Electronic Arts has reportedly found the original tapes holding high-quality footage for Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, the 1994 space combat game from Origin. The material surfaced during a game preservation panel at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, where producer Jim Vessella spoke about digitizing EA's video archive.
According to a post by an attendee, Vessella reportedly found more than 600 source tapes in EA's archives and is restoring them. The panel was titled The Lost Tapes - Preserving the EA Vault and Restoring an FMV Classic, and its title points to the recovery of the full-motion video (FMV) sequences that made the game famous.
Vessella is already known in the retro community for his work on the 2020 Command & Conquer Remastered Collection. Recovering the original tapes could allow a re-release with video of higher quality than earlier versions, which suffered from the compression limits of the time.
The project comes at a favorable moment for the series. EA recently made the source code of four classic Command & Conquer titles open source, and modern versions of older Origin games have appeared on other platforms.
No release date or price has been announced for the new edition, and no technical details of the final format have been given.
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