Christmas 1992, me in my pajamas waiting for like an hour to install this game from 7 3.5" floppy disks + 4 more disks for the optional Speech Pack. Awwwwwwwww Yessssssssss.
I played Wing Commander 1 back in the early 90's when I was 8. Never played 2 or 3. Watching these make me want to revisit the franchise now that I'm in my 30's. Nostalgic as hell. Wing Commandef was amazing in its time.
Wow. So I played this game on a 12Mhz x386. I also had the speech pack but I've actually never see it run so fluid and smoothly. I've probably seem this opening a hundred time in the actual game but seeing this is like seeing it for real for the first time. To give an idea of how young I was, I *sure* that Kathra also did the voice of Dr. Claw on Inspector Gadget.
I remember buying this with the speech pack in fall 1991 and it being so hardcore that it destroyed the hard drive on my pc while installing. I had to wait three days for a replacement drive to come so I could play and it was torture.
Actually, the first game I saw that had voice output was an adventure - Sherlock Holmes. It was quite an incredible thing back then. Blew your mind. And I am pretty sure, it was quite some time before Wing Commander II. But dont ask me for the exact year.
I always liked the character models better for Wing Commander 1 and Wing Commander 2. The Kilrathi character models in particular are better than those cheesy Kilrathi character models in Wing Commander 3.
Man, I loved the Wing Commander games. They were the reason I bought my first computer. WC II is probably my favorite because, with the Special Ops add-ons and the huge story they told, you really got a lot of entertainment from them. Although Privateer holds a special place in my heart as well. Origin games in general are some of my best memories of gaming in the '90's.
I remember this game. It was the first time I heard digital speech on a computer game - it blew me away. I just had to get a sound card for my computer, and I begged my dad to get me one.
Oh, memories... I had to buy a separate speech pack to get the voices. I think it were around 11 disks which had to be installed afterwards. But it created a whole new level of depth to gaming. Can remember how many people I dragged in front of my PC and forced them to watch the intro. :-)
Well, this was one of the first PC game to use digitized voices. All voice actors were members of the staff (Paul Arden Lidberg (Khasra) and Gilbert Austin (Prince Thrakhath) were scriptwriters, Ken Demarest III (Blair) was the AI Programmer, Kirk Winterrowd (Maniac) was in the Quality Assurance, etc.)
My old-time favourite game. Great music + great graphics and a fine soap opera plot! I still can feel the excitement when flying the Broadsword, getting a torpedo lock on a Kilrathi cruiser, approaching it with furball fighters on your tail, getting multiple hits from the cruiser's flak fire and listening to the music which starts when your ship takes enough hits... Epic memories! God i miss that game!
I loved the music. Old School Soundblaster is so great. And I'll never forget the "Plinking" sound mass drivers made. (On a related note, I'll also never forget how flimsy the ferrets were.)
"Caernarvon station, Gwynedd system" I never realized this as a kid but man, could this be any more Welsh? I'm surprised the crew weren't wearing WRU jerseys and singing choir songs to welcome home returning fighters.
We had the same specs - I had problems freeing up HDD space for this game. 21 Megs was huge during those days. I used to show off this cinematic to my cousins to show off what my computer could do haha.
Wow, I LOVED this game ! Do you remember it took incredible 21MB (including speech pack) on your hard drive ? Most standard hds those days had a size of about 40- 90MB !
Wow. this is game loosk AWESOME. Now I wish I had kept my old Windows 95 PC so i could play this. I have played WC 3 4 and Prophecy, and I have never even seen what 1 and 2 look like before. Now I want to play them so badly! Such classic titles!
"We've developed inter-galactic travel, laser weapons that fire slower than the speed of light, torpedos that somehow work in space, and a method of stellar dogfighting at speeds slower than on earth during WWI, and we're fighting talking cats...I'm even prepared to believe that fucking hairdo...but a -cloaking device-? No, Captain, you blew up your own ship! Traitah!"
