeon Keeper and we moved the CNC Ultimate Collection over to Steam just to you know get the get the games into the hands of more players. And those are 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 these steps in this kind of direction of you know let's continue to invest in our legacy IP and uh and let's keep you know getting these games into the hands of more players. And this one we we bit off a lot. Uh 25 games at once turns out is is a lot of work.
[laughter]
Yeah.
And so, you know, we're in this moment and we're really eager to see how how the reception is and, you know, how how they do.
Cuz 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 10. And I was like how did down was Command & Conquer doing in the charts here? And it was because of those remastered sort of re re 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 the charts measures so commercially successful. So that's that's uh wasn't really a question. I was just pleased to see it.
Yeah, and I mean it it it's it's the

best combination, right? Is that you put something out and I think, you know, C&C Remastered still was one of our highest player rated ratings on Steam uh like the past 15 years uh in the portfolio. Uh and we really yeah took some new new steps with the Steam Workshop and things that, you know, was kind of a first for 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 um that then, you know, other games in the portfolio can can adapt. And that's that's really cool. And then when yeah, you know, when uh you know the commercial success is there too uh 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 uh I imagine there's lots of licensing hurdles on this one, but I know black and white is the most requested game on GOG.
[laughter]
Yeah, you know that is the interesting thing as we've, you know, we uh we ran into this with 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. Uh but one of our technical directors was just super passionate about it. He he found the source code kind of in an archive and uh was able to really start tinkering with it and start to get it back kind of running and um but when we start 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 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 relicensing these 14 songs uh 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 and 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 uh 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 in 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
[laughter]
Yeah the I mean a lot of these games have been out there on like you know on GOG and on on the EA app for for a long time um but yeah the the music relicensing was really the one that we had to take on for this batch
I do remember there's a remarkable story I'd love to fully get all angles of it did you hear about the Golden Eye remake
No I haven't heard that story
So Rare remade Golden Eye fully remade it this is for Xbox 360 they did it themselves fully like HD remark remade of the remake of the game It was 95% finished and then it got canceled for some licensing reason they weren't allowed to release it and then the end there is a there is a HD release has happened since then but it's it's

just it's basically an enhanced port um and that fully remake game I mean it leaked out there now but the but it's uh but it's it's basically a finished remake of of the original 997 Golden Eye game and um every time I tweet with some of the people that worked on it I hear different stories from everybody, but it's um but yeah, it's it's definitely a licensing
Yeah, I know. As we look back in our portfolio and, you know, the amazing, you know, games that you know, some of the games even I worked on back in my early career like yeah, there's you know, three or four different stakeholders uh you know, in those games. And so um I know there's other you know uh studios out there that do you know, legacy products and they've had to go through these sort of things and sometimes they can thread the needle and and find a way to get it all done, which is amazing. Um but yeah, so sometimes these things are caught up in in weird histories where sometimes there's not even a a paper trail all the time about who owns what.
Well, you find out some of the the license holder is some farmer in in [laughter] like Islam. But you know, other stories that Nightdive tell me is is
Yeah, Nightdive exactly. Yeah, Stephen over there.
So where let's talk about the games.

Let's talk about [laughter]
Sure. Let's yeah, let's talk about the games.
These 25 games and
part of the story though, yeah.
I think some of them are sort of fully anniversary editions with all sorts of work on it. Some of them are are not. What what went into the decision around what games you were you were doing the sort of full anniversary uh uh uh approach to?
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think it was it was inspired by this vault. So when 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 and 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, um you know, I'm following their 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 uh 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 what 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. And [clears throat] so uh we've got almost like a dozen modders from the Wing Commander community who are all working on different parts of the franchise. There's a couple modders who work on Wing Commander one and two, and there's someone who works on three, four, and privateer two, and then another group that, you know, 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 like bring joy to this franchise. And so for those, we had a path of, you know, if these mods are open sourced and and the fans endorse that collaboration, you know, then we could really put some great quality of life features around those games. And 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

FNVs, and then we had a controller support, and we were able to do all these things because these modders were, uh, 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 the, uh, you know, increased frame rate, you know, allowing you to hot swap the rock music now in the race and all that sort of sort of fun stuff. And so that was kind of the capacity we could take on, uh, for those seven anniversary editions. And then for the other 18 games, those ones made sense like, well, let's at least get those into into the hands of more players. And so, you know, bring those over to Steam for the first time. Uh, and now once we get them out there, we can kind of see which franchises kind of get heat and, you know, see how how players react to each one.
I do find it remarkable that this sort of scene generally, cuz I I do dip into

it from, you know, from time to time. I got the, um, Shadow Man remaster they did a little while ago, Nightdive did. And they put in the levels that were cut from the game. And you know, when you see Bethesda and Nightdive actually do with the Doom and the Quake, and they sort of include like John Romero's, um, 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, um 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. And it's just Anyway, I am
Yeah. I mean, one of 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 you know, and then you just 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, you know, a game like Wing Commander 1, uh you know, we've bundled in the Kilrathi Saga version, which was

