The fact that the game always crashed on exit, and they hex-edited the crash message to change it to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander" is so on-brand for Chris Roberts, it's amazing.
@@Lee-wk3cb You can literally play it now. it just doesn't have all the features yet. If its a scam why are they spending all the money they were given developing the game they said they would. By end of year they should have passed their biggest technical hurdle "server meshing", they recently have been doing 2000 player server tests. Not to mention its single player counterpart squadron 42 will be releasing in a couple years and they have been able to show off gameplay live for it.
I was one of the programmers on 'Wing Thing' as we called it. I have fond memories of Wing 1 and Wing 2 - although the hours we worked bordered on brutal. From a programming perspective, doing all we did in the Vertical and Horizontal blanks as the raster gun traversed the screen was amazing. You have no idea how many times we would look at compiler output to eek out every clock cycle we could.
As a new indie developer, I've always looked up to your programming skills because it's so well built. Especially getting the ships to all scale seamlessly is an incredible sense of immersion
I have nothing but respect for you and your ilk, I've recently started playing around with programming in C for MS-DOS (using DJGPP) and it's given me some real perspective of the challenges you would have had to overcome, especially once you started moving to 32-bit...
This was my game. Everyone always talks about Doom, but Wing Commander was what I was playing. Looking back on this now it really is amazing what a jump forward this game was. Great job on the video.
Same here. I was so deep into this story, especialy the two mission discs "Secret Missions", where you had to loos some of your wingmen, no matter what.
The impact of this series can't be overestimated. The voice expansion pack for Wing Commander 2 led to me buying my first sound blaster card, which made me open my computer for the first time. This translated into IT skills which led into a career in cybersecurity and software development 30 years later. These games truly pushed the envelope and changed more than their developers possibly realized.
Same. The WC2 speech pack made me want a sound card, and installing my first was the first time that I ever upgraded a computer. It gave me confidence and by the late 90s, I was building computers not just as a hobby but for my job.
Heh, that's really cool. I remember what got me into software engineering and it was just as seemingly (at the time) innocuous. Just a thing you have to do for another goal that ends up paving a way for your whole life.
Two things got me into IT (for about 8 years). My very first PC (1990) ...a Packard Bell Packmate 286-12 which wouldn't complete POST as soon as I set it up, which forced me to spend two weeks of my lunch hours calling text support ( I was in NJ, tech support was in CA) and trying their 'solutions' only to generate a total of 87 different errors...which made me so frustrated I bought 'Inside the PC" by Norton, read it entirely on a weekend, called PB tech support on the Monday and told THEM everything that was wrong with it and that they owed me an actual working PC for my $2300, and not pile of e-waste (I did indeed get a new working PC from them...tiny bonus, it was a 286-16, not a 12 Mhz. I vowed I would NEVER be dependent on 'tech support" ever again Wing Commander was the FIRST game I ever bought. The SECOND thing that got me (eventually) into my IT career was getting Wing Commander 2 Speech Pack working. Added the sound card (my first upgrade) and a Gravis Joystick, then got involved with the memory management/AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG SYS. The successful upgrade and my original support experience led to me building my own PC for the first time...using an AMD 386-SX with a co-processor, 4MB (!) of RAM and dual 40MB HDDs. When Wing Commander III came out in 1994, my IT career had already started.Field tech to corporate deskside support to corproate helpdesk, to 'special project implementation' ( such as Y2K mitigation) and consultant to 'Systems Management Specialist'...until 9/11 happened. The Wing Commander series was absolutely brilliant...clever art and ui, compelling story, absolutely thrilling to play.
This happens in every industry. You invent the industry and then you come up with new tech (like sound cards to give better sound or GFX cards etc). Unfortunately this hasn't seemed to work for the VR industry! I've been tempted to get a headset the last few years but it looks like you need a rather powerful GFX card to make it worth while really. I'm more interested in using it as a "virtual" office/screen so I'd put it on and have an office with X number of virtual monitors I can manipulate. I don't really want to be dancing around. That seems too much like a gimmick to me. Either way, yes the advancements in sound tech were truly amazing and it's what unfortunately lead to the death of rival systems like the amiga (they did have some you could upgrade but most were fairly limited). Being about to choose from multiple sound cards and gfx cards in the mid 90s really boosted the PC ecosystems. Adlib/soundblaster/roland etc all as viable options meant even us poor high school students could get something a few years old and it'd still function well and then we could upgrade in a year or so and then the games just got better!
In 1990 I worked at Software Etc 5 miles down the road from Origins offices. One day Chris Roberts and Stephen Beeman come into the store with a 386/33 and a Roland setup for us to setup as a demo for the game. As a 16 year old I was blown away with the game quality and sound (the Roland tracks were really something we hadn’t heard of at that time). Over the weeks I got to know many of the Origin people and eventually Richard Garriot got me for an interview, and I was hired into QA (16 year olds dream job!!!!!). Fun fact: - The visible hand in the cockpit was only visible if the user’s computer had the extended memory properly installed via Himem.exe. - We had so many calls when the game first released of people asking us how to keep from dying in the first 30 seconds in the game, some people were really angry. Wing Commander literally changed my life.
My best memory as a kid was rushing home from school…..going to my real space ship……that I built in my room using books and printers and other stuff my mom had. So in front of me was my screen with Wing Commander, then all around me was techy stuff to make my room look like a real ship. So when my eyes left the screen I would be looking at a large calculator or printer. I would then pretend to hit buttons on them as if they launched my weapons. I would be talking to crew mates etc. it was glorious.
I remember I did a similar thing as a kid with my brother after we'd constantly replay the Flying Fortress bomber segment in Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. Except our "simulator" was entirely imaginary; we'd arrange dining room chairs in a rough plane-like shape, covered it all in these camouflage pattern blankets we had, and then mounted our Nerf Vulcan blasters at various points, and would switch between them like how you switch between turret positions in the game. We'd pretend to fire at imaginary Japanese Zeroes, shake the hull to pretend we were taking flak fire, etc. I think at one point we ended up using the PSP we shared to pretend to control the bomb display, I can't remember what game we'd put it on, though.
We had GREAT child memories with one of my cousins, we played on his Thomson TO7 (I guess?), to a "flight simulator" (can't remember the name), I was the "pilot" with the joystick in front of the screen, and my cousin put a table just behind me, the computer on it and acted as my copilot behind, arming weapons and reading radar... I think that almost 40 years later, my cousin still have a magic memory of that moment as I have...
@@garryiglesias4074 I’d trade today’s experience with games for those moments in a heart beat. I remember playing any game meant something. You didn’t see it as just something to pass the time….you RUSHED home from school to go on this adventure.
To bring it back full-circle to re-enacting Star Wars, Wing Commander III had you playing as Mark Hamill's character, whose final mission is to fly through a long trench to drop a bomb in a target at the far end. Seeing real actors (Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell) in a videogame was pretty mindbending back in the early '90s.
My favorite part of WC3 was the pre-mission 486 DX2 load ritual: Get up, grab a snack, have a drink, do your laundry, hang your laundry, sweep the porch, take a shower. Come back to find that the game is still loading, or did it crash? But the music is still playing! It was fun going back to it once I got a Pentium and more RAM.
@@Vulkans I lived that unique brand of hell as well. Especially irritating were those few missions near the end of the game where there were FMV transitions of your spacecraft between space and atmospheric flight. Transitioning back to the sim from the FMV took just as long as the initial "turbines to speed" sequence on the cockpit computer. I too recall revisiting the game on much faster hardware and being blown away by how negligible the load times became.
@@Vulkans WC3 ran beautifully on a 486 DX4/100 oc to 120MHz in the Asteroid field. ;) And 8Meg was enough if you raised up the Buffers and Files in the Config.sys
My mom and dad got divorced when I was just a baby and when I got a little older Dad got me for the summers. The last summer I spent with him, he bought Wing Commander brand new and he and me and my brother would take turns playing it on his computer. I think he had a 486 because we had to disable the turbo or the game was like playing in fast forward. Wing Commander is the game that got me hooked on flight sims. X-Wing, Privateer, F-15 Strike Eagle, F-19, F-117, Descent Freespace... Those were the good old days.
@@dennispatel3188 Strike Commander was THE simulator I was waiting for... I remember seeing tiny stamp scale screenshot which seemed "photorealistic" of the cockpit in video game magazines of the time, YEARS before it went out.... I remember then the LONG install with the depacking of all data on the harddrive (can't remember the exact duration, but it was like "a couple of hours" or so, or maybe my memory is doing funny things). At the end, it was a great game, but not as "photorealistic" as the early screenshots were teasing us.
WC Privateer, SW Tie fighter, SW Dark Forces, Ultima 3, Heroes Quest 2, Warcraft Orc & Humans, DnD Eye of the Beholder, Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, and Civilization; Were my favorite PC games to play on my family's old IBM386 and Packard Bell Legend 486. Great memories being 9-13 years old rushing home from school to play games.
