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I didn't say it wasn't a huge obstacle. In fact, I said that it was. But the fact remains, you can get C source code from an executable. From there, it's not all plain guesswork, though. There are other debugging and probing tools you can use to figure out what the various functions are...

All software development businesses today do. In fact, it is common for data management to be done by specialized companies now, not in-house. EA is huge, though, and it may be the individual divisions that handle this on their own. But you can't be too surprised that EA doesn't have the data...

That wasn't what they did back then, though. Maybe id, but 3D Realms didn't make engines. They didn't even make the Build Engine used for Duke Nukem 3D. There were a few (mostly crappy) games based on the Duke Nukem 3D code, but that definitely was not the primary goal in its development...

Were they really that much more informal than id or 3DRealms at the time? How did they make Wing Commander 2 if they didn't even keep track of the code for Wing Commander 1? I think you have a picture of how things worked then from piecing together anecdotes from people who worked there, told...

I still don't buy this. First of all, there was no technology boundary to preserving the final version of the source code of a game in the mid 90's. That's nothing. Secondly, they had to know they would be useful again. For sequels at the very least. In many cases (Wing Commander I to Wing...

I'm just telling you that it is possible. You can get the source code. But what you are looking at afterward is almost completely unreadable. It would take a lot of work to figure out what everything does. Depending on the size of the program, not just more effort than a company is willing...

I assure you it is possible. I do things like this sometimes, though on a smaller scale. It doesn't happen for the reasons I mentioned before - you lose all the organization, in-source comments and documentation, function and variable names, and some of the original lines as they were written...

You can pretty easily disassemble an executable, and there do exist decompilers which can give you back source code in the original language. So no, the source code isn't lost. You can get it back from the executable. Except you will have lost the organization and comments and variable names...

How did that happen? What happened to all of that stuff when Origin closed?

Wait, you mean the source code for Wing Commander I is lost?

Got to go with the original - Wing Commander I. Even though it was the first, I think it had the best gameplay, with nothing coming close until Prophecy. I also think it had the most memorable ships, weapons, and characters.

I didn't vote, because I haven't played the games outside of the main series enough to judge them fairly. I might have picked Prophecy/SO because of SO, except that I really love Prophecy, so that isn't really fair. Those should have been two separate choices. As it is, I would probably pick...

I think it was, yes.

Did it? I don't remember WC4 (the game) making any reference to Blair's choice of woman from WC3. I always chose neither, so it fit my WC3 experience perfectly :)

I vastly preferred the Raptor to the Rapier in WC I. I didn't notice a significant difference between any of the ships in Prophecy, except for the difference between fighters and bombers.

I disagree with all the points raised in this thread in criticism of Prophecy. Right from the beginning, Prophecy had things working against it. It was introducing a new enemy. Blair wasn't the main character. The FMV was scaled back significantly. And I was as unhappy about all of these...

Right, but like I said, I'm not talking about those people. Just people who casually played the games in the past. And those are the people you are trying to reach with familiar elements. That's true, but I agree that FMV will not happen. And I don't really think it is needed. I think...

You may be right, but I am surprised by it, because everyone I have talked to about Wing Commander (who is not a major fan of the series) always remembers not the original, but Wing Commander III and IV. And Privateer, now that I think about it. That's different, though. In a movie or TV...

Why do you think this? When I hear people talk about Wing Commander these days, they are pretty much always talking about Wing Commander III or IV. Nobody cares much about the Tiger's Claw from what I have seen. And Kilrathi? You'd need to have the Kilrathi involved somehow, but I don't...

If you don't want it Lucas-ified then prequels are not the way to go. I already know what happens with the Kilrathi war, and I don't want to play any more games set then. I want to see what happens next. Frankly, I would have liked to see them continue the story with the bugs and make a...