Introduction to Wing Commander

Vasator

Spaceman
I don't know if this was posted before but I thought it would be a fun idea. How were you introduced to Wing Commander. When was the first time you saw it and played it?

The first time I played Wing Commander was in 1994/95 in High School. I was taking a class on Drafting and Design and was introduced to CAD for the first time (using 386 computers running DOS). Our Teacher Mr. Dixon would let us play a mission of Wing Commander when we finished a project. The next year he introduced us to Wing Commander II (The games ran really really slow on these machines and I remember playing it on my computer at home a 486, it was a lot faster and had to get used to the speed increase)

So that is how I became a Wingnut and I have loved playing the games since then....

So how about anyone else? what was your first intro/experience with Wing Commander?
 
The first WC game I played was WC2, and I was very young. I don't think I got very far.

When I was around 12-13 years old, I played WC3 a lot... With invincibility.

The WC game that really convinced me to go back and give all of the WC games a try was Standoff. It was the first WC game I played without cheating, and it still remains one of my favorite WC games. (In fact, it's my favorite right now, and I'm overjoyed to read that the team thinks they can finish it before Christmas 2009.) My second favorite game would be, oh, it varies from time to time. Maybe WC4 or SM1 or SM2.
 
I remeber playing WC1 at my cousins house and ejecting so that we could see the next cutscenes... But it wasn't till I played WC2 through much later that I was hooked.
 
I first played it on an Amiga A600.
It was a rip off copy (I had no idea what pirate software meant back then) and we had no keyboard map, so we had to work out a lot on our own. This also meant no auto pilot and manually making our way from nav point to nav point, which to this day I find more rewarding than just pressing 'A'.
The thing was slow as shit, but my skills became something akin to Iceman. It was pretty cool because being that slow meant that the missions really did feel arduous; the final assault in Venice would take at least an hour!
Me and a mate used to play it a lot and one of us would be co-pilot for the other. if I was pilot, I'd shout out 'Full guns' or IR 'missile!' and he would do the keyboard work.

Not having a PC for years (until a little after WC3 came out) I remember going into my local Game shop, looking at WC2 on the PC and seeing the screenshot of Thrakath saying 'My ships have destroyed the Tigers Claw'. It's funny how that made my blood boil!!!
 
I got a sound-card and CD-Drive combo back in 94 or so which came with an EA top ten pack which included wc2 deluxe. I actually played all the other games first (sherlock holmes etc) before trying wc2 as I didn't much like elite.
When I did play it I was blown away, I loved it so much. A couple of years later I got a p120 and my dad got me wc3 for christmas (ea classic edition) which hooked me, I found wc1 in another classics pack on a games stall in the local market some years later (99 or so i guess) but by that stage I was already lost in the WC world. That said, while i've had the key games for ages now I'm still collecting stuff (strategy guides, the CCG, sega-cd and 3do ports).

I'm not sure what really sold wc2 to me, but i think it was the mission where you lose
shadow
(sorry if someone hasnt got to that bit yet) I was distraught, I played that mission through about 20 times that day, just to try and save her.
 
Wing Commander II was the very first PC game that I got and played, and to this day it maintains a special place in my heart.
 
My elder brother got WC 1 as a christmas present in 1990 or 1991 - he played it all night long and I watched him for most of the night and was incredibly impressed. It was my favourite game immediately but it's only with WC 3 that I got also really interested in the universe and some years later, I became (or tried to become) a collector.
 
Gateway 2000 game pack that came with our new PC in the early 90s (92 or 93 I think). It had Priv/RF/Strike Commander and Armada. What more could a boy ask for? Soon after I acquired WC2 Deluxe. I was hooked.

I remember being so excited when the WC3 ads started to show up in the old mail order software mags (remember those? Oh how I loved to get the new PC/Mac Connections) Ahh those were the days.
 
My parents took a dim vew on video games, and wouldn't let me load any on our family computer at first, so I was late to the party. Then, in 1992-3 (my freshman year in high school), I made friends with a guy that had a much nicer computer and who showed me X-Wing. We would take turns flying together--one of us piloting and the other "R2-ing" for the pilot--taking care of shields, power, weapons, targeting, etc. Then, he told me that if I liked X-Wing, there was a game that I would really love, and offered to sell me his entire Wing Commander collection--WC1, SM1+2, WC2, SO1+2, and the speech addon pack, for $20. Best purchase I ever made. I loved the games, and played through them in order, on my parents 386. Then we got a 486 and all of a sudden the games got a lot harder, and I was introduced to the beauty that is the losing tracks. I've been hooked ever since.

Incidentally, I discovered WC1+2 my first year of High School, WC3 (Kilrathi Saga version) my first year of college, the CIC my first year of grad school, and Standoff during my first year in the working world. I just got married, so I feel like there's got to be something big coming in a Wing Commander way soon!
 
WC4 was a big deal when I was in 8th grade. There was about 5 of us that would talk about Colonel Blair and everything else. It was great times.
 
Around the same rough timeframe I got WC1 for the SNES and WC2 for the PC. I played both of them interchangeably and constantly from any random point for what seemed like years before I got another WC game, but by 1994 I had already caught up on Academy/Privateer and was waiting on releases like Armada and WC3.
 
Mine was the movie.

