These articles are so odd.
From an academic perspective, I find it kind of annoying that he only lists his sources at the bottom of the article, without referencing with in-text citations. This is not any great fault on his part, because it's the way most journalists write (they rarely provide sources even at the end, which he at least did), and it's the way most of these game history blogs work. But it makes it very hard to filter through the account and figure out where he's basing on previous claims and where he's making his own claims. Needless to say, this would have clarified a lot in terms of the mistakes he makes.
For example, I had a look at the 2013 Chris Roberts interview (published 2016) he mentions and quotes in the article. And sure enough, there's Chris Roberts himself saying SM1 was an afterthought that came from having leftover assets. Chris Roberts makes it pretty clear the decision was made
after the game's release - differently to the Making WCI and II account from the Ultimate Strategy Guide. Based on that, it seems that he didn't so much ignore the facts or misrepresent them; rather, he simply made the decision to believe one source over another. Had he properly referenced the article with in-text citations, this would have been clear.
Had this guy provided proper referencing, the source of his mistake would be clear: faced with two conflicting sources in this 2013 interview and the Ultimate Strategy Guide from 1990, he simply chose to go with the newer and more personal account from Chris Roberts. This is a mistake, but I think it's one of his more understandable mistakes - after all, the account from the Strategy Guide is only clear about when the idea of the Special Edition was proposed (and even that is a very fuzzy "earlier in the year" - when?). It doesn't necessarily follow from that that Roberts immediately proposed the add-on disk; it could be something that occurred later. But it could also have occurred exactly at that time, and it's clear from the Roberts interview that after 23 years, he's hardly a reliable source (and who could blame him?). In any case, it's far too little to go on, if you're going to make the claim that this is why SM1 had weak missions (weak missions, of course, are a problematic claim in itself).
And yeah, the SM2 thing is even more surprising. At least with SM1, it's possible to see where he's coming from. But the idea that SM2 was built on the WC2 engine...? What source could he possibly have found to suggest that? That having been said, even with no evidence whatsoever, there
may be something to that claim, if you strip it of the gameplay hyperbole, and concentrate
only on the frame limiter. Undoubtedly, WC2 did begin as a code modification of WC1, and undoubtedly up to a certain point, it would have been relatively easy to take a new function from the WC2 code and insert it back into WC1 (just look at the non-interactive WC2 demo). However, you would want to be crazy-careful with stuff like this, and that's undoubtedly why only the frame limiter was inserted (and of course, it's easily conceivable that the frame limiter was developed
for SM2 in response to player feedback, and
then ported into the WC2 code). I mean, any code-based gameplay change would require a very substantial additional amount of testing of the whole package, which not only would make SM2 more expensive to develop, but also could be difficult given Origin's QA department would have been small and constantly overworked with multiple projects.
Interestingly, that same page explains exactly what Chris was saying in the update… the Speech Accessory Pack wouldn't have been possible from a materials standpoint. If you're interested in some of the math, a big release from Origin at that point in time would ideally have a $6.00 materials budget, which is the cost of printing the box, stickers, manuals and media. A 3.5" diskette was $0.72 towards that budget, which means that with seven disks Wing Commander II has already used up $5.04 with $0.96 left over for the Joan's booklet, install guide and box. Add three more for the speech and you're in the red!
Anyway, he does all this again after the criticism, sharing the original script and the finished introduction by the way of insisting that there's been some mistake, that an intentionally maybe-sinister thing has happened and can't be explained. But we know exactly what happened: going up against disk budgets! There were working builds of the game with a significantly longer intro that included the courtroom… and they were reduced into a single conversation with Tolwyn that uses the common office sets and portraits. (Which makes you wonder: is that left out because he didn't come across it in his research or because it would directly contradict his following paragraph about the sound disks?)
I don't know if he would have come across this stuff in his research. He's dealing with old games, so of course he
should have come across some stuff about disk costs and how they affected decisions. But maybe he didn't; certainly, the numbers you cite here are completely new to me, and I thought I was fairly well-versed on all the development history stuff that can be found on WC history. This would be information you'd do well to post for him as a comment. Certainly, his comment about the Speech Pack being a blatant cash grab is extraordinarily out of place. It's impossible that someone who looks at games history would be entirely unaware of the extent to which space availability affected game design at that time.
Oh, by the way - he mentions the game cost $50 and the speech pack was $25. Is that actually correct? I'm not sure why, but I was under the impression that at the time, the game would have been closer to $25. Do you know the original prices for these?