@SammySawyerT I think the first Sherlock Holmes adventure which had speech was the Case of the Serrated Scalpel. That was a good few years after WC2. The Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective video FMV games were also after WC2, iirc.
Fun fact, the planet the Kilrathi emperor is looking at is actually the world of the Ultima games. You can spot that from the land masses and the twin moons. In fact in Ultima 7 you can actually find a crashed Kilrathi ship in a farmer’s field and he mentions the pilot shouting, “Kill Wrathy, I’m not sure who he means but he sounded angry about Wrathy.”
This game looked pretty fucking awesome for it's time. And yes i played it ALOT back in the day. Miss those days when games actually were more than FPS... :P
Ah, this takes me back. I remember hours and hours spent blowing up dralthis, nuking fralthras, laughing at the 'pluk-pluk' of mass drivers, and wondering why i could not get past that last mission and see the endings that didn't end at caernarvon....although then again, considering the start of WC3, that bad ending could work as well, if you discount the secret missions packs for WC2
julien valentin It was Adlib's downfall that it could not produce sampled sound. With games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and, of course, Wing Commander 2 being all the rage, this was a big issue.
This was the first game I ever heard audio dialogue in. I was so blown away by that and by the graphics, the detail, the storyline. Watching it now, it all looks kinda silly and cartoonish, in a way I didn't notice back then.
Haha, this is what I'm talking about! I remember playing this game like 15 years ago, we had a 386DX33 with a 125mb HDD and it was absurd because the game took 21 megs with the speech pack, lol. WC2 = Best video game ever. Probably the game that put Sound Blaster on the map. I think I could probably recite every damn line from this game word for word at this point, I'm gonna have the midi songs running through my head all night now, haha..
@Elleroth - "referring to the Windows 95 re-release" Ah. Indeed one of the early complaints about gaming in Windows rather than DOS was the CPU overhead. What DID run seamlessly on a 386-33 in DOS, would chug-alug again in Windows.
@radams36 Non-interactive entertainment is a thing of the past, and fully immersive experiences like Wing Commander are what killed it. A game "makes it" when it's a great game, not when it becomes a movie.
@NameCallingIsWeak I was referring to the Windows 95 re-release from the Kilrathi Saga box set. Their mouths just keep running while they aren't talking, much like some old, terrible Godzilla flic. I played it originally on a 486-33 with the 900 1.44 floppy install and then the DOS CD version, both with the speech pack and both worked perfectly. :) The Win95 problem has persisted since I 1st played it on a K6.2 350 and again later on my 3ghz Pentium 4 machine. :/
Kills me, just KILLS me, that the Wing Commander movie was so utterly lame, when all the first three WC games were SO good - good plots, interesting characters. Lot of GREAT memories on all three games. And these opening cinematics were AWESOME! I loved the way that the ancillary material, like the ship's newsletter, did a really nice job of establishing the honorable history of the Tiger's Claw, then you load up WC II and BOOM! She's GONE! Wow! Really bowled me over back in the day.
Wing Commander has one of the best sci-fi stories ever. I think a TV Series should be produced but following the storiline acoording to the GAME. Season 1 could tell the storyline of Wing Commander 1 and Secret Missions 1 & 2. Season 2 would be Wing Commander 2 and Special Operations 1 & 2. The problem is to tell the story the right way we would get seasons as big as 40 episodes each.
Download DosBox, man. All that the Kilrathi Saga is are the dos versions of the games, with a windows front-end. You can run the .exe's for 1 and 2 using DosBox, and it'll run perfectly.
i think i was 8 years old and i screamed out loud "noooooooo" when Spirit killed herself. i couldn´t eat or sleep i didn´t leave my room. it went on until my mother let me watch City of the living dead. and later when i killed Jazz i screamed "FAAAACK YAAAAH"
I thought his name was "Prince Thrakhathamon" for a while. Like, "I will speak with Prince Thrakhathamon. Guards, you are dismissed." But at least I knew they weren't saying to kill Wrathy.
