Wing Commander CIC
Mat Bradley-Tschirgi tipped us off about about a huge Wing Commander retrospective posted at Sequelcast. The WC series is the star of Episode 5 of their video game podcast. Both show hosts have plenty of great anecdotes, and they go over an extensive history of the series. There's clearly been a lot of research done, and this enables the commentators to talk intelligently about even the products they're not intimately familiar with. The total runtime over an hour long! Download the entire thing as an mp3 here.
Overall, their info is pretty accurate, although we can help clarify a few random tidbits.
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Original update published on June 13, 2013
Overall, their info is pretty accurate, although we can help clarify a few random tidbits.
- WC3 & WC4's composer was George Oldziey, and he actually did the orchestral music for Prophecy as well. The techno music was part of Prophecy's simulator, and it wasn't until Secret Ops that the tracks made it into the regular game.
- WC Arena does actually have a first person mode. It's one of four view modes: top down, a top-down with a more forward looking view, a rearward view and a directly forward-looking perspective.
- Finally, it's a common misconception that something about Prophecy lead to the discontinuation of games. At first glance it makes sense - if WCP sold well, why wouldn't they make more? The game actually did perform well - so well that they created the 56-mission Secret Ops sequel and gave it away for free to tide fans over! The reason that WCSO ended up being the last PC Wing Commander has to do with Origin's shift to online games. Titles like Privateer 3 and Strike Team were in development but shelved to move resources to Wing Commander and Privateer Online. MMO saturation and Westwood's Earth & Beyond ended up getting the WC online games canceled, and the rest is history... Once again though, kudos to Mat and Thrasher for doing all their research and compiling it into this lengthy presentation!
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Original update published on June 13, 2013