EA Still Has the Wing Commander 3 Tapes. Someone Just Showed Them
At a Portland retro show, EA producer Jim Vessella put an anniversary cut of Heart of the Tiger on screen. The studio found more than 600 original 1994 FMV tapes, including Mark Hamill's scenes, and the build is said to run at 60 frames.
Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger came out in 1994, when full-motion video was a selling point and Mark Hamill was the face on the box. EA still has the tapes. On Saturday, at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, producer Jim Vessella put an anniversary edition on a screen and let a room of people who already own the CD-ROM see what the source looks like.
The account comes from a Warp Pipes roundup on Monday, not from an EA press release. Vessella’s line, as reported, is that the archives turned up more than 600 original FMV source tapes. The show reel uses scenes as they were shot, then upscaled, and the build is said to run at 60 frames a second. That is a different object from the game people remember, which was chopped to fit a 1994 PC and a disc that already felt huge.
There is no date, no platform list, and no official announcement. Treat the Portland showing as a producer with a find, not as a ship date. Anniversary editions of this era have a habit of living on a convention stage for a year before anyone can buy them.
What makes the tapes interesting is how bad the original delivery was allowed to be. Heart of the Tiger was the one where the space opera finally had movie actors in it, Hamill in the cockpit, and the video still looked like it had been squeezed through a drinking straw. If EA really kept the masters, the anniversary cut is less a remaster than a first chance to see the footage the way the set was lit.
Hamill has spent the last decade being everywhere again, from a squadron bridge in a game that still is not out to whatever Lucasfilm asks this month. Heart of the Tiger is the older job. If the tapes hold, it might also be the one that finally looks like the movie it was pretending to be.