I had wanted to see it when it came out, but none of my friends in middle school wanted to see it ("But c'mon guys! The trailer to Episode I is attached to it!"). The movie bombed in the box office and I soon forgot about it.

Then in winter 2003, I hit up the mall looking for some great bargains at the local Suncoast. They had a stack of $10 DVDs, and I found a copy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, nice! Underneath that was a few copies of Wing Commander. I figured "what the hell" and bought that as well, since I'd wanted to see it. I actually didn't watch it until a few days later, when everyone else was at church or work.

I went nuts. The movie kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time, and the ending completely blew me away. Fooling the huge-ass enemy ship into going in the black hole? Genius!

I think I registered here soon after that, and I just started buying all sorts of Wing Commander stuff. I bought the two movie novels, the handbook, three of the games (Wing Commander: Prophecy on PC and GBA and Wing Commander Academy)...all sorts of stuff. I still have my Wing Commander CIC polo shirt with the callsign "Eight-ball" hanging up in my closet.
 
My introduction was through my cousin. He had Wing Commander 1 on the old 5 inch floppy discs for the PC, and you had two options when you loaded "The hard way but honest" which was the normal version, and "For cheats" which made you invulnerable. Played through on there while visiting him, then he introduced me the next time I visited a few years later to Wing Commander 3. I got WC 3 when I got home. It was a year later I got my own copies of WC 1 and 2 with the add-ons when I was on the sick from school with a broken leg, then got 4 when it came out and Prophecy when it first came out. Took me ages to get Secret Ops cos I didn't even know of it till I started coming here. Finally a mate sold me his copy of Prophecy Gold. I also have the sound track album for Prophecy, and to this day the title track is on my MP3 player.
 
It all started at a friend's house playing WC1. We would go back and forth between WC1 and Strike Commander. We couldn't figure out how to pronounce the Scmimitar (we said "shmikter") or 'fly' the F-16 because it wouldn't move left or right like the starfighters would. We were 5 and 7, so we hadn't yet developed nasty flight sim skills. This served as my introduction to PC gaming.

Fast forward a few years, and I was loving life. I had my own Zeos and was spending many afternoons (once homework was finished, of course) playing WC2, Falcon 3.0, and X-Wing/TIE Fighter.

Wasn't life simple back then? My biggest worry in those days was whether or not I'd be able to save the Frigate Redemption... I hated that mission. Now words like 'economy,' 'workforce' and 'relationships' seem to dominate my day to day affairs... :D
 
My brother came home one day with the collector's cd edition of X-Wing one day in 94. We became insanely good at it.

Then in 98 I went to a friends house. He said he had X-Wing and was stuck on a mission. (he had only a DOS computer)

After showing him some tips, tricks, and strategy. We got past the mission.

He then showed me Wing Commander 1.

I remember I died in the asteroid field. He turned on the afterburner lock and forgot to tell me how to turn it off. :p
 
My introduction to Wing Commander, as I recall, was playing an emulator of WC1 on my PC years ago, not knowing what i was doing, and royally sucking.
Then, a few years later I got hooked on Wing Commander Academy. I love that show. Which made me try WC again.
I played WC4 and became addicted, and of course not knowing what was really going on, I went and searched and found copies of the older titles, and I've been thoroughly addicted ever since.
 
Wing Commander 2 with ten other games that came with my original PC. It's the only one of those ten games I still play today, my favorite Wing Commander, and probably one of my favorite video games of all time.

I still remember getting my rear-kicked all over the place, then I learned you could run away from fights, and then I learned how to fight. Before WC2 I never really played a game that had such a detailed story before and it took me by surprise and sucked me in.

Then I sort of forgot it for a while. Then I remember watching the Wing Commander Academy cartoon on USA around the same time I saw Wing Commander 3 in Kmart and got excited about memories of Wing Commander 2 and bought it right away. After that I was a Wing Commander fanatic.
 
The first thing that introduced me to Wing Commander was the Kilrathi ship in Ultima VII

And the first time I played a WC game, was when I had the luck of finding Privateer CDrom version for just 200pts (2$ more or less) at some book market that got open for a weekend at my town.

Privateer was a really hard game and I didn't manage to do much because I didn't even knew how to jump ~~~ (also the game came without any documentation, it was just the CD).

Years later I got the chance of playing the Kilrathi saga and that's when I really became a fan of wing commander.
 
I think my first exposure to Wing Commander as a game was when was Junior year of high school. I was hanging out with a buddy of mine(Powell99 to be exact) and he brought his laptop with WC on it and was messing with it during class. I archived this memory and was only brought to it again by Powell's mentions of it in conversations long past.

Well, it wasn't until just recently I was exposed to Secret Ops and Standoff, and for some reason I just can't stop playin' it. I can't put my finger on it, though I've always been addicted to flight sims(X-wing, admittedly was my first) I even set aside some time to sit down and watch the movie when it came on My Network TV a week ago. I've been scouring over the encyclopedia over the past few weeks incessantly also.

A now, I can't stop writing posts for AAO that are more than most essays I've ever written. So yeah, You could call me a birthing-wingnut.
 
My first encounter with WC was when I watched my friend play WC2, WC3 and WC4 on his computer. My parents didn't allow me to play computer games (Kids are supposed to be outside playing according to their view) so it was first in 1997 that I got my first game, WCP.
 
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