I played this game first when it was "Closed Beta". When it went to "Open Beta", I was still playing. When EA finalized the game, they took out the Beta files, and installed the game files, which meant all of us had to reinstall the game. EA sent me, "FREE", the two disc CD set to reinstall the complete game. Once reinstalled, I played up until three days before EA shut EnB down.
Following the shut down, while I know there were others interested in buying the game, I did ask and got the chance to submit a bid for all the game files. My submission didn't work, and then I found out that EA wanted a couple million for the files.
If I had had that much money, I would have bought those game files, and then launched Earth and Beyond, on my company servers.