Thank you for the excellent coverage of one of the greatest--and most important--games of all time! I was born in 1985, and so was just getting into PC gaming in 1989 at four years old with titles like Mixed-Up Mother Goose and King's Quest. Then Wing Commander came out in 1990. It hooked my family and I immediately. I would watch my grandfather, uncle, and father all take turns--and then they'd let me play, teaching me how to use our Gravis 2-button joystick (with the red buttons) to play. When I couldn't play, I was reading Claw Marks and studying the ship blueprints. Then came WC2.. and the Speech Pack! Then came Privateer, Academy, Armada, III, etc... I grew up with Wing Commander, and it was the first game series I fell in love with. I'm proud to still own all of the PC big boxes today, the novels, etc. My son watches me play now, and he'll randomly shout "you cannot defeat the Drakhai" as a taunt when we're playing other multiplayer games. What a game. What a series!
I remember playing games like Battlehawks 1942 and F-19 Stealth Fighter and wishing we had a decent Star Wars space combat game that was better than the Star Wars arcade game we had at the time. Even though we had a copy of the PC port of Star Wars Arcade, and so didn't have to spend a ton of quarters playing it, it still wasn't the same. Then Wing Commander came along and changed all that. I would play for hours and hours doing my best to win every mission so I could get the best path possible, and finally succeeded! Eventually Star Wars X-Wing came out and satisfied that desire for a true Star Wars space combat experience, but there will never be another experience the same as Wing Commander. Thank you for the wonderful video and stay safe out there!
"so I could get the best path possible", that's exactly what I did. I remember reading an interview with Chris Roberts years/decades ago talking about the branching story paths they had spent so much time on. In reality the vast majority of players like us would keep restarting until they nailed each mission. Only a tiny fraction of the playerbase ever experienced the alternate timelines they put blood, sweat and tears into developing. I think the problem stems from it never being made clear that after losing a mission you can quickly regain the optimal path, I assumed like many others I would be forever saddled with the consequences of my initial failure. A wingman dies and they are gone forever, that implied failing an objective had a similar permanent outcome.
There is an official period win95 port called the Kilrathi Saga that caps the game speed so it can run smoothly on any recent CPU. Its even playable on win10/11 with the fan patch WCDX. (and a mod wing commander loader to inject the Sega CD voice into WC1!)
Ooh, I remember being hyped for the voice acting in the Win95 version, but haven't checked back in about a year. Now I want a co-op mod. Hey, if geniuses can make Might & Magic 6-7-8 into one campaign and make the resulting mod also be multiplayer...
Yep, I bought a complete copy on Ebay in '02 for $110. Most I ever spent on a game. Before, I had to purchase a used older computer locally just to play the dos version I had.
Memories. I was 8 and my dad the medical I.T. guy loved PC's and Power Macs, Compaq was in my backyard and I had connections for the best hardware of the era. Wing Commander blew my mind and then some. MVG, thank you for doing classics justice.
Bought Wing Commander on my Amiga 600 (stock) after seeing it on a friend's 386. It ran very poorly on the Amiga, but I didn't mind, loved it so much. Didn't finish the campaign, though (did so later on the PC). Now just this summer I found my old Amiga disks and the save file was still intact. It was great going back 30 years and try to finish what I started in my teenage years. Nostalgic.
my first experience with wing commander was on the Panasonic 3DO. i'm actually surprised you didn't mention this version. just like the Sega CD version, it has complete voice acted characters. However, the graphics and gameplay are near perfect to the original. No frame drops I highly recommend looking into this version.👍🏽
The Panasonic 3DO is another system I want to get into, but can't justify. Get me a deal on on like the old days where you'd find stuff like that for pennies on the dollar compared to now and I'll be all over it. Back in the day a 3DO could've passed as a VCR or something and been ten bucks. These days it's not so simple, especially anything from that era. It's mostly 360/ps3/wii now.
I LOVE this series of games SO MUCH! I've met Tom Wilson and Ginger Lynn from WCIII, and I still have the Deluxe Edition film can with Tom's autograph. And the magnificent T-shirt. Anybody remember the incredibly difficult Gwen Hyvar (sp?) mission? Had to play that one REPEATEDLY to get through it. Truly a fantastic series of games.
Was also a big fan of the Wing Commander series. My favorite of the series was Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger for the 3DO. That was easily the best flight sim / movie / game ... thing I've ever played. Absolutely loved it!
Thanks for this video 😄Wing Commander was a really big part of my teen years, and i spent more time than i care to admit playing it and reverse engineering portions of it. Those were fun times, wouldn't trade it for the world. The Wing Commander series (and the first one in particular) are gems that just can't be praised high enough
My first Wing Commander game was Wing Commander III. As an 11-year-old, it was just phenomenal with its 3D texture-mapped graphics and FMV featuring Mark Hamill himself. It would take another 5 years to realize the final mission was ripped straight from Star Wars, and another 10 years to find out who G.L. Allen was
This game absolutely blew my mind, I played the trilogy like my life depended on it. 30 years later I distinctly remember the bombing mission I was on where my jump drive was damaged - but in Wing Commander you could just find your carrier in the navigation thingy and slow-boat it home! I remember feeling like it took HOURS to get back - it just nailed the immersion. The cockpit was sparking, I wasn't sure if the family shitbox 486 would crash before I got back, and then finally the carrier grows in the screen and hot damn I beat the mission. Pretty sure these were among the many games I had that had to be coaxed into running by using the demonic power of a boot floppy. I had literally no idea what I was editing in that thing, just that if I mixed and matched enough permutations of the various power words it would eventually work.
At age 27 in 1990 I had purchased a high end 836 33MHz system and played Wing Commander and it’s sequel. It was fantastic! I remember having to spend more money to buy a good joystick. I can’t remember if I already had the AdLib card or if I bought one for this game. Ultima Underworld was another game I loved at the time. Anyway, good times before kids and career took over spare time.
Here in Brisbane back in the early 90's there was a shop in the Myer Center called "Games 'R' Us". I had an Amiga 500 and they had a whole wall dedicated to Wing Commander 1 and 2 and the various addons for the PC. That was when the PC started to become the dominant platform for flight sims and other 3d games. Finally in '94 I bought my first PC, a 486 dx2-66mhz and Wing Commander and Xwing were the first 2 games I bought. Had to run WC1 with the turbo off. I did buy it for the A500 when it came out but on an non accelerated A500 it was an unplayable slideshow. It plays well with an accelerator though which I now have in my Amiga.
As a kid I remember getting really excited about the game, but my 286 couldn't run it. A couple years later we had a 486 machine, but then I was way more into Star Trek 25th Anniversary as a TOS nerd. I came back to Wing Commander years later when I saw Mark Hamill's face on the box. EDIT: I hope that this video is a low-key way of announcing that you're involved with a remaster project... :D
Wing Commander 2 actually was playable on a 286, after removing everything possible out of the config.sys, ditching the mouse driver etc. The cutscenes and transitions ran at a glacial pace but surprisingly the gameplay itself was fine. I should add that this was using PC Speaker for audio.
@@poonsamurai That was my experience, as well. WC2 was playable on our 286, but the cutscenes played back at something like a quarter speed. It was agonizing, but worth it.
I loved the copy protection gimmick in Star Trek 25th Anniversary. You needed the map in the instruction manual to figure out the right place to go. If you went to the wrong star system you would be ambushed and enter into a 3-on-1 battle. You were supposed to lose quickly in these scenarios, but I liked the combat so much that I was eventually able to clear out these ambushes with ease. I liked the mission where you are supposed to gather parts to reassemble and operate the broken transporter but the mission actually has multiple solutions along with awesome animations for "set to kill" phasers.
My older brother who worked at a computer store around xmas 1992. He bought me a Sound Blaster Pro with Wing Commander 2. I had been gaming on PC for almost a decade and going from PC Speaker to Sound Blaster Pro was such a mindblowing experience for me as a kid.
I was a huge fan of F-15, F-117A and many flight sims. Falcon 3.0 was brutal to learn as an 19 yr old. I had an AMD 386 40 mhz with the Math Co Processor. When Wing Commander came out, I was in bliss, I had a Sound Blaster Pro, and then upgraded it to 16 bit. I had the Thrustmaster flight stick. That wasn't enough for me, so I bought Champions Flight stick and throttle, then also got the rudder pedals. I invested $500 on hardware upgrades to get the full immersion of this game, and tossed out the flight sims for something more simple, with great music and an awesome story line. I still have many many fond memories of this game, and then the X-Wing games came out. This was the acme of flight sim games, I miss them so much. And Privateer, that just blew my mind. An independent pilot buying and upgrading my ships and weapons was so thrilling, the itchy trigger finger I had trying not to shoot a confed ship because I was smuggling contraban. This universe was so fun. It's been over 12 years since the talk of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, I was hoping to recapture those glory days. I'm fearing it'll just be in permanent development hell. Wing Commander was the only space combat game I ever loved. X-Wing and it's spin offs were fun, Descent was amusing. But nothing could top WC for me. The epic story that ended in a cliff hanger that will never get resolved. The opening theme, the combat music, they were all a beautiful mesh with the game play and the death music just gutted me when I lost a Wingman. It was the first game I ever felt like I was really somebody in a world. Not just a random player. I loved the character interaction in WC3 and 4, it was a choose your own adventure, then played it again using the 2nd choice. And the multiple story endings they had for WC4, did I turn evil, did I stay good, did I betray Confed. The replayability was endless, then I got some of those games guides just to look and see what I missed, then discovering, that I could chose other flight routes to get different encounters, again my mind was blown how much thought went into the game.
