Electronic Arts announced that they have released 25 PC games from “the EA vault” on Steam, GOG and the EA App for the first time ever.
These are PC games from the 90’s by now-defunct developers, which includes titles from Bullfrog and Origin Systems.
Seven of the 25 games have been “restored,” as it now includes a higher resolution full-motion videos (FMVs) straight from the archives, with optional upscaling, and optimisation for modern systems. The rest of the collection are considered as “faithful ports.”
The new classic EA games released today are as follows:
- Restored Titles
- Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition
- Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition
- Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition
- Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition
- Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: 30th Anniversary Edition
- Wing Commander Prophecy: 30th Anniversary Edition
- Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition
- Faithful Ports
- Wing Commander: Privateer
- Wing Commander: Academy
- Wing Commander: Armada
- Strike Commander
- Theme Hospital
- Crusader: No Remorse
- Crusader: No Regret
- Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
- Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress
- Ultima III: Exodus
- Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
- Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
- Ultima VI: The False Prophet
- Ultima VII: The Complete Edition
- Ultima VIII Gold Edition
- Ultima IX: Ascension
- Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
- Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds
The blog post at EA features a documentation of how these re-releases started: the discovery of a physical media vault at EA Redwood Shores featuring about 20,000 archival assets by EA Senior Producer Jim Vessella.
All of these 25 games are influential to this day. The Ultima series, which makes the bulk of the list, was the RPG series that helped shaped the genre we all know today. The use of the word “avatar” to describe the player character, morality choices and more can be traced back to the series. It didn’t just inspired CRPGs, Dragon Quest, the game that brought in a whole wave of RPGs made in Japan was also influenced by Ultima.
The Wing Commander and Privateer series remains the north star for various space flight games, with the original creator Chris Roberts now working on a spiritual successor that has been development for a decade with crowdfunding donations now passed the billion dollar threshold, Star Citizen.
The whimsy management game Theme Hospital has ex-developers reconvene to make a spiritual successor, Two Point Hospital, and that has since spawned a bunch more wacky management games with the dry wit of British humour.
Road Rash showed the world you can mix racing and violence where arcade race can use weapons to give oneself an advantage.
The Crusader series, long regarded as abandonware, had an influence on the Fallout series.
It’s about time EA is doing something with mass amount of back catalog titles. It’s also a reminder that a lot of the development studios behind them have long been defunct, as the publisher is notoriously known for closing off developers, even if they are highly-regarded and had shipped multi-million sellers. BioWare was the latest to be shut down.