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

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In This Edition,
EA’s Jim Vessella on…

• Finding 20,000 lost tapes

• Working with Wing Commander fans

• Resurrecting Road Rash

Hello! Welcome to Part Two of today’s The Game Business.

(Missed Part One where we dived into AI piracy and whether we need new game consoles? You can watch that here.)

Today, EA has announced it is bringing 25 classic games to Steam, including Theme Hospital, and titles in the Wing Commander, Crusader and Ultima franchises.

But on top of that, it’s released seven ‘anniversary’ editions of these classic games which feature frame rate improvements, game speed fixes, new FMVs and added controller support. Those seven include six Wing Commander titles and Road Rash.

But the remarkable part of this story is how it all came to be, including an unlikely discovery and some big support from the modding community.

Enjoy!

In Spring 2022, after two years working from home due to the pandemic, EA senior producer Jim Vessella returned to his office in California.

And he was immediately faced with 200 Betacam tapes crammed into his cubicle. It was the result of the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection project, which he had worked on just before he was sent home.

“On that project, I’d been pointed to storage closet down at EA LA where I discovered the old Westwood cache of Betacam tapes,” he explains. “They had been rescued by an admin almost 10 years ago and shoved in a corner of the closet for safety. I went down there, found the cache, digitized all those assets, and we incorporated a lot of that footage into the Remastered Collection.”

That game came out in 2020, and so the tapes needed a new home.

“One of the facilities people was like, ‘I think there’s a room in the other building that has a couple of items like that.’ He took me over there, opened it up and it was like Indiana Jones… just, whoa. Knowing what I’d discovered with the Command & Conquer tapes, I really felt like we had to find out what was on all these tapes.”

Vessella had discovered 20,000 old physical media assets dating back to the 1980s, including Betacam tapes, film reels and CD-ROMs.

“I wanted to digitize it, because as I was digging through the boxes, I started seeing tapes labelled with ‘Master Edit: Wing Commander III’ or ‘Master Edit: Road Rash.’ I’m like, ‘wait a minute. Is this the stuff that fans have been looking for for 30 years, just sitting here?’”

Of course, these tapes had been sitting around for decades and there was no certainty they’d work.

“That was one of the first things I did. I was unpacking stuff and found a Wing Commander III tape, so I took it over to one of the local shops that could digitize stuff and validated that the footage is still good to go.

“I spent the next year or so organizing the room, unpacking the boxes, and found another colleague who was doing similar work. We got the room in really good shape, organized in chronological order.”

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The initial plan was to digitize everything, but Vessella started to wonder if he could justify putting this stuff out commercially. And so, he made a business case to management.

“We were able to put together a proposal of how much stuff we think there is and the budget we’d need. We took that to leadership, and they were more than happy to endorse it.”

Vessella wanted to reintegrate these FMVs into Wing Commander and Road Rash, but he needed help. And that’s where the community came in.

“Being part of the Wing Commander community for the past 30 years, I’ve been following their fan sites and been in their Discords, and I knew that there were mods that had already done some of this, where they’ve already enabled you to play MP4 videos and improved some of the quality-of-life features. I reached out to those modders and was like, ‘can you walk me through this mod?’ They’re like, ‘we’ve already open-sourced it, and we’d love to collaborate.’

“We’ve got almost 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 1 and 2, someone who works on 3, 4 and Privateer, and then another group that worked on Prophecy. GOG came in and helped work on Prophecy. There was this coalition of Wing Commander fans who just wanted to [do this]. “

He added: “My philosophy is that I never want to use anything from the community without their endorsement and blessing, even if they have open-sourced it. We went through the proper open-sourcing attribution stuff that you do when you use that software.”

It wasn’t all outside support. Road Rash became a passion project for one of EA’s technical directors, who went in to enhance the 1990s racing combat game.

And beyond the technical challenges, there were licensing issues to work out. This was specifically around Road Rash’s soundtrack, which featured 14 tracks from seven bands such as Soundgarden.

“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 with the songs?’ And they’re like, ‘well, we need to get in touch with all the band members and get their approval.’ So, they went off on this quest. It took 12 months to track down every band member... but we got it done literally just in time for launch.”

In a week already full of nostalgia, including Zelda and World of Warcraft, EA has launched 25 classic games on Steam today, alongside seven anniversary editions. But this isn’t the end of the story. Vessella’s digitization effort has caught the attention of other EA studios.

“All of a sudden, we’ll get a box shipped in from one of our studios, like the Vancouver studio or Tiburon. They’re like, ‘we found this in one of our closets, can you digitize this, too?’ It’s started to rally people looking for these items so that we can preserve them.”

“It took 12 months to track down every band member... but we got it done literally just in time for launch”

And what about the prospect of future enhanced releases?

“This goes back a few years,” he says. “In 2024, a small group of us put another batch of games out on Steam. We took a lot of Bullfrog games, like Populous and Dungeon Keeper, and we moved the Command and Conquer Ultimate Collection over to Steam. It was just to get the games into the hands of more players. And those were really positively received.

“In 2025 we open-sourced the source code for Command & Conquer and added in Steam Workshop support, and that was really positively received by the entire industry. It’s been these steps in that direction of, ‘let’s continue to invest in our legacy IP and get these games into the hands of more players’.”

He concludes: “This project is a love letter to my childhood, and we’re hoping that it’s a really cool moment for long-time fans who get a chance to go back and have that nostalgic moment. And for gamers who’ve maybe heard of these franchises but have never had a chance to play them in an approachable way. And then maybe a new generation who will discover the games and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, these are amazing.’ That’s the experience I had when I was 11, booting up Wing Commander III for the first time and being like, ‘oh my gosh, this is what gaming can really be.’”

That’s it for today’s The Game Business. Join us next week as we get closer to the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6.