Classic, but I still don´t get why the humans, facing total annihilation or at least enslavement through intelligent tigers, would name one of their carriers "Tigers Claw". And as a kid in the early 90s I found the intro very confusing because of that name.
@Elleroth In hindsight, perhaps there is something still left in the code that prevents it from recognizing a modern cpu that just causes it to assume it's on something slower than a 386-33.. Also, that torpedo issue in the Win95 release made blowing up K'tithrak Mang really fun! xD My solution was to pull up and hit the afterburner after launching.. One did go off right under me though which pretty much annihilated all my armor and shields. D: Other than these 2 things it worked great!
@Cherrybloodsyrup I don't think it feels that way, though. Zipping around and making turns like that would crush you at those speeds in real life. Probably. Donno...havn't tested it out myself...
Try to find a copy of the Wing Commander Saga on eBay or something; it has the first three games, optimized for Windows. Includes all the speech packs.
Anyone notice ol' blue hair makes the same exact facial expression as Owen Wilson's character in Behind Enemy lines when he's getting chewed out by the Admiral? Check out around 2:30. I need to make a "separated at birth?" slide show.
Spent hours freeing 600+ Kb DOS memory in AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to get the speech working.
load himem.sys Kids these days have it so easy.
Oh, I came here for memories and you brought back nightmares!
Christmas 1992, me in my pajamas waiting for like an hour to install this game from 7 3.5" floppy disks + 4 more disks for the optional Speech Pack. Awwwwwwwww Yessssssssss.
Haha me too!
Except we got it in the early summer of that year
OG. I had this exact experience with TIE Fighter + Defender of the Empire floppies. Best memories.
Sound like your childhood was as memorable as mine. Good times.
I played Wing Commander 1 back in the early 90's when I was 8. Never played 2 or 3.
Watching these make me want to revisit the franchise now that I'm in my 30's. Nostalgic as hell.
Wing Commandef was amazing in its time.
Dereck Dunn You can download Wing Commander 1-4 on Origin cheap.
3:33 Haha! Caernarvon Station, Gwynedd System! Caernarvon is a town in in the District of Gwynedd in North West Wales where I'm from!
Don´t elect leftists there!
I must have watched the opening cinematics a million times as a kid, because now, all these years later, I could quote every line almost verbatim.
0:25 ironically they used the Kiralthi stealth fighters in “Wing Commander Academy” the cartoon.
Oh God, I played this so much! Wonderful memories. At the time it looked so awesome. Still does!
These are great family games but they also warned us about the psychotic left...
@@Yatukih_001 I think you missed the point
Wow. So I played this game on a 12Mhz x386. I also had the speech pack but I've actually never see it run so fluid and smoothly. I've probably seem this opening a hundred time in the actual game but seeing this is like seeing it for real for the first time. To give an idea of how young I was, I *sure* that Kathra also did the voice of Dr. Claw on Inspector Gadget.
my god this brings back memories..from when I was like 9
I remember buying this with the speech pack in fall 1991 and it being so hardcore that it destroyed the hard drive on my pc while installing. I had to wait three days for a replacement drive to come so I could play and it was torture.
I learned about this game from a Kill Wrathy in Ultima VII
Actually, the first game I saw that had voice output was an adventure - Sherlock Holmes. It was quite an incredible thing back then. Blew your mind. And I am pretty sure, it was quite some time before Wing Commander II. But dont ask me for the exact year.
Oh trust me. When I saw this in 1992 I was floored! :) Course I was the only kid on the block with a computer fast enough to run Wing Commander 2.
considering the year this was made, this is excellent animation!
The tune that starts up at 2:49 is my favorite piece of music in all the Wing Commander games.
OMG this brought back memories. Was the first time I ever heard a computer speak. It was totally amazing!
I always liked the character models better for Wing Commander 1 and Wing Commander 2. The Kilrathi character models in particular are better than those cheesy Kilrathi character models in Wing Commander 3.
Think I just heard Frank Welker doing his Dr. Claw as a Kilrathi awesome!