Something I liked was realizing I didn't have to play the Death Star trench run as intended and could just fly to the port at high altitude and then dive bomb it for the win!
I have such fond memories of Wing Commander 3, I used to go to my friends house, and it wasn't a multiplayer game, but he'd fly the ship, and I'd fire the weapons. We loved that game.
Great video ! Very enjoyable. I've never played this series and I may never play this series, but you certainly got me pumped for it and I feel like I appreciate it better now.
I have played, and loved, all NINE Wing Commander games over the years. They still hold up! I'm also a Star Citizen backer since I heard back in 2013 that Chris Roberts was making a new space game. I'm excited for its future.
I just dug up GOG's WC Privateer. And it's so funny because it's a very early Star Citizen. All the features that are in Privateer are also in Star Citizen. I hope the story in Squadron 42 can keep up with the feeling of Privateer. I am also a backer SC since the beginning of the campaign
"This finally meant we were able to play out our dreams of becoming a space pilot" Yeah, i lived out my dream of becoming a space pilot, finding that i was terrible at it, and washing out of the program to become a space alcoholic. Still - i absolutely have vivid memories of playing that game in middle school with my friends! Great video, thanks for sharing it.
My dad was a huge Treky, he bought this game literally when I first learned to read way back in the early 90s. This was one of the first games I played for the SNES and had a blast slowly sounding out the words and spent countless hours on the simulation because I didn’t know how to progress the game. The visuals always amazed me for the time.
The fact that there were two chains of missions - one where you won a given star system, and one where you lost - each with it’s own scenarios and cutscenes was an incredible amount of replay ability for the time. If I recall, we lost this in WC2…
Wing Commander is a lot of fun, but I like Privateer even more. You have more freedom, a working economy, and you can become a bounty hunter. Awesome. In the second game you even play as Clive Owen in the main role and Jürgen Prochnow is the main antagonist. Finished Privateer 2 again just recently and it's still a great game, too.
I am a console player at heart, my gamer story began with Mario on the NES. But discovering Wing Commander on a friend's computer when I was a teenager was mind blowing. We wrote together an entire sequel to the game, missions, ships, wingmen and all. Wing Commander 2 will forever stay in my mind as the game that defined the way we still conceive video agmes today. And Wing Commander 4, with its fantastic introduction, is still one of my most cherished videogame memory.
C64... that was the best machine I ever had.... I kept using it long after its lifecycle ended, deep into the '90s. I had like over 2000 floppies stacked with games. I remember often loading in games, and not ever starting them because the demo's from the crackgroups were so amazing and that i used them as a form of what we nowadays call Spotify... :)
There was no pc in my house back then, only a snes. A friend had geek parents, with a pc and lots of games. This was such 'elite stuff', even booting it was a challenge for us. One day his dad fired up Wing Commander. My jaw dropped at the opening sequence, the whole 'mind blowed' experience, with goosebumps and all! My killer Castlevania/Megaman/Contra thing instantly seemed like child toys. Needless to say me and my friend were hooked instantly. We played non-stop, getting our asses wiped out over and over, but we don't cared. With the joystick and great speakers, the level of immersion was unmatched. The music was printed in my soul and would not leave me for months. We were obsessed with it. We designed spacecrafts on his superior lego sets, tons of them, even motherships, carriers and docks. This went for years, leading us to the mechwarriors stuff... wich we began to replicated on lego too, always more advanced. We eventually got to full working, interchangeable body parts. So much great memories... Thank you Wing Commander
im old enough to remember that Wing Commander had crazy high system requirements when it came out. A rich friend of my had a PC beefy enough to run it, and we were both amazed at the graphics. origin systems games usually meant rich kid games only
My dad ran his own computer repair business which was just barely enough for our family to get by, so we were far from rich, but we did have the hardware for it. I saw the game first when visiting a supplier with my dad. Blew my mind! On the way home we got a freak ice patch on a back road in March and literally nearly both died. We were both completely fine except for assume scratches from the windows viewing in, but the it was hard to find an unbroken part in the car, and the computer parts we'd just bought we're ejected 20 from the car. That's completely unrelated, but forever connected to Wing Commanders graphics in my mind.
When It was first released it was not that bad...6 months later when it was Re-released with 64bit support (the hand moved) is when it dogged out slower computers.
Glad you mentioned the onscreen joystick mirroring the player input - this was indeed super cool. I got the same buzz out of seeing the gear shifting hand in RAC rally. It just felt so next gen ☺️
I played the crap outta Wing Commander back in the early 90s. I still watch playlists on youtube of all the cinematics when I'm feelin' nostalgic. I remember when we got a Sound Blaster a bit before the sequel came out, and watching the Wing Commander II intro cutscene and going "Those cats are talking!" lol
I played through WC2 with only the PC speaker, so I was surprised when I finally got a sound card and realized that the cats were talking. I'd seen the intro many times, but relying on subtitles, and didn't know what I was missing.
The thing I enjoyed about the branching mission path was that some of the most interesting and challenging missions were only available if you had lost a couple of times. I went back years later and discovered these.
Found this at Cosco in like 1994 or 1995 after keeping a copy of some game mag from '89 that had featured it. Whole stack of 3.5 floppies in the box plus the expansions. We had a 486-33 and it ran perfectly. Dad would later upgrade the system to a 66 with math coprocessor and I actually managed to play it. And then I could not stop moving for about an hour just pacing because my brain needed to slow down. Haven't played this in decades because I moved on to WC3&4 + Prophecy. But yes to the whole video.
I still have Wing Commander 4 on a multiple CD pack. I think there are 5 CDs in it. Crazy how bad gaming was back then with disc swaps due to copy protection.
They are difficulty games, but unfortunately WC1 & 2 don't work well in DosBox. Even if you get the cycles more or less acceptable there's still some timing issues that cause the player's shots to not register as hits on the enemy spacecraft which makes the games significantly more difficult.
It was this game and the Wing Commander series that it got me working in IT! Each game demanded better hardware and it exposed the computer industry to me. I"m now a Director of an IT department and i have the Wing Commander series to thank ! Cheers!
13:48 And that unmistakable voice is none other than Cam Clarke, who also voices Liquid Snake in MGS (and a literal ton of other instantly recognizable characters)
I played (surreptitiously) Wing Commander from a diskette in the computer lab. Also, I remember playing (at home) Descent: FreeSpace with a Microsoft SideWinder Precision Pro joystick and a Sound Blaster sound card. It was a blast.
Wing Commander and Privateer were my jam growing up among other space and flight sims around that time.. I used a 386 DX-40, Sound Blaster, and a CH Joystick. It was such an amazing time for PC gaming. I had hoped Star Citizen captured some of that spark, but I've long since lost hope with it and Squadron 42.
I was a total Wing Commander kid growing up. We had the PC and SNES versions and I forgot how gimped the SNES version was. I recall the PC version of WC2 (maybe WC1 too) that you really had to muck w/your config.sys to get the required memory allocated right. Privateer was maybe my favorite out of all of the series (yes, even WC3 w/Mark Hamill).
Getting this to my Amiga 500 as a 11 year old was simply amazing. I had it for a month and then i bought a Supra 50mb hard drive with extra memory. This extra memory (from 1mb to 2 mb) improved the graphics, a big step up as i remember it. The surprise and joy i felt after this unexpected upgrade is lifelong.
I started with Wing Commander 2. Amazing game and yes, that music is very much burned in my brain. Fun fact: WC2 had two mission packs and a speech pack. IE paid DLC without the downloading. WC1 also had mission packs and IIRC one of the big plot points of WC2 is set up in those mission packs.
Speech Packs were such an early-90s thing, in that brief window when digital sound cards were becoming popular, but CD-ROMs hadn't yet become standard. In hindsight, it's a little amazing that people paid ~$20 just for some VOC files, but that was the style at the time.
I love these retrospectives, please do more. Most of these games were right before my time and I didn't know anyone who played them growing up. Such a cool series.
The cut scenes were funny ... the cut scene going to the fighter top scene bounce run, then the lower scene running normally. So the people have accordion waste.
I had the Amiga 500 version, played on an A1200. As mentioned in the video, it didn't look as nice as the PC version but the gameplay was definitely still there, and I enjoyed every minute of playing through to the end. Great memories.
Raptor > Rapier and I will die on this hill. In space. As a child, I may have done a Campaign in which I systematically removed all my wingmates. I feel kinda bad about it now.
I lived for torp runs in a Broadsword, so I won't yuck your yum - park yourself right at the edge of the flak field, draw your bead and lock, then afterburn straight in. Man what a rush.
I'm with you on the Raptor > Rapier thing, but not murdering my own wingmen. :) The 'speed advantage' doesn't really mean much with A-burners, and the 'maneuverability advantage' is offset by the heavier firepower and ability to tank more hits. Raptor any day of the week...
Indeed one of my childhood games. I remember going to a friends house after school to play on his 286. It felt slower because of what you explained, compared to my older brother's 386 16Mhz PC. I remember I coulnd't kill the first named enemy, he always got away 😂
Crazy that you just put this up, I just started playing it again 2 nights ago for the first time since the 90s! I even ordered a thrustmaster joystick, getting it tomorrow so I can appreciate the game properly (according to the WC dorks).
