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Origin Systems' sci-fi space sim Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is set to receive a 30th-anniversary edition, thanks in part to an internal restoration project led by an EA employee who has been digitising the company's video archive.
The news comes courtesy of a talk called "The Lost Tapes - Preserving the EA Vault and Restoring a Classic", which took place at Portland Retro Gaming Expo on Saturday, October 10th. This saw EA senior producer Jim Vessella revealing the project, while discussing his wider efforts to preserve roughly 16,000 tapes in EA's archives. Due to being based in the UK, Time Extension wasn't in attendance for this event, but thankfully the Video Game History Foundation board member Steve Lin and the library scientist @chorby.org shared some information from the talk, which gives a little more detail about what we can expect based on some of the slides from the panel.
According to Lin and @chorby.org, this new release will feature Kilrathi Saga Integration (which likely means it will bundle in Wing Commander 1 & 2 and their expansions), upscaled FMVs from source, the ability to experience gameplay at 60fps, controller support, and will come with the Community Enhancement Patch. It is also planned to release on Steam, GOG, and EA app. Other than that, we don't have much more information to share, but expect a more official announcement will follow in the near future.
Wing Commander, in case you're unaware, is a series that originally debuted in 1990 with the original Wing Commander for MS-DOS, and became a huge critical and commercial success for Electronic Arts. Understandably, because of this, it later spawned a string of ports to other systems as well as sequels, with the third game landing in stores in December 1994 for DOS and Mac OS (I guess the 32nd anniversary edition didn't have the same ring to it).
Notably, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger was the first game in the Wing Commander series to use polygonal graphics and FMV cutscenes (replacing the sprite-based graphics of earlier titles), with EA and Origin Systems enlisting Hollywood talent like Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and John Rhys Davies to lend performances to the big-budget release. At the time, this was seen as part of a wider trend (known by the fairly ridiculous shorthand "Silliwood"), in which Hollywood forces began merging with Silicon Valley-style companies to produce flashy software with Hollywood-style production values.
For the most part, a lot of these collaborations were considered huge failures, but Wing Commander III flew in the face of that, becoming another major hit for EA, earning several award nominations, and generating strong reviews from the press at the time. For example, PC Gamer US's Liam McDonald called the game a "tour de force," praising Mark Hamill's casting as the titular commander as "a stroke of genius that pays off big."
In addition to PC and Mac versions, the game later came to the 3DO and PlayStation, with the latter releasing in 1996.
In slightly unrelated (but potentially still relevant) news, a group of investors, including the Saudi-led Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, recently acquired Electronic Arts in a $55 billion leveraged buyout — the biggest in private equity history. This deal has led to protests from gamers, as well as reports of concerns within the company that the organisation may see a change in culture, as well as cutbacks and closures to pay off the debt — something you can read more about here.