More Chinese Localizations Emerge (January 23, 2014)

[ChrisReid]

GunASKA posted some interesting pictures of WC4, Privateer 2 and Prophecy from China. He believes that these were the first WC titles formally released there. We posted some WC1 and WC2 boxes in Chinese language a few years back, and Gun reckons that these were probably from Taiwan. He's got a nice story about originally receiving these - no matter what country they're from, everyone has great memories of getting their first Wing Commander games!

I lived in Beijing. So far as I know, WC4 was the first release in the series in Chinese markets (mainland). It should have been 1996 and it came with a Chinese box, manual, and a translated novel (the translation work was not so good...).
This all happened after the EA China office was set up.

I clearly remember the day I got WC4. It was a present from my mom (I was just a kid and this was really expensive). After we bought the game, we went to some relatives' home. I got the game but there was no PC in my relatives' house, so I spent a whole day on the bed with my new game. I opened it and closed it then opened it again... I tried to read the novel, but the translation was bad so I could not understand anything... and then the only thing I did was fly in the space with nothing but my imagination. I stared at the face of Mark Hamill for a whole afternoon... (I hadn't watched Star Wars at that time, so I had no idea who he was).

It was really an unforgettable memory in my life.

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Original update published on January 23, 2014

 

[Wedge009]

That's a nice story. It reminds me of when I first got Prophecy, at the 1998 Royal Easter Show in Sydney - the first time it was at the Olympic Park having moved from another location. While there's lots of agricultural and farming exhibits and demonstrations around there's also the traditional showbags and there must have been some techy or games booths around as well. I remember taking interest in one guy because he was promoting Wing Commander Prophecy and I looked at my dad (without any sense of expectation at all), he must have been feeling very generous because he went ahead and bought it for me. It wasn't a bad price, as I recall, AUD70 when retail games were more like AUD100 on release (and Prophecy would have still been fairly new at this point). I remember sitting with my family having a picnic lunch and reading the ICIS manual and Taggart's letter to Blair... it all sounded quite exciting and at this point I think I had only played WC1, WC2, Academy and Privateer, so I still had orange-beard Scottish Paladin and Bluehair as my mental picture for them.

I might have mentioned this before, but the anecdote made me feel a bit nostalgic.