EA Returns Ultima, Wing Commander and Crusader to Steam

Electronic Arts is opening a large chunk of its back catalog on Steam today, bringing 25 older games to the platform in a single batch. The lineup covers several long-running franchises, and the publisher is pairing the returns with quality-of-life updates to give longtime fans a reason to buy again.

The headline group is seven Anniversary Editions. Six of them are Wing Commander games, the space combat series that many PC players grew up with, and the seventh is Road Rash, the motorcycle racer known for its brawling. These updated versions sell for $9.99 each.

The other 18 re-releases cost $4.99 apiece. They include every Ultima role-playing game, both Crusader titles, the flight sim Strike Commander, and Theme Hospital, the hospital management sim that still has a loyal following. The announcement also names GOG as a destination for the release, though the details available so far center on Steam.

The price gap is easy to read. At under five dollars, the standard re-releases are a low-cost way to revisit older franchises, most notably Ultima, whose series dates back to the early 1980s. The Anniversary Editions cost roughly twice as much, so buyers will have to decide whether the quality-of-life changes justify the difference for the games they already know.

For a publisher with a large archive of older titles, this kind of bulk release is a practical way to put decades-old games in front of new players without rebuilding each one from scratch. Whether the wider catalog gets the same treatment will depend on how these sales perform.