A Wing Commander 3 remaster is in development at Electronic Arts, according to longtime EA producer Jim Vessella. He revealed the project during a Wing Commander retrospective panel at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo on Saturday, October 10.
Vessella told the crowd that he had found the master tapes from the production of Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger. Those tapes hold the full-motion video scenes that made the 1994 PC game famous. The Wing Commander 3 remaster is planned as a 30th anniversary release. Its restored footage will replace the compressed video of the original.
What the Wing Commander 3 remaster includes
According to Kotaku, the game will run at 60 frames per second. It will also include community enhancements made after the original release. Vessella said the package includes “the Kilrathi Saga,” which points to all three games in the original trilogy being part of it. EA previously used that name for a 1996 Windows collection of the first three Wing Commander games.
Bluesky user chorby.org, who attended the panel, posted that Vessella “found over 600 source tapes in the EA archives” and has been restoring them. No release date, price or platform list came out of the panel, based on Kotaku’s report.
A cast led by Mark Hamill
Heart of the Tiger casts the player as Christopher Blair, a pilot in a long war between humanity and the feline Kilrathi Empire. Blair is posted to the TCS Victory, an aging carrier. Reports of environmental trouble on the Kilrathi homeworld arrive at the same time as news that Angel, Blair’s former partner, has been captured. From there, Blair leads a secret campaign meant to end the war.
The live-action scenes star Mark Hamill as Blair. Malcolm McDowell, Tim Curry, John Rhys-Davies and Ginger Lynn Allen also appear. Many fans rank Heart of the Tiger as the high point of the series. It paired refined space combat with some of the most polished FMV work of the decade.
Wing Commander was one of the biggest PC series of the 1990s. It ran for five main entries plus a dozen expansions. The brand also spread to a Super Nintendo port, novels, an animated series and a 1999 feature film starring Freddie Prinze Jr. Still, the series has seen almost no new releases since 2000, so the Wing Commander 3 remaster is its first announced project since then.
Why the reveal stands out
Kotaku noted that a retro gaming expo is an unusual place for an EA announcement. EA does not often revisit its back catalog, although Vessella has done so before. He led the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, which EA released in 2020 after years of fan requests.
However, Vessella did not work on the original Wing Commander games. Series creator Chris Roberts left the franchise long ago. For more than a decade, Roberts has led development of Star Citizen at Cloud Imperium Games. That space game’s crowdfunding drew heavily on his Wing Commander reputation. EA has not yet put out a formal announcement for the Wing Commander 3 remaster.