Man, I loved the Wing Commander games. They were the reason I bought my first computer. WC II is probably my favorite because, with the Special Ops add-ons and the huge story they told, you really got a lot of entertainment from them. Although Privateer holds a special place in my heart as well.
Origin games in general are some of my best memories of gaming in the '90's.
I remember this game. It was the first time I heard digital speech on a computer game - it blew me away. I just had to get a sound card for my computer, and I begged my dad to get me one.
Just finished this game after all those years. What a classic!
The golden combo was the Roland MT-32 for music with the Sound Blaster for the speech pack. What a game.
i can't believe how i remember so many details... the line deliveries... all that stuff. Crazy.
Oh, memories... I had to buy a separate speech pack to get the voices. I think it were around 11 disks which had to be installed afterwards. But it created a whole new level of depth to gaming. Can remember how many people I dragged in front of my PC and forced them to watch the intro. :-)
That game is a classic! It bring up so many memories.
Thanks for this video : )
00:30 "With the loss of your carrier, you drift endlessly through the void"
01:50 oh guess he drifted back to earth then.... lol
Well, this was one of the first PC game to use digitized voices. All voice actors were members of the staff (Paul Arden Lidberg (Khasra) and Gilbert Austin (Prince Thrakhath) were scriptwriters, Ken Demarest III (Blair) was the AI Programmer, Kirk Winterrowd (Maniac) was in the Quality Assurance, etc.)
My old-time favourite game. Great music + great graphics and a fine soap opera plot! I still can feel the excitement when flying the Broadsword, getting a torpedo lock on a Kilrathi cruiser, approaching it with furball fighters on your tail, getting multiple hits from the cruiser's flak fire and listening to the music which starts when your ship takes enough hits...
Epic memories! God i miss that game!
Awesome capture! Brings back so many memories of one of my favorite games.
He is badass. That's proven in the Special Operations intro.
Awesomness! I LOVE THAT INTRO! Wing Commander II is awesome - blew me away back then!
I loved the music. Old School Soundblaster is so great. And I'll never forget the "Plinking" sound mass drivers made. (On a related note, I'll also never forget how flimsy the ferrets were.)
Great! Just listening to the midi brings tears to my eyes
"Caernarvon station, Gwynedd system"
I never realized this as a kid but man, could this be any more Welsh? I'm surprised the crew weren't wearing WRU jerseys and singing choir songs to welcome home returning fighters.
This was the best back in the day ~~ First Talking heads in games as far as I know? I watched this tons of times as a kid
We had the same specs - I had problems freeing up HDD space for this game. 21 Megs was huge during those days.
I used to show off this cinematic to my cousins to show off what my computer could do haha.
I was about 4 or 5 when I played this.. I'm 20 now.. Geez this is still soo dang epic!
i misst so much to play and feel.this was a game..........
Wow, I LOVED this game !
Do you remember it took incredible 21MB (including speech pack) on your hard drive ?
Most standard hds those days had a size of about 40- 90MB !
Wow. this is game loosk AWESOME. Now I wish I had kept my old Windows 95 PC so i could play this.
I have played WC 3 4 and Prophecy, and I have never even seen what 1 and 2 look like before. Now I want to play them so badly! Such classic titles!
"We've developed inter-galactic travel, laser weapons that fire slower than the speed of light, torpedos that somehow work in space, and a method of stellar dogfighting at speeds slower than on earth during WWI, and we're fighting talking cats...I'm even prepared to believe that fucking hairdo...but a -cloaking device-? No, Captain, you blew up your own ship! Traitah!"
SpookyJohnathan awesome 👏 😂😂
OMG this brings me waaaaaay back
@SammySawyerT
I think the first Sherlock Holmes adventure which had speech was the Case of the Serrated Scalpel. That was a good few years after WC2. The Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective video FMV games were also after WC2, iirc.
You were behind the times then. I had a 200 mb drive back then. It was still quite a bit I suppose. Back in the days of Windows 3.11
I used to say this phrase over and over again when I was about 12 until my parents wanted to punch me in the face.
