In a new developer video, EA has now shown for the first time how the iconic cutscenes of the real-time strategy classic Command & Conquer in its revised form in Command & Conquer: Remastered.
In addition, the developers tell the funny story of the creation of the revised videos, for which some EA employees are first old video tapes from the 90s had to fight.
Disappointment in the Westwood Archives
In the almost seventeen-minute video, producer Jim Vessella says that Command & Conquer Remastered original cutscenes present in a contemporary look.
The EA employees also came across in their archive whole drawers full of video tapeson which the original recordings of the cut scenes were located. The employees were already sure that the video recordings were now in a much better quality than they can be found in the game itself.
After EA found the only provider on the west coast of the United States who could digitize the old, unusual Sony tape format that Westwood used for the recordings, they got a hard drive with the digitized recordings. Unfortunately, the tapes have not survived the last 25 years very well, so the result is still looked worse than the videos from the game CDs.
more on the subject
First gameplay from C&C Remastered shows the jump from 320×200 to 4K
Upscaling with artificial intelligence
Since the original tapes were not a usable source, EA had to resort to scaling up the existing videos. In collaboration with members of the C&C community who had already done such things for fun, they developed one AI upscaling algorithm, which should bring the old clips to a contemporary resolution.
However, EA uses the videos of the console version of Command & Conquer as the source, since the videos here had a slightly better resolution than those of the PC version.
However, this is not the only one funny anecdote on the new edition of the RTS classic: In December 2019, EA announced that AI assistant EVA was set to music by the same speaker – who had to record her lines in a closet in 1995.