The OG on my 486 dx2 with my 1mb game card was amazing. Never saw a music conductor move so fast, and the speech pack 3.5” floppies was just unreal once it finally worked! I’m a SpaceMarshal in Star Citizen and hope CR realizes our childhood dreams with SQ42 and SC! What a masterpiece legend he is.
The booklet called "Claw Marks" REALLY inserted you into the world. It was presented as a magazine read by the pilots but was totally a immersive tool to get you into the world of Wing Commander. What a great insert for the game which I read many times
1992. My first PC. A 386 SX25 and a copy of Wing Commander. After installing the game I realized I had forgotten to buy a soundcard. A Soundblaster was duly purchased the next day. Awesome!
I still remember being blown away by that running scene at a computer show in 1990. It was incredible. The whole game just changed pc gaming back then.
Wing Commander and that Orion intro with the Strings was such a mind blower back in the day when we got our Sound Blaster-16 card. Being able to name my own character, and have a place between missions also felt like this was a real place that I was living and breathing in when talking to characters between missions. Wing Commander was really ahead of its time. Playing a game within a game when you sat down in the training module.. it was just so cool. 1:20 Kids just don't know how good they have got it with all the buttons and actions showing up in-game on the HUD. I still remember playing those old games and needing a print out (if you were lucky it came with the game) for flight and mech games on PC just to know what keys did what because you needed so many, and I remember thinking there is no way they could get these games onto a console with the limited number of buttons. Elite Dangerous actually did it first for me where I preferred playing on PC with an Xbox One Controller because they managed to get every single keybinding onto a controller by holding combinations of buttons, and implementing that into the HUD as well, it was such a cool game back in 2015, so much so that I got my dad hooked onto it. That was revenge for him getting me hooked on Eve Online many years prior. RIP dad 2022, miss him very much he was my gateway into PC gaming in the 90's. Did you make this video because Wing Commander 1+2 is on sale on GoG? I had to buy it yesterday. I also loved Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites on PC because it had gameplay elements of Wing Commander but they had the Enterprise and old-school Star Trek ships that I loved! Not enough people talk about those games, sadly. And there was only two like it that came out, all the rest after Judgement Rites had a different art style and gameplay.
You mentioned Battlehawks 1942.. I was about 10 years old in 1990, and went to a friends house he had A commodore Amiga. At the time, I had a BBC Model B. We fired up his Amiga and I played Battlehawks 1942... The thing I remember being blown away by was the detail of the enemy aircraft. They looked amazing. In that moment I knew- I had to own a Commodore Amiga!
I first played WC on SNES in 1993 and fell in love with it. I then moved onto the PC versions of the game. I read all the novels as well. One of my favorite games ever! I even created a fan page on Facebook for it.
I loved this game so much. I remember playing it on the SNES. My best memory was being at a cabin up north with my family and it was pouring all day... I played and beat Wing Commander in a single sitting. It was such a satisfying feeling.
OMG. Wing Commander 3 was just gold. Specially with its story line and the addition of Mark Hamill. I still use the term “watch and learn, colonel” in my vocabulary. 😊
Forgot to talk about the damage shown on your ship when you landed. The more hits you took, the more visual damage was shown. Leaking fluid, laser scoring.... Was awesome!
The voice of the commander in the Sega CD version sounded strangely familiar. It turns out that he was voiced by Cam Clarke, who also voiced Liquid Snake!! Apart from that, he was probably in every major game or movie, animated series. Simply LEGEND!!! MVG great job, unintentional second meaning. As usual, great quality content. Greetings and I wish you all the best!!
This was the game that got my dad to finally buy a Soundblaster back in the early '90's. I remember how mindblowing it was to hear actual voices coming out of our family computer. I still to this day cannot get it running properly on modern machines.
WC1 and WC2 were the games that taught me computers. Digging into absolutely every system detail to eeek out the a tiny additional bit of speed. I never had exactly the right computer for any of the games and I always had to tweak to get things right. I kind of became the nerdy kid who could put computers together from scratch and fix almost anything (in the 386/486 days!) because this game was soo good I had to see that next bit of story and improve that play the smallest of bits. The story branching was mind blowing to me. I was obsessed with the story and even spent an embarrassing amount of time writing my own fan fiction when bored in school classes. This game had a definite part in my becoming a hardware engineer, and a successful one at that in the most dilbert of ways. The series really should continue for real, not just in spirit. It's some of the most fond of memories for me.
I only got to play this game on the SNES, and it still blew my mind how addictive it was. The fact that the fighters you were playing with could die permanently was a true game changer for me. Suddenly I was tasked with not only taking out the enemy, but protecting my friends. Total game changer. I remember after beating the game I played through killing all of my comrades and seeing where the story would take me. Really awesome part on the devs for taking that into account.
Was working at a research centre in England when this came out in the 90s. I got WC I & II and the expansions for PC which the director let us play on the lab PCs after work. Still had the boxed games until this year when they sold on Ebay for 3 figures. I loved the poster blueprints for the ships that came with the game. Fav ship was the Raptor. Nice vid.
First game my roommate purchased for his new 386 our freshman year of college. When he had his 386 built he provided a sound blaster card that he had picked up at a computer store and asked them to install it. I remember the guy in the shop asking what a sound card was and what you could do with it. Life changing experience firing up Wing Commander for the first time.
The fact that the game always crashed on exit, and they hex-edited the crash message to change it to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander" is so on-brand for Chris Roberts, it's amazing.
Bug? no it is a feature...
And today hes scamming people
@@ThomasVvV Star citizen isn't a scam
@@Nib_Nob-t7x Ok so when does the game release
@@Lee-wk3cb You can literally play it now. it just doesn't have all the features yet. If its a scam why are they spending all the money they were given developing the game they said they would. By end of year they should have passed their biggest technical hurdle "server meshing", they recently have been doing 2000 player server tests. Not to mention its single player counterpart squadron 42 will be releasing in a couple years and they have been able to show off gameplay live for it.
I was one of the programmers on 'Wing Thing' as we called it. I have fond memories of Wing 1 and Wing 2 - although the hours we worked bordered on brutal. From a programming perspective, doing all we did in the Vertical and Horizontal blanks as the raster gun traversed the screen was amazing. You have no idea how many times we would look at compiler output to eek out every clock cycle we could.
As a new indie developer, I've always looked up to your programming skills because it's so well built. Especially getting the ships to all scale seamlessly is an incredible sense of immersion
I have nothing but respect for you and your ilk, I've recently started playing around with programming in C for MS-DOS (using DJGPP) and it's given me some real perspective of the challenges you would have had to overcome, especially once you started moving to 32-bit...
What Wing Commander game functions were carried out in the vertical blank?
Thanks! You and your colleagues created something very special. 👍
Mad respect!!
This was my game. Everyone always talks about Doom, but Wing Commander was what I was playing. Looking back on this now it really is amazing what a jump forward this game was. Great job on the video.
Same. Through WC IV
It was exactly the same for me!
Same here. I was so deep into this story, especialy the two mission discs "Secret Missions", where you had to loos some of your wingmen, no matter what.
The impact of this series can't be overestimated.
The voice expansion pack for Wing Commander 2 led to me buying my first sound blaster card, which made me open my computer for the first time.
This translated into IT skills which led into a career in cybersecurity and software development 30 years later.
These games truly pushed the envelope and changed more than their developers possibly realized.
Same. The WC2 speech pack made me want a sound card, and installing my first was the first time that I ever upgraded a computer. It gave me confidence and by the late 90s, I was building computers not just as a hobby but for my job.
Heh, that's really cool. I remember what got me into software engineering and it was just as seemingly (at the time) innocuous. Just a thing you have to do for another goal that ends up paving a way for your whole life.
Two things got me into IT (for about 8 years).
My very first PC (1990) ...a Packard Bell Packmate 286-12 which wouldn't complete POST as soon as I set it up, which forced me to spend two weeks of my lunch hours calling text support ( I was in NJ, tech support was in CA) and trying their 'solutions' only to generate a total of 87 different errors...which made me so frustrated I bought 'Inside the PC" by Norton, read it entirely on a weekend, called PB tech support on the Monday and told THEM everything that was wrong with it and that they owed me an actual working PC for my $2300, and not pile of e-waste (I did indeed get a new working PC from them...tiny bonus, it was a 286-16, not a 12 Mhz.
I vowed I would NEVER be dependent on 'tech support" ever again
Wing Commander was the FIRST game I ever bought.
The SECOND thing that got me (eventually) into my IT career was getting Wing Commander 2 Speech Pack working. Added the sound card (my first upgrade) and a Gravis Joystick, then got involved with the memory management/AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG SYS. The successful upgrade and my original support experience led to me building my own PC for the first time...using an AMD 386-SX with a co-processor, 4MB (!) of RAM and dual 40MB HDDs.
When Wing Commander III came out in 1994, my IT career had already started.Field tech to corporate deskside support to corproate helpdesk, to 'special project implementation' ( such as Y2K mitigation) and consultant to 'Systems Management Specialist'...until 9/11 happened.
The Wing Commander series was absolutely brilliant...clever art and ui, compelling story, absolutely thrilling to play.