Fun fact, the planet the Kilrathi emperor is looking at is actually the world of the Ultima games. You can spot that from the land masses and the twin moons. In fact in Ultima 7 you can actually find a crashed Kilrathi ship in a farmer’s field and he mentions the pilot shouting, “Kill Wrathy, I’m not sure who he means but he sounded angry about Wrathy.”
This game looked pretty fucking awesome for it's time. And yes i played it ALOT back in the day. Miss those days when games actually were more than FPS... :P
@Elleroth - "they didn't seem to even bother to sync the speech" You needed at least a 386-33 to get the lip-syncing working in real time.
Ah, this takes me back. I remember hours and hours spent blowing up dralthis, nuking fralthras, laughing at the 'pluk-pluk' of mass drivers, and wondering why i could not get past that last mission and see the endings that didn't end at caernarvon....although then again, considering the start of WC3, that bad ending could work as well, if you discount the secret missions packs for WC2
This is the first time I see the intro in color!
Yeah!! Adlib compatible digitalized voices!! :)
julien valentin They were actually not compatible with Adlib; they needed the SoundBlaster card.
you may be right..It's been quite a while..
julien valentin It was Adlib's downfall that it could not produce sampled sound. With games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and, of course, Wing Commander 2 being all the rage, this was a big issue.
With my card (not a pure adlib) I was able to hear some digitalized voices in very few game..I though WC2 was one of them but i may be wrong...
Cooool ! Good old things . I like it.!
A classic! Tears to my eyes...
This was the first game I ever heard audio dialogue in. I was so blown away by that and by the graphics, the detail, the storyline. Watching it now, it all looks kinda silly and cartoonish, in a way I didn't notice back then.
Haha, this is what I'm talking about! I remember playing this game like 15 years ago, we had a 386DX33 with a 125mb HDD and it was absurd because the game took 21 megs with the speech pack, lol.
WC2 = Best video game ever. Probably the game that put Sound Blaster on the map.
I think I could probably recite every damn line from this game word for word at this point, I'm gonna have the midi songs running through my head all night now, haha..
Maverick (aka Bluehair) and Maniac were in fighters when the Tiger's Claw was destroyed.
So many hours put into this game
@Elleroth - "referring to the Windows 95 re-release" Ah. Indeed one of the early complaints about gaming in Windows rather than DOS was the CPU overhead. What DID run seamlessly on a 386-33 in DOS, would chug-alug again in Windows.
Cheers for clarifying!
You should be able to play them using DOSBox (Google for it) on newer versions of Windows.
the very first version of the games took up 12 megs of hd-space, which was outrageous! i only had a 20 mb drive :D
Thinking of getting a new flight stick just for the game
The best game there is, The best game there was and The best game there ever will be!!!
wow 386sx25? I was rocking a 386sx16. I remember I upgraded to the 486dx25 in anticipation of Strike Commander, which showed up, what, two years late?
@radams36 Non-interactive entertainment is a thing of the past, and fully immersive experiences like Wing Commander are what killed it. A game "makes it" when it's a great game, not when it becomes a movie.
@NameCallingIsWeak I was referring to the Windows 95 re-release from the Kilrathi Saga box set. Their mouths just keep running while they aren't talking, much like some old, terrible Godzilla flic. I played it originally on a 486-33 with the 900 1.44 floppy install and then the DOS CD version, both with the speech pack and both worked perfectly. :) The Win95 problem has persisted since I 1st played it on a K6.2 350 and again later on my 3ghz Pentium 4 machine. :/
For me too :) I loved this game :)
This game I think singlehandedly put Sound Blaster on the map...and the rest is history...
Kills me, just KILLS me, that the Wing Commander movie was so utterly lame, when all the first three WC games were SO good - good plots, interesting characters. Lot of GREAT memories on all three games. And these opening cinematics were AWESOME!