this very rare version from 1996 that made it more Windows compliant and uh added digitized music and all these fun things. And so there's that version with this mod called WCDX on top of it. So it makes that version almost like the kind of like 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 46 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 it's kind of a historical time capsule of like where the game went. And you know, you can then choose as a player uh how you want to play it. And 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, you know, 320 by 200 if if you choose. So we love giving those options to players uh and make sure that we also keep the historical version uh for both that kind of modding community and then like kind of historical purposes. Um so yeah, it's it's fun to be able to to provide uh that kind of history.
Did you find any sort
cut scenes? Like any, any bloopers and uh?
[laughter]
Yeah, I know I mean there were I mean there were over, there were over 600 tapes related to Wing Commander uh that we digitized and I'd say maybe about maybe about 75 of those were like related to like the Masters. The other you know 500 were like you know the green screen shoots, you know random trailers, you know like just a bunch of working stuff, you know different versions of of the uh the kind of working tapes and so yeah there's a lot of stuff. We weren't able to include all that and 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 big project and we were able to kind of put a little more meat on that bone. Um for these ones it's much more of a little kind of Skunk Works kind of passion thing and so uh you know we were able to kind of do this with the Master stuff but uh yeah and we we found a lot of a lot of fun stuff in in the archive.
It's really great that you can do this at an organization such as EA you know where you know where this sort of thing you know this it's not a priority right you know they've got these multi-billion dollar franchises to work on and then sort of this can sort of crop up hidden in the in the corners of the business. It's uh it's not yet I just think it's uh that's that's that's just cool. I'm wondering because obviously though because of some of that is was there legal issues about working with fans and mods and all this sort of stuff where there things you had to hoops you had to jump through in terms of what the lawyers at EA would allow you to do?
You know we work we worked really closely with our legal team and um you know because the modders open sourced all their mods under the MIT license
Mm.
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 and you know my 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 um so we had a really good relationship with each of the modders who contributed. And they were all, you know, willing and eager to open source their contents that it could be incorporated into this official release. You know, then we went through the proper kind of, you know, open sourcing kind of attribution stuff that you do and when you use that kind of software. And and so we think it's a win-win for everybody. You know, the modders are able to share their 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 some cool things I think where you know, if you if you owned any of the Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA app, you're going to get the upgrade for free. And so we thought that was because you know, we want to make it that these mods were gifted 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 in your library with all the new FNVs and all the enhancements as well that you know, that we put into it. And so we thought that was a hopefully you know, a good gesture to kind of show that we're we're trying to do this in in the right way.
Jim, that was my next question. Thank you for [laughter] beating me to it and asking about the fact the free upgrades. And so the point was you actually I'm actually out of questions, but it was it was this is a great thing and I just hope that you're becoming like the EA museum curator. I just think it's a 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 and Conquer is the highest rated

on Steam and and you've just had Zero Company which is the second highest rated Star Wars game in the last 20 years. It's quite a good batting average you've got going for you for you there.
No, it's it's been a great year. I mean it's been a yeah, a lot of work obviously and a lot of Zero Company play testing and a lot of play testing these these legacy games. And so it's it's been busy I would say. But you know, it's it's really fun to be able to you know, work on these big titles, you know, like like Star Wars, which you know, I've I've wanted to to do my entire career. Um, but then, you know, alongside that, you know, put in put in hours to to do these legacy games for these communities and uh and it's kind of a a love letter to to my childhood and you know, we're hoping that it's a 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 maybe heard of these franchises like Road Rash or Wing Commander, but have never had a chance to actually kind of play them in

a in an approachable way and now they're just, you know, right there and a lot more approachable. And then, you know, maybe some 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 can be because that's the experience I had when I was, you know, 11 booting up Wing Commander III for the first time and being like, oh my gosh, this is this is what gaming can can really be.
I'm more optimistic I think this is going to trigger a a return to Wing Commander as a as a modern uh video game franchise. I'm I'm looking at Ultima thinking in in the Baldur's Gate III age that's that's that's that's prime for a comeback as well. So
[laughter]
Yeah, it's great. It's great to get Ultima out there in front of of of more gamers. You know, we've got, you know, Crusader in here, Theme Hospital, you know, is a is a classic. Yeah, it's just I I remember I remember when I started in this industry which is 20, you know, 20 years ago and I would I would talk to the people behind like, you know, they were on the Theme Hospital now so the the the development team over who 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, you know, it'll carry I I think that will do well. [laughter] 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 unless you have something that I I didn't touch upon that you wanted to share because I I'm I am conscious that this arc finding these this treasure trove of of goodies is um uh is quite the it is quite the event by the sound of it.
Yeah, no, we're really we're really excited and I just I want to say thanks for helping to, you know, tell tell the story cuz I hope that I hope that, you know, gamers who love retro, gamers that love these, you know, these legacy IPs, that love preservation uh you know, give give give it a thumbs up just, you know, help let us know that they that they, you know, are are fans of this and and appreciate it and uh 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.
It's brilliant. Thank you, Jims. 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. Now, if you missed the first part, you really should check it out. It's a great chat with Digital Foundry leader Richard Leadbetter 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 thegamebusiness.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.