Hello!
I stumbled across this forum and thought I'd say hi. I worked on various Wing Commanders back in the day when I worked at Mindscape, which had European distribution rights for Origin, plus licensed titles for conversion to other platforms.
As best I recall, in 1990 I started doing some amount of production work on Ultimas 5 and 6 on Amiga and ST. Then about a year or so later, my boss Phil Harrison showed me a pre-release build of Wing Commander which was just incredible. We needed to pre-sell the game to retail so we built a fast machine that showed off the capabilities - 386-33 with LAPC-I for music and Soundblaster for speech. The roadshow and trade events where we showed off the game were a lot of fun because it always got a great reaction.
After the game's release, I did a lot of customer support helping players get the game working properly in base memory, which was a bit harder in Europe because we needed to store international keyboards in base memory too, so it was tight. I ended up writing a guide that made it into subsequent WingCo boxes to help people, and then ultimately things got a bit easier when ms-dos 4.01 made way for ms-dos 5.0.
I helped a bit with WC2 and WC3 although I wasn't part of the production team. I just got builds from Origin, helped get them tested, localised, and mastered then did some amount of support on them. I remember waiting forever for Strike Commander; I think the trailer was out a year before the game.
Amiga was a big platform for us in Europe and we'd already ported the Ultimas, but Wing Commander was thought too processor-intensive for Amiga. Someone in the studio knew Nick Pelling from 8-bit days and knew that he was a maths genius, so we approached him and he told us that he thought he could do it. Nick was a bit of a hero of mine, having made some incredible 8-bit games on the BBC Micro.
I don't remember a lot of the production process, but I recall regularly going to Surbiton to see how things were progressing, sign off milestone etc. Progress was slow because he was doing a lot of under the hood stuff, like sprite renderers and resamplers, taking Origin assets and figuring out how to best present them on Amiga hardware at a decent framerate. There were a couple of milestones which were just triangles, dithered sprites and geometry lines, which felt a long way from a game! Plus, IIRC, Nick got sick along the way, which slowed things down. It wasn't easy!
I remember Nick picking through the CV source code and finding some bugs in the Kilrathi attack patterns and was pleased that he’d made them a bit smarter.
In retrospect, the slow schedule helped us because new Amiga hardware started to show up which had faster clock speeds and more advanced features, like AGA. I recall there being a lot of debate about what we put on the SKU sticker since it didn't run particularly well on a stock Amiga 500 but the sales team didn't want to say that it wouldn't run.
Either before or after launch, Commodore approached us about supporting the CD32 at launch. They gave us a prototype which was a breadboard and CD drive screwed to a wooden frame. The game was actually a great fit for the CD32 as it had a byte-per-pixel mode. I think Nick wanted to do some more enhancements but for some reason we kept it simple. It ended up being the pack-in game with a CD32 although the hardware itself didn't sell well.
Around 1993 I moved from Mindscape to EA, which was a coincidence because EA bought Origin at a similar time so I ended up being responsible for the Amiga WingCos there. I believe I tried to persuade them to release the Secret Missions, but I was the new guy and there wasn't much interest.
A little while later we hired Chris Robert's brother, Erin, and hired a team in Manchester to make The Darkening, which ended up being Privateer II, if memory serves. They were a strong, tight team and I think the game turned out pretty well. I suppose people here will remember more than me. Although I wasn’t too involved, dealing with the live action filming was interesting and new. I got to go to Pinewood for the wrap party too.
EA Warrington ultimately got closed down and most of the team moved to our office near London. I might have the chronology a bit wrong but I think most of the team moved onto Harry Potter.
Still making games, 33 years later. Wing Commander was definitely a seminal part of my early career!
I stumbled across this forum and thought I'd say hi. I worked on various Wing Commanders back in the day when I worked at Mindscape, which had European distribution rights for Origin, plus licensed titles for conversion to other platforms.
As best I recall, in 1990 I started doing some amount of production work on Ultimas 5 and 6 on Amiga and ST. Then about a year or so later, my boss Phil Harrison showed me a pre-release build of Wing Commander which was just incredible. We needed to pre-sell the game to retail so we built a fast machine that showed off the capabilities - 386-33 with LAPC-I for music and Soundblaster for speech. The roadshow and trade events where we showed off the game were a lot of fun because it always got a great reaction.
After the game's release, I did a lot of customer support helping players get the game working properly in base memory, which was a bit harder in Europe because we needed to store international keyboards in base memory too, so it was tight. I ended up writing a guide that made it into subsequent WingCo boxes to help people, and then ultimately things got a bit easier when ms-dos 4.01 made way for ms-dos 5.0.
I helped a bit with WC2 and WC3 although I wasn't part of the production team. I just got builds from Origin, helped get them tested, localised, and mastered then did some amount of support on them. I remember waiting forever for Strike Commander; I think the trailer was out a year before the game.
Amiga was a big platform for us in Europe and we'd already ported the Ultimas, but Wing Commander was thought too processor-intensive for Amiga. Someone in the studio knew Nick Pelling from 8-bit days and knew that he was a maths genius, so we approached him and he told us that he thought he could do it. Nick was a bit of a hero of mine, having made some incredible 8-bit games on the BBC Micro.
I don't remember a lot of the production process, but I recall regularly going to Surbiton to see how things were progressing, sign off milestone etc. Progress was slow because he was doing a lot of under the hood stuff, like sprite renderers and resamplers, taking Origin assets and figuring out how to best present them on Amiga hardware at a decent framerate. There were a couple of milestones which were just triangles, dithered sprites and geometry lines, which felt a long way from a game! Plus, IIRC, Nick got sick along the way, which slowed things down. It wasn't easy!
I remember Nick picking through the CV source code and finding some bugs in the Kilrathi attack patterns and was pleased that he’d made them a bit smarter.
In retrospect, the slow schedule helped us because new Amiga hardware started to show up which had faster clock speeds and more advanced features, like AGA. I recall there being a lot of debate about what we put on the SKU sticker since it didn't run particularly well on a stock Amiga 500 but the sales team didn't want to say that it wouldn't run.
Either before or after launch, Commodore approached us about supporting the CD32 at launch. They gave us a prototype which was a breadboard and CD drive screwed to a wooden frame. The game was actually a great fit for the CD32 as it had a byte-per-pixel mode. I think Nick wanted to do some more enhancements but for some reason we kept it simple. It ended up being the pack-in game with a CD32 although the hardware itself didn't sell well.
Around 1993 I moved from Mindscape to EA, which was a coincidence because EA bought Origin at a similar time so I ended up being responsible for the Amiga WingCos there. I believe I tried to persuade them to release the Secret Missions, but I was the new guy and there wasn't much interest.
A little while later we hired Chris Robert's brother, Erin, and hired a team in Manchester to make The Darkening, which ended up being Privateer II, if memory serves. They were a strong, tight team and I think the game turned out pretty well. I suppose people here will remember more than me. Although I wasn’t too involved, dealing with the live action filming was interesting and new. I got to go to Pinewood for the wrap party too.
EA Warrington ultimately got closed down and most of the team moved to our office near London. I might have the chronology a bit wrong but I think most of the team moved onto Harry Potter.
Still making games, 33 years later. Wing Commander was definitely a seminal part of my early career!
