EA producer found 20,000 archival media assets in secret physical vault at its HQ

Jim Vessella, a Senior Producer at the EA Partner teams at Electronic Arts, stumbled upon EA’s secret physical media vault at the company’s Redwood Shores campus. This wasn't just any storage room containing copies of old games; instead, it held nearly 20,000 archival media assets stored in various media, including Betacam, VHS, D1, Film Reels, CD-ROMs, and more. Vessella discovered it in 2022 and spent the next six months outside of his working hours unpacking the room. He was eventually joined by Greg Roensch, who worked with the EA Story initiative, which is the company’s own preservation project, and reorganized the room chronologically. From there, EA shared how this effort turned from an archival project into a remaster of several classic titles.

Vessella, who also worked on the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection in 2019, built a proposal to digitize the room once it was organized, with efforts starting in 2024. …