This happens in every industry. You invent the industry and then you come up with new tech (like sound cards to give better sound or GFX cards etc). Unfortunately this hasn't seemed to work for the VR industry! I've been tempted to get a headset the last few years but it looks like you need a rather powerful GFX card to make it worth while really. I'm more interested in using it as a "virtual" office/screen so I'd put it on and have an office with X number of virtual monitors I can manipulate. I don't really want to be dancing around. That seems too much like a gimmick to me.
Either way, yes the advancements in sound tech were truly amazing and it's what unfortunately lead to the death of rival systems like the amiga (they did have some you could upgrade but most were fairly limited). Being about to choose from multiple sound cards and gfx cards in the mid 90s really boosted the PC ecosystems. Adlib/soundblaster/roland etc all as viable options meant even us poor high school students could get something a few years old and it'd still function well and then we could upgrade in a year or so and then the games just got better!
Same here
In 1990 I worked at Software Etc 5 miles down the road from Origins offices. One day Chris Roberts and Stephen Beeman come into the store with a 386/33 and a Roland setup for us to setup as a demo for the game. As a 16 year old I was blown away with the game quality and sound (the Roland tracks were really something we hadn’t heard of at that time). Over the weeks I got to know many of the Origin people and eventually Richard Garriot got me for an interview, and I was hired into QA (16 year olds dream job!!!!!).
Fun fact:
- The visible hand in the cockpit was only visible if the user’s computer had the extended memory properly installed via Himem.exe.
- We had so many calls when the game first released of people asking us how to keep from dying in the first 30 seconds in the game, some people were really angry.
Wing Commander literally changed my life.
Haha, I love the detail about people being angry at dying in the simulator.
You lucky so-and-so!! What a great experience to have had though regardless, nice one Andrew, nice one indeed!!
I sucked at the game too lol I could only play with cheats on.
That's seriously cool. Origin sounds like a pretty interesting workplace lol
@@acomingextinction for real, I wish I worked somewhere cool before I got a steady boring job.
My best memory as a kid was rushing home from school…..going to my real space ship……that I built in my room using books and printers and other stuff my mom had. So in front of me was my screen with Wing Commander, then all around me was techy stuff to make my room look like a real ship. So when my eyes left the screen I would be looking at a large calculator or printer. I would then pretend to hit buttons on them as if they launched my weapons. I would be talking to crew mates etc. it was glorious.
I remember I did a similar thing as a kid with my brother after we'd constantly replay the Flying Fortress bomber segment in Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. Except our "simulator" was entirely imaginary; we'd arrange dining room chairs in a rough plane-like shape, covered it all in these camouflage pattern blankets we had, and then mounted our Nerf Vulcan blasters at various points, and would switch between them like how you switch between turret positions in the game. We'd pretend to fire at imaginary Japanese Zeroes, shake the hull to pretend we were taking flak fire, etc. I think at one point we ended up using the PSP we shared to pretend to control the bomb display, I can't remember what game we'd put it on, though.
We had GREAT child memories with one of my cousins, we played on his Thomson TO7 (I guess?), to a "flight simulator" (can't remember the name), I was the "pilot" with the joystick in front of the screen, and my cousin put a table just behind me, the computer on it and acted as my copilot behind, arming weapons and reading radar...
I think that almost 40 years later, my cousin still have a magic memory of that moment as I have...
@@garryiglesias4074 I’d trade today’s experience with games for those moments in a heart beat. I remember playing any game meant something. You didn’t see it as just something to pass the time….you RUSHED home from school to go on this adventure.
Yes man that’s awesome my kid is 6 right now and I know he’s seeing and doing stuff like this, like we did 💪🏻🤣👍🏻
To bring it back full-circle to re-enacting Star Wars, Wing Commander III had you playing as Mark Hamill's character, whose final mission is to fly through a long trench to drop a bomb in a target at the far end.
Seeing real actors (Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell) in a videogame was pretty mindbending back in the early '90s.
My favorite part of WC3 was the pre-mission 486 DX2 load ritual: Get up, grab a snack, have a drink, do your laundry, hang your laundry, sweep the porch, take a shower. Come back to find that the game is still loading, or did it crash? But the music is still playing!
It was fun going back to it once I got a Pentium and more RAM.
@@Vulkans I lived that unique brand of hell as well. Especially irritating were those few missions near the end of the game where there were FMV transitions of your spacecraft between space and atmospheric flight. Transitioning back to the sim from the FMV took just as long as the initial "turbines to speed" sequence on the cockpit computer. I too recall revisiting the game on much faster hardware and being blown away by how negligible the load times became.
How could you forget Maniac, aka Tom Wilson, aka Biff from Back to The Future!
Yep, I read entire books while playing through WC3. Those load times were absurd.
@@Vulkans WC3 ran beautifully on a 486 DX4/100 oc to 120MHz in the Asteroid field. ;) And 8Meg was enough if you raised up the Buffers and Files in the Config.sys
My mom and dad got divorced when I was just a baby and when I got a little older Dad got me for the summers. The last summer I spent with him, he bought Wing Commander brand new and he and me and my brother would take turns playing it on his computer. I think he had a 486 because we had to disable the turbo or the game was like playing in fast forward.
Wing Commander is the game that got me hooked on flight sims. X-Wing, Privateer, F-15 Strike Eagle, F-19, F-117, Descent Freespace... Those were the good old days.
@@r.l.royalljr.3905 That's a nice memory. And a golden era of flight sims.
I like the series but Tie Fighter is hands down the best in the genre.
Gotta throw in Strike commander as well
@@dennispatel3188 Strike Commander was THE simulator I was waiting for... I remember seeing tiny stamp scale screenshot which seemed "photorealistic" of the cockpit in video game magazines of the time, YEARS before it went out.... I remember then the LONG install with the depacking of all data on the harddrive (can't remember the exact duration, but it was like "a couple of hours" or so, or maybe my memory is doing funny things).
At the end, it was a great game, but not as "photorealistic" as the early screenshots were teasing us.
@@garryiglesias4074 True
WC Privateer, SW Tie fighter, SW Dark Forces, Ultima 3, Heroes Quest 2, Warcraft Orc & Humans, DnD Eye of the Beholder, Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, and Civilization; Were my favorite PC games to play on my family's old IBM386 and Packard Bell Legend 486. Great memories being 9-13 years old rushing home from school to play games.
Privateer 2 was one of my favorite games. First video cut scenes in any game I played.
SW tie fighter was my first pc game, i loved it.
Origin also did the Ultima 1-5 games. They knew their stuff.
Thank you for the excellent coverage of one of the greatest--and most important--games of all time! I was born in 1985, and so was just getting into PC gaming in 1989 at four years old with titles like Mixed-Up Mother Goose and King's Quest. Then Wing Commander came out in 1990. It hooked my family and I immediately. I would watch my grandfather, uncle, and father all take turns--and then they'd let me play, teaching me how to use our Gravis 2-button joystick (with the red buttons) to play. When I couldn't play, I was reading Claw Marks and studying the ship blueprints. Then came WC2.. and the Speech Pack! Then came Privateer, Academy, Armada, III, etc... I grew up with Wing Commander, and it was the first game series I fell in love with. I'm proud to still own all of the PC big boxes today, the novels, etc. My son watches me play now, and he'll randomly shout "you cannot defeat the Drakhai" as a taunt when we're playing other multiplayer games. What a game. What a series!
Please never give up producing these videos it's just gold a big thank you
I remember playing games like Battlehawks 1942 and F-19 Stealth Fighter and wishing we had a decent Star Wars space combat game that was better than the Star Wars arcade game we had at the time. Even though we had a copy of the PC port of Star Wars Arcade, and so didn't have to spend a ton of quarters playing it, it still wasn't the same. Then Wing Commander came along and changed all that. I would play for hours and hours doing my best to win every mission so I could get the best path possible, and finally succeeded! Eventually Star Wars X-Wing came out and satisfied that desire for a true Star Wars space combat experience, but there will never be another experience the same as Wing Commander. Thank you for the wonderful video and stay safe out there!
"so I could get the best path possible", that's exactly what I did. I remember reading an interview with Chris Roberts years/decades ago talking about the branching story paths they had spent so much time on. In reality the vast majority of players like us would keep restarting until they nailed each mission. Only a tiny fraction of the playerbase ever experienced the alternate timelines they put blood, sweat and tears into developing.
I think the problem stems from it never being made clear that after losing a mission you can quickly regain the optimal path, I assumed like many others I would be forever saddled with the consequences of my initial failure. A wingman dies and they are gone forever, that implied failing an objective had a similar permanent outcome.
There is an official period win95 port called the Kilrathi Saga that caps the game speed so it can run smoothly on any recent CPU. Its even playable on win10/11 with the fan patch WCDX. (and a mod wing commander loader to inject the Sega CD voice into WC1!)
Ooh, I remember being hyped for the voice acting in the Win95 version, but haven't checked back in about a year.
Now I want a co-op mod. Hey, if geniuses can make Might & Magic 6-7-8 into one campaign and make the resulting mod also be multiplayer...
Not to mention having toggleable invisible cockpits, which might break the original design a bit, but would probably be appreciated by modern players.
Wait, that might and magic mod has multi-player?! 🤯@@KopperNeoman
Yep, I bought a complete copy on Ebay in '02 for $110. Most I ever spent on a game. Before, I had to purchase a used older computer locally just to play the dos version I had.
