Promotional Sheet Provides Sneak Peek At WC4 (October 1, 2006)

[ChrisReid]

Greg Barwis has kindly donated this super cool sell sheet for Wing Commander IV. The front size features the game's famous promotional poster art, and the back side has various information that retailers could use to market the game. Like many pre-release items for WC4, the expected ship date is listed as December 1995, although the final launch slipped to February at the last minute. Despite this two month delay, the gold standard of interactive movies was completed in less than 14 months. Check out our ten year anniversary retrospective on The Price of Freedom here.

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CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Fighting for survival is a hard habit to break... and some hard-bitten warriors simply don't know how to embrace peace. Now that the bloody battle between the Kilrathi and Terrans has been concluded, the Confederation doesn't have to look very far for their next enemy. Civil wars and unrest have broken out on the home front. Colonel Blair is recalled to help the Terran government stamp out the growing fires.

It won't be easy. Signs of decay are becoming impossible to ignore. The Confederation is beginning to splinter under the new pressures. You must deterine how to save it - or if it should be saved at all. Sometimes it's far from simple to line your sights on the enemy.

FULL PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Wing Commander IV is the next stage of the epic adventure - when men of ambition try to use the aftermath of a galaxy-spanning war to promote their own greed for power. The complex story is a masterpiece of motivation and corruption, and the characterization is richer and more immersive than anything done before in the gaming industry. The combat, as always, will leave you breathless.

ORIGIN, far from resting after the success of Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, has been hard at work improving graphics, cinematic quality and player interactivity. Can the best get better? It has to be seen to be believed.

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Original update published on October 1, 2006

 

[CataclysmX]

I also saw that it originally says 4 CDs. Not 6 CDs. (In the second image)

 

[Foxtrot]

ya whats up with that ? was it ment to be a 4-cd game ?

 

[ChrisReid]

ya whats up with that ? was it ment to be a 4-cd game ?

It was meant to be however many discs it took once they finished polishing everything up. Four discs was an estimate at one point, but you'll notice that the disc holder the game shipped with has space for seven CDs. It just turned out to use six.

Note that WC4 on the Playstation is only 4 CDs, but that came out more than a year and a half after this sheet was printed, and this does not refer to that.

 

[Don]

Four discs was an estimate at one point, but you'll notice that the disc holder the game shipped with has space for seven CDs. It just turned out to use six

Is that the reason why the game was delayed for two months?

 

[Quarto]

Is that the reason why the game was delayed for two months?

Yeah, that's right - they had to re-open all the boxes and put two more CDs into the disc holder, which can be pretty time-consuming .

Seriously, though. At the time when this sell sheet was written, all the material would already have been shot, so the delay probably wasn't caused by them suddenly realising that they had more material to deal with than anticipated. I think, judging from the WC4 Post-Mortem (which, IMO, is one of the most interesting documents in the CIC Archive, because it reveals so much about the development process), the delay was caused simply by the game (as opposed to the movies) being still unfinished and/or buggy. Even after those additional two months, they had to still leave many bugs unfixed to release the game, apparently.

 

[Delance]

That makes sense. For example, Eisein tells the player to take out certain Vesuvius' turrets, but that's not required at all in the game. Maybe it was a feature that was left out due to time constrains?