I loved the way that the ancillary material, like the ship's newsletter, did a really nice job of establishing the honorable history of the Tiger's Claw, then you load up WC II and BOOM! She's GONE! Wow! Really bowled me over back in the day.
Jogging Ben told me it was the first game using 'speech' back then...
Oh Yeah! Rockin that S##t with 8 meg of Ram and an 8bit soundblaster!
Memories......
@Armageddon2077 Most likely a population is kept alive as up to Kilrah's destruction they were considered a delicacy by the Kilrathi.
Wing Commander has one of the best sci-fi stories ever. I think a TV Series should be produced but following the storiline acoording to the GAME. Season 1 could tell the storyline of Wing Commander 1 and Secret Missions 1 & 2. Season 2 would be Wing Commander 2 and Special Operations 1 & 2. The problem is to tell the story the right way we would get seasons as big as 40 episodes each.
@fgusta2new
Monitor which I had in that time (on my 386) was monochrome.
Well, as I said, that is where I downloaded it.
Love the Kilrathi voices.
Download DosBox, man. All that the Kilrathi Saga is are the dos versions of the games, with a windows front-end. You can run the .exe's for 1 and 2 using DosBox, and it'll run perfectly.
i think i was 8 years old and i screamed out loud "noooooooo" when Spirit killed herself. i couldn´t eat or sleep i didn´t leave my room. it went on until my mother let me watch City of the living dead. and later when i killed Jazz i screamed "FAAAACK YAAAAH"
@BillyCauseyjr It was, as a cartoon series. Wasn't really that great if you ask me. Search for it - you can find the whole series for download.
I thought his name was "Prince Thrakhathamon" for a while. Like, "I will speak with Prince Thrakhathamon. Guards, you are dismissed." But at least I knew they weren't saying to kill Wrathy.
Dude... Maverick was Christopher 'Maverick' Blair... the main character of Wing Commander games I-IV, he didn't die on the Tiger Claw!
Classic, but I still don´t get why the humans, facing total annihilation or at least enslavement through intelligent tigers, would name one of their carriers "Tigers Claw". And as a kid in the early 90s I found the intro very confusing because of that name.
What's confusing is the movie changed the name to "Tiger Claw."
my first pc game! :D
@Elleroth In hindsight, perhaps there is something still left in the code that prevents it from recognizing a modern cpu that just causes it to assume it's on something slower than a 386-33..
Also, that torpedo issue in the Win95 release made blowing up K'tithrak Mang really fun! xD My solution was to pull up and hit the afterburner after launching.. One did go off right under me though which pretty much annihilated all my armor and shields. D:
Other than these 2 things it worked great!
I remember installing the game :-) 15 5 1/2 inch discs i think..and the speech pack came extra?
Yeah, I think it was about 5 hours or so till it was installed! xD
@Cherrybloodsyrup I don't think it feels that way, though. Zipping around and making turns like that would crush you at those speeds in real life. Probably. Donno...havn't tested it out myself...
Aww... I so miss the whole plot of WC2 "Who's the traitor really?!"
@SpookyJohnathan Two words: Inertial dampening!
Lol. I agree, it's still an amazing game. The whole story in WC2 is awesome.
We must return to MIDI BGMs x) lol
Best Midi soundtrack ever.
That guy in the white uniform reminds me of Louis' dad from family guy. XD
Try to find a copy of the Wing Commander Saga on eBay or something; it has the first three games, optimized for Windows. Includes all the speech packs.
@KrassoSzoreny
Kilrathi soldier sees tiger in zoo. Song plays.
Mucha muchacha... papparapara... mucha muchacha.... papparapara!
More games need pixel art cinematics :)
This would make a great MMO game to WoW
Anyone notice ol' blue hair makes the same exact facial expression as Owen Wilson's character in Behind Enemy lines when he's getting chewed out by the Admiral? Check out around 2:30. I need to make a "separated at birth?" slide show.
Yes, both games are almost one and the same.
I want my Wing Commander and Origins back:((
they took our jobs