I can’t tell you how much I love the running-down-the-hall bit. It’s stayed with me all these years.
Memories. I was 8 and my dad the medical I.T. guy loved PC's and Power Macs, Compaq was in my backyard and I had connections for the best hardware of the era. Wing Commander blew my mind and then some. MVG, thank you for doing classics justice.
Privateer was my intro to the Wing Commander series. Once you'd edited your batch and config files it was such a blast. Really fun series overall.
Bought Wing Commander on my Amiga 600 (stock) after seeing it on a friend's 386. It ran very poorly on the Amiga, but I didn't mind, loved it so much. Didn't finish the campaign, though (did so later on the PC). Now just this summer I found my old Amiga disks and the save file was still intact. It was great going back 30 years and try to finish what I started in my teenage years. Nostalgic.
Yep it was like idk 5 fps and now people complaining about 30 fps in games 🤣🤣
It was slow as molasses at times, yeah, but it _sounded_ much better on an Amiga.
Disk swapping on the amiga was the worst.
my first experience with wing commander was on the Panasonic 3DO. i'm actually surprised you didn't mention this version.
just like the Sega CD version, it has complete voice acted characters. However, the graphics and gameplay are near perfect to the original. No frame drops I highly recommend looking into this version.👍🏽
Same! It’s an amazing version!
That’s a very interesting and unique version.
The Panasonic 3DO is another system I want to get into, but can't justify. Get me a deal on on like the old days where you'd find stuff like that for pennies on the dollar compared to now and I'll be all over it. Back in the day a 3DO could've passed as a VCR or something and been ten bucks. These days it's not so simple, especially anything from that era. It's mostly 360/ps3/wii now.
I LOVE this series of games SO MUCH! I've met Tom Wilson and Ginger Lynn from WCIII, and I still have the Deluxe Edition film can with Tom's autograph. And the magnificent T-shirt.
Anybody remember the incredibly difficult Gwen Hyvar (sp?) mission? Had to play that one REPEATEDLY to get through it.
Truly a fantastic series of games.
Was also a big fan of the Wing Commander series. My favorite of the series was Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger for the 3DO. That was easily the best flight sim / movie / game ... thing I've ever played. Absolutely loved it!
I still have my 3DO and that game. No idea if it still works but I really should dust it off and find out.
Thanks for this video 😄Wing Commander was a really big part of my teen years, and i spent more time than i care to admit playing it and reverse engineering portions of it. Those were fun times, wouldn't trade it for the world. The Wing Commander series (and the first one in particular) are gems that just can't be praised high enough
My first Wing Commander game was Wing Commander III. As an 11-year-old, it was just phenomenal with its 3D texture-mapped graphics and FMV featuring Mark Hamill himself. It would take another 5 years to realize the final mission was ripped straight from Star Wars, and another 10 years to find out who G.L. Allen was
Same - Mark Hamill as Colonel Blair aka Maverick was awesome!
@@IskandarRahmat Don't forget Tom Wilson and John Rhy Davies!
Like wise !!
And now hamill is a total idiot.
.."another 10 years to find out who G.L. Allen was"... late bloomer? 😛
This game absolutely blew my mind, I played the trilogy like my life depended on it. 30 years later I distinctly remember the bombing mission I was on where my jump drive was damaged - but in Wing Commander you could just find your carrier in the navigation thingy and slow-boat it home! I remember feeling like it took HOURS to get back - it just nailed the immersion. The cockpit was sparking, I wasn't sure if the family shitbox 486 would crash before I got back, and then finally the carrier grows in the screen and hot damn I beat the mission. Pretty sure these were among the many games I had that had to be coaxed into running by using the demonic power of a boot floppy. I had literally no idea what I was editing in that thing, just that if I mixed and matched enough permutations of the various power words it would eventually work.
Wing commander could definitely have some Nightdive magic applied
I feel like some open sourcing could get some pretty clean enhancements.
@@titanic_monarch796 This is EA we're talking about
oh right i forgot, damn.
At age 27 in 1990 I had purchased a high end 836 33MHz system and played Wing Commander and it’s sequel. It was fantastic! I remember having to spend more money to buy a good joystick. I can’t remember if I already had the AdLib card or if I bought one for this game. Ultima Underworld was another game I loved at the time. Anyway, good times before kids and career took over spare time.
I even like the film, but I'm weird and also liked Green Lantern...
8:07 I love how there's a specific key combination for "my boss is coming, press alt-B to hide the game so he doesn't catch me playing"
Here in Brisbane back in the early 90's there was a shop in the Myer Center called "Games 'R' Us". I had an Amiga 500 and they had a whole wall dedicated to Wing Commander 1 and 2 and the various addons for the PC. That was when the PC started to become the dominant platform for flight sims and other 3d games. Finally in '94 I bought my first PC, a 486 dx2-66mhz and Wing Commander and Xwing were the first 2 games I bought. Had to run WC1 with the turbo off. I did buy it for the A500 when it came out but on an non accelerated A500 it was an unplayable slideshow. It plays well with an accelerator though which I now have in my Amiga.
I loved this game. Sadly my PC was too weak to play it, so i played it later on the sNES together with a friend. Man, those were the days…
As a kid I remember getting really excited about the game, but my 286 couldn't run it. A couple years later we had a 486 machine, but then I was way more into Star Trek 25th Anniversary as a TOS nerd. I came back to Wing Commander years later when I saw Mark Hamill's face on the box.
EDIT: I hope that this video is a low-key way of announcing that you're involved with a remaster project... :D
I was horrible at Star Trek 25th Anniversary as a kid; I only finally beat it 3-4yrs ago. :P
Wing Commander 2 actually was playable on a 286, after removing everything possible out of the config.sys, ditching the mouse driver etc. The cutscenes and transitions ran at a glacial pace but surprisingly the gameplay itself was fine.
I should add that this was using PC Speaker for audio.
@@poonsamurai That was my experience, as well. WC2 was playable on our 286, but the cutscenes played back at something like a quarter speed. It was agonizing, but worth it.
I loved the copy protection gimmick in Star Trek 25th Anniversary. You needed the map in the instruction manual to figure out the right place to go. If you went to the wrong star system you would be ambushed and enter into a 3-on-1 battle. You were supposed to lose quickly in these scenarios, but I liked the combat so much that I was eventually able to clear out these ambushes with ease. I liked the mission where you are supposed to gather parts to reassemble and operate the broken transporter but the mission actually has multiple solutions along with awesome animations for "set to kill" phasers.
Wing Commander Trilogy, remastered for all major platforms by Nightdive complete with physical release, would probably give me a heart attack.
My older brother who worked at a computer store around xmas 1992. He bought me a Sound Blaster Pro with Wing Commander 2.
I had been gaming on PC for almost a decade and going from PC Speaker to Sound Blaster Pro was such a mindblowing experience for me as a kid.
Love the beautiful TIMES OF LORE theme in the background here, too.
I was a huge fan of F-15, F-117A and many flight sims. Falcon 3.0 was brutal to learn as an 19 yr old. I had an AMD 386 40 mhz with the Math Co Processor. When Wing Commander came out, I was in bliss, I had a Sound Blaster Pro, and then upgraded it to 16 bit. I had the Thrustmaster flight stick. That wasn't enough for me, so I bought Champions Flight stick and throttle, then also got the rudder pedals. I invested $500 on hardware upgrades to get the full immersion of this game, and tossed out the flight sims for something more simple, with great music and an awesome story line. I still have many many fond memories of this game, and then the X-Wing games came out. This was the acme of flight sim games, I miss them so much. And Privateer, that just blew my mind. An independent pilot buying and upgrading my ships and weapons was so thrilling, the itchy trigger finger I had trying not to shoot a confed ship because I was smuggling contraban. This universe was so fun. It's been over 12 years since the talk of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, I was hoping to recapture those glory days. I'm fearing it'll just be in permanent development hell.
Wing Commander was the only space combat game I ever loved. X-Wing and it's spin offs were fun, Descent was amusing. But nothing could top WC for me. The epic story that ended in a cliff hanger that will never get resolved. The opening theme, the combat music, they were all a beautiful mesh with the game play and the death music just gutted me when I lost a Wingman. It was the first game I ever felt like I was really somebody in a world. Not just a random player. I loved the character interaction in WC3 and 4, it was a choose your own adventure, then played it again using the 2nd choice. And the multiple story endings they had for WC4, did I turn evil, did I stay good, did I betray Confed. The replayability was endless, then I got some of those games guides just to look and see what I missed, then discovering, that I could chose other flight routes to get different encounters, again my mind was blown how much thought went into the game.
You ought to look at Tie Fighter and X-Wing next. How they haven’t done a direct remake or update is staggering. Totally Freeform.
Something I liked was realizing I didn't have to play the Death Star trench run as intended and could just fly to the port at high altitude and then dive bomb it for the win!
I played the crap out of the TIE Fighter demo, the one with a Dodge Neon car commercial at the beginning to pay for it!
Check out the TIE Fighter Total Conversion mod for X-Wing Alliance!
Check out XWVM, it's a pretty far advanced fan remake in development that uses the real mission files and looks incredible!
There has not been a good space sim since Tie Fighter.
Awesome video! With Wing Commander, my memories are the ones with Mark Hammil. I remember being blown away that videos could play in a video game!
