EA is launching 25 classic games from its catalog on Steam today, including seven Anniversary Editions across six Wing Commander games plus Road Rash. The remaining reissues feature every Ultima role-playing game, both Crusader entries, Strike Commander, and Theme Hospital. The 18 standard re-releases are priced at $4.99 each, while the refreshed Anniversary Editions cost $9.99 apiece.
For those quality-of-life changes, EA says the updated releases support modern systems and controls, boost performance, and make the games easier to approach without reducing their original feel. On Wing Commander in particular, known for its many full-motion video scenes featuring Mark Hamill, the company notes that the restored titles were improved with help from a dedicated community that collaborated closely with EA to bring fan-made work into the official versions. As part of the launch, anyone who already has a digital version of the Wing Commander games on GOG or the EA App will automatically get the Anniversary Edition upgrade at no extra cost on their platform.
EA also says the Anniversary Editions, including Road Rash, were shaped by a long restoration effort that began with the discovery of a physical archive filled with thousands of Betacam, VHS, and D1 tapes along with other media materials. That digitization work recovered the supposedly missing Master FMV sequences for these seven classic titles, which were carefully re-edited to bring back more than 1,500 cinematic scenes across the collection.
The Ultima series was created by veteran RPG designer Richard Garriott, widely known as Lord British, who later built a castle to live in and became one of the earliest private citizens to travel into space. More on those stories and others can be found in a past interview from 2017.
Here is the full lineup of classic games EA is bringing back:
- Ultima 1
- Ultima 2
- Ultima 3
- Ultima 4
- Ultima 5
- Ultima 6
- Ultima 7
- Ultima 8
- Ultima 9
- Ultima Underworld 1
- Ultima Underworld 2
- Wing Commander
- Wing Commander 2
- Wing Commander 3
- Wing Commander 4
- Wing Commander: Privateer
- Wing Commander: Armada
- Road Rash
- Crusader: No Remorse
- Crusader: No Regret
- Strike Commander
- Theme Hospital
Ryan McCaffrey serves as IGN's executive editor of previews and hosts IGN's the weekly Xbox program Podcast Unlocked, and he also co-hosts Next-Gen Console Watch. He hails from northern New Jersey, which means he says Taylor ham, not pork roll. You can argue the point with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.