Classic gaming: Wing Commander

Where YJ reminisces about one of the best games ever made

Back in 1990 when I got my first computer, and I just started getting into PC games, I watched my bro play a game which totally captivated me. That game was Wing Commander.

Wing Commander was a game developed by Chris Roberts in 1990. It was a sci-fi flight sim game which he wanted to deliver a cinematic experience not unlike Star Wars at the time. The game pitted mankind against an alien race called the Kilrathi, but the first game never developed their background except they lived on war and were vicious. The game went on to be a massive hit, becoming Origin’s most popular product and went on to produce several sequels, with each major installment usually pushing the boundaries of gaming.

Being quite young back then, I had totally no idea what was happening when I played it, but the game was unlike anything else available at the time. The sci-fi flight sim genre hadn’t even been invented yet, the graphics were groundbreaking at the time and music score was very good, changing depending on the situation you were in during battle, like if your ship was heavily damaged, or if you had a missile locked onto you.

It was also the first game to offer branching paths depending on how well you performed. If you failed key missions you would go down the ‘losing’ branch, where the Terrans are on the defensive and retreating, and if you kept failing, the game would lead to a no-win situation. I remember as a kid I could never do very well, but I always managed to win the last few missions which went back onto the ‘winning’ path.

There were little things that added to the experience too. If you did well during missions, you would receive medals in a ceremony, you would get promotions, and your flight officer would give you better fighters. If you didn’t protect your wingmen in battle, they would die and eventually you’d have to fly alone.

It was an extremely immersive experience that sparked my desire to develop games (which sadly never came to fruition). Watching the briefing and scramble sequence still gives me goosebumps to this day.

Wing Commander 2 came out a year later. Having nailed the gameplay the first time, the second game put more emphasis on the story. The downside to this was now your wingmen could no longer die unless it was scripted, and the whole medals thing was done away with. The game was one of the first to introduce to feature speech and voice overs, which was cool at first but got a bit grating after the 1023412th time the enemy told me they wanted to feast on my entrails.

In 1994, Wing Commander 3 finally arrived. The game was a huge step forwards in terms of technology, using several emerging technologies at the time. With the emergence of CD-ROM at the time, developers suddenly had about 500 times the storage space to work with. As always Chris Roberts decided to take advantage of this new technology and make WC3 a multimedia project. He wanted to make a game that would define ‘interactive movie’. And he did, using full motion video for cutscenes, starting a trend which many games would follow afterwards.

A decent cast of actors were chosen, including Luke Skywalker…er Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, Malcolm MacDowell, John Rhys Davies, and weirdly Ginger Lynn (who was a porn star at the time). Dialogue trees were added into conversations which would either improve the morale of your wingmen and how they performed in battle. This game was widely touted as the world’s first interactive movie.

And movie it was. You had had movies for entering elevators, elevators moving to floor 1, floor 2, floor 3, movies for you exiting the elevator…it got a bit ridiculous really. Because of all the FMV and cutscenes, the game was also alot more linear than the previous two installments.

The game also introduced true 3D graphics as opposed to the sprite based of the old games. This was during a period when there were no 3D accelerators, so the game needed a monster machine to run. It was the Doom 3 and Crysis of it’s time. Without a Pentium 90 at least you could be waiting at least 20 minutes for your missions to load…and another 20 minutes every time you died. I had to beg my dad to buy the super computer needed to run this game and it wasn’t until a few years after it was released that I was able to play it properly.

But it was an epic game, and continued the cinematic tradition of the Wing Commander games. Ironically, like Star Wars, the game ends with Luke Skywalker flying down a trench to deliver a bomb to destroy the enemy stronghold. And with that ended the trilogy of the Kilrathi Saga.

Not content with creating the mammoth film/game that WC3 was, Roberts went on to make Wing Commander 4 2 years later in 1996. This game would contain even more cinematics than WC3 and took a whopping 6 CDs instead of 4. The game also took 12 million USD to make, which is still a large number by today’s standards, and this is mainly due to the fact that they decided to use real sets this time instead of blue/green screen effects.

And this time you might be mistaken that you were watching a movie instead, because the cutscenes were so plentiful and went on for so long, the game suffered. The part that you actually paid to play. The mission design was probably the worst in the series, having lots of useless filler missions in order to progress the story. There was also some bad design in the ending, where if you make any wrong decision once out of 3 seperate dialogue splits at the last fucking cutscene you died and had to replay the entire mission.

For this, Roberts finally was cast out of Origin, and went on to make the absolutely horrible Wing Commander movie. A year later in 1997, Origin released Wing Commander: Prophecy, the first WC game without Chris Roberts at the helm.

Origin had learnt from their mistakes from WC4, and had scaled down the movie aspect of the game. They also wanted to return to the glory days of the original with good missions driving the story and not the other way around. No longer were you the top ace and hero of the wars like in WC1 to 4, but you played an upcoming rookie pilot instead, and no longer could you choose your ships like in WC3 and WC4, you now had to earn them again.

And it was a good game. Everything was finally in full 3D, and very pretty if you had a graphics accelerator. Massive battles was what the game delivered, with almost 30 enemies (wow) at the same time. The game was also the most moddable out of the series, with fans producing their own ships and missions, even conversion packs for the game.

Unfortunately, some of the magic of the series had died when Chris Roberts left Origin, and Wing Commander’s popularity slowly faded away, along with the genre. But no one can deny the brilliance of what Roberts has created and pushing the boundaries of gaming as a medium.

Pics taken from WCCIC (wcnews.com)