I have such fond memories of Wing Commander 3, I used to go to my friends house, and it wasn't a multiplayer game, but he'd fly the ship, and I'd fire the weapons. We loved that game.
Great video ! Very enjoyable. I've never played this series and I may never play this series, but you certainly got me pumped for it and I feel like I appreciate it better now.
I really loved the 3DO port of Wind Commander, my favourite version by far!
Wind Commander? Is that like a farting simulator? (Please say yes)
@@crxtodd16 haha. I noticed that typo after and thought it was too good to fix! Farting simulator is exactly what it made me think of!
@@MarkDell Haha, outstanding!
First VGA game I ever played, it was jaw dropping at the time.
I have played, and loved, all NINE Wing Commander games over the years. They still hold up!
I'm also a Star Citizen backer since I heard back in 2013 that Chris Roberts was making a new space game. I'm excited for its future.
I just dug up GOG's WC Privateer. And it's so funny because it's a very early Star Citizen. All the features that are in Privateer are also in Star Citizen. I hope the story in Squadron 42 can keep up with the feeling of Privateer.
I am also a backer SC since the beginning of the campaign
"This finally meant we were able to play out our dreams of becoming a space pilot"
Yeah, i lived out my dream of becoming a space pilot, finding that i was terrible at it, and washing out of the program to become a space alcoholic.
Still - i absolutely have vivid memories of playing that game in middle school with my friends! Great video, thanks for sharing it.
I never played the first Wing Commander game, but seeing it now I’m blown away by the sprites of the ships. So many angles and scales!
How appropriate for Factorio Expansion Pack Day!
And somehow I STILL don't have enough memory for all the sprites!! What gives?
My dad was a huge Treky, he bought this game literally when I first learned to read way back in the early 90s. This was one of the first games I played for the SNES and had a blast slowly sounding out the words and spent countless hours on the simulation because I didn’t know how to progress the game. The visuals always amazed me for the time.
only 34 more years until star citizen releases!
*until the pre-alpha demo, at which point it will have been "reimagined" as a paid Starfield mod
you have been able to play starcitizen for over a decade...
@@Tom_Neverwinteryou have been able to be scammed for a never-ending development game for over a decade you mean
@@Tom_NeverwinterAnd? It's still in alpha.
@@albeceldariu so why is starcitizen out and why do you keep plagerising a moving goalpost narrative that failed year one....
The fact that there were two chains of missions - one where you won a given star system, and one where you lost - each with it’s own scenarios and cutscenes was an incredible amount of replay ability for the time. If I recall, we lost this in WC2…
Wing Commander is a lot of fun, but I like Privateer even more. You have more freedom, a working economy, and you can become a bounty hunter. Awesome. In the second game you even play as Clive Owen in the main role and Jürgen Prochnow is the main antagonist. Finished Privateer 2 again just recently and it's still a great game, too.
Man, the hours I sunk into Privateer. Loved that game.
Spent a LOT of time playing Wing Commander and Privateer. The *animated pre-rendered city scenes* could have been a screensaver!
Loved Privateer. Wish they would remake it!
I am a console player at heart, my gamer story began with Mario on the NES.
But discovering Wing Commander on a friend's computer when I was a teenager was mind blowing. We wrote together an entire sequel to the game, missions, ships, wingmen and all.
Wing Commander 2 will forever stay in my mind as the game that defined the way we still conceive video agmes today.
And Wing Commander 4, with its fantastic introduction, is still one of my most cherished videogame memory.
As a C-64 then Amiga 500 veteran, we used to look enviously at Wing Commander and the PC master-race!
C64... that was the best machine I ever had.... I kept using it long after its lifecycle ended, deep into the '90s. I had like over 2000 floppies stacked with games. I remember often loading in games, and not ever starting them because the demo's from the crackgroups were so amazing and that i used them as a form of what we nowadays call Spotify... :)
There was no pc in my house back then, only a snes. A friend had geek parents, with a pc and lots of games. This was such 'elite stuff', even booting it was a challenge for us.
One day his dad fired up Wing Commander. My jaw dropped at the opening sequence, the whole 'mind blowed' experience, with goosebumps and all! My killer Castlevania/Megaman/Contra thing instantly seemed like child toys. Needless to say me and my friend were hooked instantly. We played non-stop, getting our asses wiped out over and over, but we don't cared. With the joystick and great speakers, the level of immersion was unmatched.
The music was printed in my soul and would not leave me for months. We were obsessed with it. We designed spacecrafts on his superior lego sets, tons of them, even motherships, carriers and docks.
This went for years, leading us to the mechwarriors stuff... wich we began to replicated on lego too, always more advanced. We eventually got to full working, interchangeable body parts. So much great memories...
Thank you Wing Commander
im old enough to remember that Wing Commander had crazy high system requirements when it came out. A rich friend of my had a PC beefy enough to run it, and we were both amazed at the graphics.
origin systems games usually meant rich kid games only
Yeah, partly why I never played it. X-Wing and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter were excellent though and I loved those games! They improved upon the genre IMO.
same. my computer couldn't run it. i think i could get it to run with like 2-5 fps so i gave up, but i always wanted to play it.
My dad ran his own computer repair business which was just barely enough for our family to get by, so we were far from rich, but we did have the hardware for it. I saw the game first when visiting a supplier with my dad. Blew my mind!
On the way home we got a freak ice patch on a back road in March and literally nearly both died. We were both completely fine except for assume scratches from the windows viewing in, but the it was hard to find an unbroken part in the car, and the computer parts we'd just bought we're ejected 20 from the car.
That's completely unrelated, but forever connected to Wing Commanders graphics in my mind.
When It was first released it was not that bad...6 months later when it was Re-released with 64bit support (the hand moved) is when it dogged out slower computers.
Glad you mentioned the onscreen joystick mirroring the player input - this was indeed super cool. I got the same buzz out of seeing the gear shifting hand in RAC rally. It just felt so next gen ☺️
I played the crap outta Wing Commander back in the early 90s.
I still watch playlists on youtube of all the cinematics when I'm feelin' nostalgic.
I remember when we got a Sound Blaster a bit before the sequel came out, and watching the Wing Commander II intro cutscene and going "Those cats are talking!" lol
I played through WC2 with only the PC speaker, so I was surprised when I finally got a sound card and realized that the cats were talking. I'd seen the intro many times, but relying on subtitles, and didn't know what I was missing.
..as long as you loaded EMM386 :) Else no talkie (and no joystick in cockpit).
The thing I enjoyed about the branching mission path was that some of the most interesting and challenging missions were only available if you had lost a couple of times. I went back years later and discovered these.
Very timely with the Squadron 42 reveal
I love the series. I still have Wing Commander 4 on 6 CDs with scenes where Mark Hamil and Thomas Wilsons play, the game was really good
Found this at Cosco in like 1994 or 1995 after keeping a copy of some game mag from '89 that had featured it. Whole stack of 3.5 floppies in the box plus the expansions. We had a 486-33 and it ran perfectly. Dad would later upgrade the system to a 66 with math coprocessor and I actually managed to play it. And then I could not stop moving for about an hour just pacing because my brain needed to slow down. Haven't played this in decades because I moved on to WC3&4 + Prophecy. But yes to the whole video.
I still have Wing Commander 4 on a multiple CD pack. I think there are 5 CDs in it. Crazy how bad gaming was back then with disc swaps due to copy protection.
Currently working on a documentary that involves a lot of devs that worked for Origin on the series. It’s an interesting piece of gaming history.
God, I have all these games on GOG, the difficulty for 1 and 2 are so damn brutal.
They are difficulty games, but unfortunately WC1 & 2 don't work well in DosBox. Even if you get the cycles more or less acceptable there's still some timing issues that cause the player's shots to not register as hits on the enemy spacecraft which makes the games significantly more difficult.
It was this game and the Wing Commander series that it got me working in IT! Each game demanded better hardware and it exposed the computer industry to me. I"m now a Director of an IT department and i have the Wing Commander series to thank ! Cheers!
13:48 And that unmistakable voice is none other than Cam Clarke, who also voices Liquid Snake in MGS (and a literal ton of other instantly recognizable characters)
Yep, the voice of Leonardo in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series too.
I was about to comment that!
I LITERALLY WENT STRAIGHT TO THE COMMENTS TO SAY THIS! I immediately recognized that voice as Liquid Snake.
What an absolutely incredible voice actor
I recognised him as Leonardo but didn't even pick up on Liquid Snake. I'm still trying to figure out what other voices he's done.
No to mention KAAAANEEEEEDAAAAAAA!!!!!
Although he does seem a bit young (at the time) to be playing a commander in his 40s or so.
I played (surreptitiously) Wing Commander from a diskette in the computer lab. Also, I remember playing (at home) Descent: FreeSpace with a Microsoft SideWinder Precision Pro joystick and a Sound Blaster sound card. It was a blast.
Wing Commander and Privateer were my jam growing up among other space and flight sims around that time.. I used a 386 DX-40, Sound Blaster, and a CH Joystick. It was such an amazing time for PC gaming. I had hoped Star Citizen captured some of that spark, but I've long since lost hope with it and Squadron 42.
