EA’s preservation effort began after producer Jim Vessella found a physical-media vault at its Redwood Shores campus in 2022. The room held nearly 20,000 items, from videotapes and film reels to CD-ROMs, many at risk from deteriorating media and obsolete equipment. After reorganizing the archive, a small team digitized thousands of assets: by April 2026, about 6,000 had been preserved, representing roughly 2,500 hours of footage. The recovered master tapes included material for Wing Commander and Road Rash, prompting work on anniversary editions of seven games: Wing Commander III and IV, Privateer 2, Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Wing Commander Prophecy, and Road Rash.
The account focuses most closely on restoring Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. EA worked with modder Matt Wells and other community members to adapt Wells’s enhancement patch into an official edition, then spent months locating, cutting, identifying, and repairing approximately 475 cinematic scenes from archival tapes. The team also recovered about 460 in-flight communication videos, including many character performances not used in the original release. The resulting edition adds higher-quality video, 60-frame-per-second gameplay, controller and joystick support, input calibration, and configurable settings. The project illustrates how preservation depends not only on saving old media, but also on community expertise and painstaking technical work to make recovered material usable on modern systems.
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Usenet Rewind makes decades of Usenet posts easier to search, opening the archive to researchers and curious readers. Its revival also exposes how supposedly ephemeral online conversations can resurface years later without their original context. (tedium.co)
Team JokerD became the first to reach level 60 in World of Warcraft: Forever, less than three days after launch. The team used an improved Undead Cannibalize ability to recover health and mana while leveling rapidly. (vice.com)
Ryszard Kapuściński spent decades reporting across Africa, covering post-colonial governments, coups, and life in poor and unstable regions. The review presents Shadow of the Sun as a vivid account of his risky travels and the pull of a life devoted to adventure and journalism. (mattlakeman.org)
Tesla is ending Cybertruck production after selling about 70,000 vehicles, far below Elon Musk’s forecast of 250,000 a year, and will focus on its Cybercab. The truck became a symbol of Musk’s overpromising and America’s get-rich-quick culture. (rollingstone.com)
World of Warcraft: Forever is now live as a permanent experience alongside modern and Classic WoW, taking players through a reimagined Azeroth from levels 1 to 60. It adds more than 1,000 quests, new zones, the playable Skyborne race, and expanded race-class combinations. (news.blizzard.com)
Richard Lloyd, Television’s guitarist and co-architect of its intricate art-rock sound, died at 75 from bile duct cancer. The band helped shape New York’s 1970s punk scene, and its acclaimed debut, “Marquee Moon,” influenced generations of musicians. (nytimes.com)
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