EA has greenlit a full remaster of the retro space sim Wing Commander 3: Heart Of The Tiger and is also returning the Ultima series of role-playing games to its original creator. The remaster was announced by EA producer Jim Vessella during a panel at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo over the weekend, where he discussed his game preservation efforts within the company.
Remaster details
The remaster of 1994’s Wing Commander 3: Heart Of The Tiger will include the original full motion video (FMV) cut scenes, which were the first in the series, as well as upscaled video, allowing them to be viewed in much higher quality. Gameplay will run at 60 frames per second, and controller support will be included.
The game starred several big name movie actors, including Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, Tom Wilson, and Mark Hamill as the lead protagonist. The remaster will also feature ‘Kilrathi Saga Integration’, which suggests it will include the first two Wing Commander games. The Kilrathi Saga was a trilogy of games detailing a war between Earth and the cat-like Kilrathi aliens.
Ultima rights reclaim
While the Wing Commander remaster is labelled as the 30th Anniversary Edition, the game is currently 32 years old. The announcement comes shortly after news that the Ultima series could be making a return too. Wing Commander and Ultima were the biggest releases of Texas publisher and developer Origin Systems, which was acquired by EA in 1992 and shut down in 2004.
The push for a new Ultima is not being led by EA but by creator Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott, who founded Origin with his father and brother. He revealed in a recent YouTube interview that due to US copyright law, he is legally allowed to reclaim the rights to Ultima 35 years after he sold them to EA. If all goes as planned, Garriott will get full control of Ultima again in 2027, which means potential re-releases of the older games or even an entirely new one. He has said he will ask EA if they want to be involved.
‘I’ve got most of a year to figure out what that means. But at the very least, it means I could re-release the earlier Ultimas, but it also means I could sequel them. And the point is I’m going to have control again of the future of my seminal product line,’ explained Garriott. Ultima was one of the very first commercially released computer role-playing games and, along with Wizardry, the foundation for modern Japanese role-players as well.