I was a total Wing Commander kid growing up. We had the PC and SNES versions and I forgot how gimped the SNES version was. I recall the PC version of WC2 (maybe WC1 too) that you really had to muck w/your config.sys to get the required memory allocated right. Privateer was maybe my favorite out of all of the series (yes, even WC3 w/Mark Hamill).
And nowadays I just go "meh, chuck 12 GB at it, this laptop can't run anything that would ever need more anyway"
Getting this to my Amiga 500 as a 11 year old was simply amazing. I had it for a month and then i bought a Supra 50mb hard drive with extra memory. This extra memory (from 1mb to 2 mb) improved the graphics, a big step up as i remember it. The surprise and joy i felt after this unexpected upgrade is lifelong.
I started with Wing Commander 2. Amazing game and yes, that music is very much burned in my brain. Fun fact: WC2 had two mission packs and a speech pack. IE paid DLC without the downloading. WC1 also had mission packs and IIRC one of the big plot points of WC2 is set up in those mission packs.
"DLC without the downloading" We called those Expansion Packs back then, due to aforementioned lack of downloading.
Speech Packs were such an early-90s thing, in that brief window when digital sound cards were becoming popular, but CD-ROMs hadn't yet become standard. In hindsight, it's a little amazing that people paid ~$20 just for some VOC files, but that was the style at the time.
I love these retrospectives, please do more. Most of these games were right before my time and I didn't know anyone who played them growing up. Such a cool series.
facts
The cut scenes were funny ... the cut scene going to the fighter top scene bounce run, then the lower scene running normally. So the people have accordion waste.
I had the Amiga 500 version, played on an A1200. As mentioned in the video, it didn't look as nice as the PC version but the gameplay was definitely still there, and I enjoyed every minute of playing through to the end. Great memories.
Raptor > Rapier and I will die on this hill. In space.
As a child, I may have done a Campaign in which I systematically removed all my wingmates. I feel kinda bad about it now.
I lived for torp runs in a Broadsword, so I won't yuck your yum - park yourself right at the edge of the flak field, draw your bead and lock, then afterburn straight in. Man what a rush.
I'm with you on the Raptor > Rapier thing, but not murdering my own wingmen. :)
The 'speed advantage' doesn't really mean much with A-burners, and the 'maneuverability advantage' is offset by the heavier firepower and ability to tank more hits. Raptor any day of the week...
I did the same thing so I could have higher kills on the kill board.
I was hooked on WC III on the 3DO. Everything about it was amazing, the story, sound, graphics. It had it all.
They should send whomever fought them over the name “Wing Leader” and gift basket every year for saving them that embarrassment.
Indeed one of my childhood games. I remember going to a friends house after school to play on his 286. It felt slower because of what you explained, compared to my older brother's 386 16Mhz PC. I remember I coulnd't kill the first named enemy, he always got away 😂
That vectorized Star Wars arcade had a PC version. It played well on a 286, and at full graphics on a cheap 386. I spent hours on it as a kid.
Crazy that you just put this up, I just started playing it again 2 nights ago for the first time since the 90s! I even ordered a thrustmaster joystick, getting it tomorrow so I can appreciate the game properly (according to the WC dorks).
I had the misfortune to work w/ Chris Roberts for 4 years - glad that era is long over
Care to share more about that experience please?
oh boy
I believe it.
I'm guessing Star Citizen will never be finished.
A great example of extraordinary vision and ambition - and all the problems that can cause.
Yup, I played the heck out of this as a kid. One of like 10 PC games I had in the 90's.
Raise up fellow vintage space combat gamers!
The OG on my 486 dx2 with my 1mb game card was amazing. Never saw a music conductor move so fast, and the speech pack 3.5” floppies was just unreal once it finally worked! I’m a SpaceMarshal in Star Citizen and hope CR realizes our childhood dreams with SQ42 and SC! What a masterpiece legend he is.
...too bad Star Citizen is a joke...💸💸💸
I played the ever living frack out of the SNES port. Great game and can only imagine how fun the OG version was.
Tie Fighter > Every other flight sim
The booklet called "Claw Marks" REALLY inserted you into the world. It was presented as a magazine read by the pilots but was totally a immersive tool to get you into the world of Wing Commander. What a great insert for the game which I read many times
1992. My first PC. A 386 SX25 and a copy of Wing Commander. After installing the game I realized I had forgotten to buy a soundcard. A Soundblaster was duly purchased the next day. Awesome!
I still remember being blown away by that running scene at a computer show in 1990. It was incredible. The whole game just changed pc gaming back then.
Wing Commander and that Orion intro with the Strings was such a mind blower back in the day when we got our Sound Blaster-16 card. Being able to name my own character, and have a place between missions also felt like this was a real place that I was living and breathing in when talking to characters between missions. Wing Commander was really ahead of its time. Playing a game within a game when you sat down in the training module.. it was just so cool.
1:20 Kids just don't know how good they have got it with all the buttons and actions showing up in-game on the HUD. I still remember playing those old games and needing a print out (if you were lucky it came with the game) for flight and mech games on PC just to know what keys did what because you needed so many, and I remember thinking there is no way they could get these games onto a console with the limited number of buttons.
Elite Dangerous actually did it first for me where I preferred playing on PC with an Xbox One Controller because they managed to get every single keybinding onto a controller by holding combinations of buttons, and implementing that into the HUD as well, it was such a cool game back in 2015, so much so that I got my dad hooked onto it. That was revenge for him getting me hooked on Eve Online many years prior. RIP dad 2022, miss him very much he was my gateway into PC gaming in the 90's.
Did you make this video because Wing Commander 1+2 is on sale on GoG? I had to buy it yesterday. I also loved Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites on PC because it had gameplay elements of Wing Commander but they had the Enterprise and old-school Star Trek ships that I loved! Not enough people talk about those games, sadly. And there was only two like it that came out, all the rest after Judgement Rites had a different art style and gameplay.
Thank you for going through the different ports! Always wondered which ones could compete against the original PC version.
You mentioned Battlehawks 1942..
I was about 10 years old in 1990, and went to a friends house he had A commodore Amiga. At the time, I had a BBC Model B. We fired up his Amiga and I played Battlehawks 1942...
The thing I remember being blown away by was the detail of the enemy aircraft. They looked amazing.
In that moment I knew- I had to own a Commodore Amiga!
I first played WC on SNES in 1993 and fell in love with it. I then moved onto the PC versions of the game. I read all the novels as well. One of my favorite games ever! I even created a fan page on Facebook for it.
I loved this game so much. I remember playing it on the SNES. My best memory was being at a cabin up north with my family and it was pouring all day... I played and beat Wing Commander in a single sitting. It was such a satisfying feeling.
I played the heck out of that game on my A-2500, the 020 speedup and running from hard drive was a great experience for young me
OMG. Wing Commander 3 was just gold. Specially with its story line and the addition of Mark Hamill. I still use the term “watch and learn, colonel” in my vocabulary. 😊
Forgot to talk about the damage shown on your ship when you landed. The more hits you took, the more visual damage was shown. Leaking fluid, laser scoring.... Was awesome!
Played them all, Privateer is still my favorite of the series, and tied with MoO II for favorite DOS game.
The voice of the commander in the Sega CD version sounded strangely familiar. It turns out that he was voiced by Cam Clarke, who also voiced Liquid Snake!! Apart from that, he was probably in every major game or movie, animated series. Simply LEGEND!!! MVG great job, unintentional second meaning. As usual, great quality content. Greetings and I wish you all the best!!
Oh man! This was my favorite game back when I was 14, used to stay up really late on friday nights playing it.
This was the game that got my dad to finally buy a Soundblaster back in the early '90's.
I remember how mindblowing it was to hear actual voices coming out of our family computer.
I still to this day cannot get it running properly on modern machines.
WC1 and WC2 were the games that taught me computers. Digging into absolutely every system detail to eeek out the a tiny additional bit of speed. I never had exactly the right computer for any of the games and I always had to tweak to get things right. I kind of became the nerdy kid who could put computers together from scratch and fix almost anything (in the 386/486 days!) because this game was soo good I had to see that next bit of story and improve that play the smallest of bits. The story branching was mind blowing to me. I was obsessed with the story and even spent an embarrassing amount of time writing my own fan fiction when bored in school classes. This game had a definite part in my becoming a hardware engineer, and a successful one at that in the most dilbert of ways. The series really should continue for real, not just in spirit. It's some of the most fond of memories for me.
I only got to play this game on the SNES, and it still blew my mind how addictive it was. The fact that the fighters you were playing with could die permanently was a true game changer for me. Suddenly I was tasked with not only taking out the enemy, but protecting my friends. Total game changer. I remember after beating the game I played through killing all of my comrades and seeing where the story would take me. Really awesome part on the devs for taking that into account.
In 1990 I was playing this non-stop. Thanks for a great video!
Was working at a research centre in England when this came out in the 90s.
I got WC I & II and the expansions for PC which the director let us play on the lab PCs after work.
Still had the boxed games until this year when they sold on Ebay for 3 figures.
I loved the poster blueprints for the ships that came with the game.
Fav ship was the Raptor. Nice vid.
First game my roommate purchased for his new 386 our freshman year of college. When he had his 386 built he provided a sound blaster card that he had picked up at a computer store and asked them to install it. I remember the guy in the shop asking what a sound card was and what you could do with it. Life changing experience firing up Wing Commander for the first time.