sfried: I wanted to ask who designed the cutscene in the game and the cast who lent their voices. They still hold up relatively well today (especially with Bizzard's StarCraft cutscenes) and was thinking if there's a possible way to get a high resolution/high quality version so that modders can somehow integrate them back into I-War for modern PCs.
In fact I'm kinda just wishing now that you and some former buddies have a get together and decide to Kickstarter an I-War 3 project, then it will become a real return of the space sim genre with Star Citizen, X: Rebirth, EVE: Valkyrie, and Elite:Dangerous already making lots of noise (I'd also include Strike Suit Zero but that's another matter entirely).
Unfortunately the full TV resolution uncompressed edit of the original cutscene assets has been lost as far as I can tell.
Some years ago at Particle when DVD encoding became possible on normal PCs I went to our editing workstation to see if I could MPEG 2 encode the intro, but I found the original edit had been deleted to make way for other assets.
In those days disk space was at a premium and bulk tape storage prohibitively expensive. The original movie frames had been archived but to reassemble them into a movie would require doing the edit from scratch - and sorry, I don't have the movie frames, though it's possible they do still exist.
We did re-render some I-War footage for a DVD promo of Defiance and that looked amazing at full PAL resolution 25fps. That footage seems to be have lost too, unfortunately.
I'd love to see a kickstarter for a new I-War game. It'd be up to the original directors of Particle Systems because I believe they own the IP.