Hey guys!
I can share some more of the story. For the past… ten years or so, I’ve been trying to track down everyone I can associated with the game, and through that I’ve found out quite a bit more about what happened.
To understand why it’s missing, you should first have some background about the development history. Prior to 1992, Origin didn’t have a major interest in developing console games. Before the sale to EA, they did not have the development infrastructure, the marketing budget or the business relationships needed to make that work. What they could do was bring in extra revenue by licensing their existing games to companies that thought they would work on consoles (and regional platforms like the Amiga, FM Towns, PC9821.)
For the original Wing Commander (and The Secret Missions) a company called Mindscape chose to license the game to produce versions for the SNES (and the Amiga, targeted for the European market that Origin wasn’t able to support.) What that meant was that they signed an agreement with Origin that either gave them a direct payout or points on the final sales (likely a combination of both) and then they took responsibility for actually making the game. Mindscape got the source code, the game assets and so on and went off and used their own team to build their ports. These companies were also responsible for marketing their games; that’s why the SNES ports aren’t generally featured in Origin catalogs, why their ad campaigns seem so different and so on; it’s a totally different group of people trying to sell the game to a totally different audience. And that’s a great system because it meant absolutely no risk for Origin (save potential damage to the brand) in exchange for money that would fuel projects like Strike Commander and Wing Commander III.
Now of course, when Electronic Arts bought Origin the playing field changed. Suddenly, Origin was a small part of a company with worldwide reach and with dedicated resources to build their own ports of games. EA maintained entire studios for consoles, and they invested heavily into the hardware itself (especially, at the time, the 3DO.) Suddenly the dynamic changed: you didn’t license Wing Commander to Mindscape because Mindscape was one of EA’s big competitors… you developed ports within the EA family.
In some cases, this meant the job went to other EA studios. Wing Commander III for the Playstation, Wing Commander for the SegaCD and the cancelled Wing Commander III for the Sega Saturn all went to distant third party EA affiliates (which is why so little development material survives!) EA also decided to expand Origin’s own group, funding a team to do their own console games. Why? Because they were gearing up to support the next big thing… the 3DO. EA’s famous founder, Trip Hawkins, had left the company to create 3DO and naturally EA was going to provide full support to make it a success; they would develop original content, launch titles, port the jewels of their library and so on. And to make that happen, it meant building more teams.
The resulting console group was formed in Austin with a lot of familiar names (many of whom would come to shine after many of the original Wing Commander team members went to Digital Anvil)… but they were originally located at a satellite office separated from the rest of the company. You heard in Richard Garriott’s book that there was a pecking order at Origin, with the most profitable, biggest projects getting the first pick for new hires… the big Wing Commander games at the time, then Ultima, then original projects and then at the very bottom of the barrel the guys doing the console ports. If that was where you started, your goal was to work your way up to the big leagues.
The 3DO, of course, died pretty quickly and Origin’s console group diversified. 3DO games were developed on the PowerPC, which made porting them to the Macintosh very easy… part of the group used that experience to port Super Wing Commander, Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV (spinning off into a separate company called Lion along the way.) Other parts of the team had been developing a console-oriented game called Prowler, which was moved to the Playstation and ultimately cancelled (that team then moved to do Wing Commander V PSX… and then when Chris left the company, they took over the Wing Commander Prophecy team.)
I talk about the pecking order and how the guys doing these games were the lowest on the social ladder… but you know what? They were also the guys keeping the lights on. Games like Wing Commander III cost a tremendous amount of money in the initial investment… they MADE a lot of money in the long run, but financing a project on that promise doesn’t work that way. Ports, on the other hand, have a much smaller buy-in and while they don’t make anywhere near as much money, they turn it around quickly and predictably.
Which brings us to the SNES and Genesis part of the team (I include Genesis games because development happened, though none were ever released.) Building out this console team, Electronic Arts understood it could make quick money porting Origin’s back catalog. The Ultima series had been massively successful in Japan, especially Ultima III for the NES… so building some already battle-tested games for those platforms just made sense. A new licensing deal was struck with a company called FCI (a major Japanese publisher with limited inroads in the US) that worked a little differently from the old model: FCI wanted Ultima games and would pay Origin to port them then take responsibility for their release and marketing.
Easy money! In 1993-4, the deal started churning out games: a successful port of Ultima VI for the SNES, a platformer called Metal Morph made out of (really) old Privateer assets. Then, a port of Ultima VII, renamed simply Ultima the Black Gate, a series of original Ultima games for the Gameboy and SNES, the Runes of Virtue series… and then at the end of the road, SNES versions of Ultima: Savage Empire and Wing Commander II.
Wing Commander II sticks out as odd, doesn’t it? FCI wanted ULTIMA games because Ultima games were gold in their main market… so why did they buy a Wing Commander II port FOUR YEARS after the actual game shipped? In fact, WC2 SNES started life as a GENESIS game, developed in part by the team at Looking Glass in Boston. Sega (Sega proper) was eager to have a Wing Commander game on their system and it was being built with their support while also sharing resources with Wing Commander II for the FM Towns, a game being built per the terms of a contract that predated the EA buyout. The Genesis team missed a milestone and the decision was made to cut the project… until the SNES group clawed it back, thinking it could be finished and sold to FCI with limited investment.
Whew!
So the SNES team, under Alan Gardner, producer Billy Cain, etc. finished the game and shipped it off to FCI, who paid them for it and began the rollout process. And that’s where we get to the original question: why didn’t it come out?
There are several parts to the decision:
- No SNES games were going to sell well in the US in 1995. Sales of the console were far below expectations for Christmas 1994. The decision was made to release Savage Empire only in Japan, where dedicated Ultima fans would at least make it profitable.
- … but Wing Commander II wasn’t going to sell well in Japan, either. No sense localizing it when there was no audience (Wing Commander II FM Towns, released a few months earlier, helped make that decision!)
- Hurting things further, Wing Commander II would have been an especially expensive game to release because it used a double ROM (like Starfox.) The game was too big to fit on a standard cartridge and needed the more expensive kind that very few companies ever actually chose to put out.
Now, story becomes legend around this point and we hear about there only being one copy and no backups and so on. That’s only partially true. Because of their extreme disinterest in anything console, there was no particular chain of custody at Origin. These games were being churned out to pay for the projects people really cared about, there was no concept that SNES games were going to even want to be played again… and everyone involved had bigger fish to try.
But there are more copies out there. The reason we don’t hear about that part of the story is because it happens after Origin steps away. The game is shipped to FCI and THEY make the decisions about marketing, sales, duplication, etc. The decision not to duplicate was their call… and it was made AFTER they started the marketing for the games.
While Origin did not retain a prototype (as far as we have been able to tell from contacting all on the team) FCI likely did… but that’s difficult to follow because:
- While the company exists today, they have stopped developing games. An inability to access their library and to license the many games they did put out is a regular problem in retrogaming circles.
- If it existed, it would be in Japan.
THE BEST HOPE that we have is something I’ve only established for sure recently: they DID create a run of review copies which were sent to US magazines. The review copies were sent in a press kit along with a ROM of the also-unreleased English language version of Ultima Savage Empire. Finding one of these copies is our best hope. I’ve contacted several reviewers and learned more about the process… but it’s a 25-year old SNES ROM, the likelyhood that they’re still readily accessible is slim. But I’m confident it WILL happen eventually.