Interactive Entertainment Reviews Privateer (October 15, 2023)

[ChrisReid]

Today we have a neat "video review" for Wing Commander Privateer from Interactive Entertainment, a CD-ROM magazine. This is from the inaugural issue dated February 1994. The clip doesn't include rolling video, but it has a narrated overview presented on top of a large number of screenshots, which would have qualified as full fledged multimedia back in the day! In a similar vein, the author gushes about the vast universe, diverse planets and enormous freedom provided by the Gemini Sector. It's the same language you might hear in a modern review of Starfield today, which is interesting food for thought on how expectations evolve with the cutting edge of computer gaming over the decades. AD was able to piece together their proprietary image format and pair it with the appropriate audio to recreate this sequence, and now you can easily enjoy it on YouTube!

Interactive Entertainment (IE) was an interactive multimedia CD-ROM
magazine published by Interactive Publishing, Inc. covering DOS, Windows,
and console games. The magazine software was designed to run on Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

Unlike competing printed publications which offered CD cover disks as a
supplement containing demos and utilities, each IE disc was a fully self-contained
magazine offering all editorial content in the form of video, audio, and text,
as well as the usual demos and utilities.

At the time of its publication, IE offered a multimedia presentation that
was unfeasible over the Internet due to slow dial-up connections and a
lack of standards in streaming video and audio on a web page, making IE
the precursor to the modern video game magazine website designed for
broadband Internet connections.

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Original update published on October 15, 2023