EA producer Jim Vessella used a talk at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo on Saturday to reveal Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger, 30th Anniversary Edition, a remaster built around 600 original FMV source tapes he discovered while digitizing EA’s video archive. Wing Commander 3 is the 1994 space combat game from designer Chris Roberts, whose latest project, the Star Citizen spinoff Squadron 42, is finally wishlisting on Steam for a planned Q2 2027 release.
PC Gamer reports the remaster will include both source and upscaled versions of the 1994 game’s full-motion video cutscenes, plus “Kilrathi Saga integration” that bundles in Wing Commander 1 and 2 and their expansion packs. The Kilrathi Saga is the 1996 compilation that first packaged the early Wing Commander games with updated art for DOS and PC.
The remaster will run at 60 FPS with controller support, and is planned for Steam, GOG, and the EA app. GOG is the DRM-free storefront owned by CD Projekt, and the EA app is EA’s replacement for the old Origin launcher. Steve Lin, a board member of the Video Game History Foundation, posted a photograph of one of Vessella’s projector slides on Bluesky confirming the details.
Wing Commander 3 launched in 1994 with a cast that included Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Tom Wilson, and is widely considered one of the strongest uses of FMV storytelling in any 90s game. Both Hamill and Rhys-Davies also appear in Squadron 42, which is why the timing is striking: the most-watched space-combat story of the 1990s is being restored while its spiritual successor is in the final stretch of development. Like the recent Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse reissue, this is a story of a publisher dusting off a dormant franchise rather than commissioning a new one.
The project comes as a surprise from EA, which has generally let its older catalogue sit. The publisher’s last major revival was the Dead Space remake, which shipped in 2023 to strong reviews but did not sell well enough to greenlight a follow-up. Vessella has personally championed several EA preservation projects in the past, including the 2012 Command & Conquer re-release, and the new Wing Commander work fits a similar pattern of using existing assets rather than commissioning a fresh remake.
Our read: Wing Commander 3 is the right candidate for this kind of restoration. It was one of the few 1990s games that actually used FMV to tell a story, so the original tapes matter in a way they would not for a sprite-based RPG from the same year. EA’s name on a 60 FPS, controller-supported PC release is also a clear sign the publisher wants to be a credible steward of its own catalogue again, rather than outsourcing it to a third-party reissue studio like Nightdive. The “30th anniversary” branding is 32 years off, which suggests the reveal landed when it could, not when it was originally planned. EA has not yet announced a price or release date.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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