Thank you for playing Wing Commander

Wing Commander is a 3D Space Combat Simulator game that released on the IBM PC in 1990 - over 34 years ago as of this episode - and it one of the finest games ever made. It took advantage of the IBM PC to maximize the immersion of a space combat simulation. It's game design had no equal. In today's episode we take a closer look at how Wing Commander came to be, its technology, game design, ports and how it shaped the series and the genre. Enjoy!

Sources:

Music Credits

► The Soldier - 1994 Richard Joseph
► Times of Lore - 1988 Martin Galway

Timestamps:

00:00 - 01:37 - Before Wing Commander
01:38 - 02:35 - Wing Commander Arrives
02:36 - 04:19 - How the game came to be
04:20 - 05:48 - 2D Bitmap Technology
05:49 - 10:22 - Game Design
10:23 - 11:45 - Sound and Music
11:46 - 14:41 - The Ports
14:42 - 16:06 - Legacy
16:07 - 16:47 - Conclusion

Social Media Links :

#WingCommander

[ToumalRakesh]

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.

[smuchow]

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.

[andrewhofmann]

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


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.

[devmech]

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.

[CyberKnight]

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.

[AppNasty]

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.

[r.l.royalljr.]

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.

[Tainted]

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.

[jonarsenal]

Please never give up producing these videos it's just gold a big thank you

[FoxbatStargazer]

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!)

[AllieT-wqeq]

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

[trueakuma]

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!

[d.ryan]

Wing commander could definitely have some Nightdive magic applied

[Renk]

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.

[voldemrt]

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.

[unpopularopinion-]

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.👍🏽

[IM-xsuv]

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.

[mariobrito]

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

[scherge]

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.

[nathanddrews]

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