Wing Commander Prophecy DVD Version ?

criticalmass said:
Here's an old article by the compmany that did the processing to DVD format, advertising the WCP DVD:
http://www.filmlook.com/news/98summer.html

Sometimes it's good to know that there's always a spare holy grail, once all the other ones you were looking for are already found.
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Hehe, that's actually how we describe it. There's a bunch out there. Extra behind the scenes footage is a big thing we're going for, design docs for games that weren't released that we don't yet have. Wing Commander 2 for SNES is in a similar position, though that'll be even tougher to get. There are people out there with the uncut full length WC movie as well. Getting Armada to run online on modern systems is a big one for me. That's a good article about the details of the WCP DVD.
 
ChrisReid said:
There are people out there with the uncut full length WC movie as well.
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That I would really love to get my hands on. I mean, really really really ... I wondered if the uncut movie had survived the cutting room and if the "test audience" film was destroyed. If not, i'd be very neat to be able to organize a viewing or paid DVD distribution (althought I don't think FOX would even bother going through the process of giving it a thought :( )
 
We will happily make any "lost" Wing Commander game available the very moment we can, up to and including Prophecy DVD, WC2 SNES and WC3 Saturn.
 
BrynS said:
Interesting. Were the master copies just the original or gold CD version, but authored onto one DVD, or did they get the full treatment (Dolby Digital 5.1, MPEG-2 Video, etc), ala the WC4 DVD?

If they are the latter, I'm a bit surprised that EA didn't order a full (or even limited) production run after spending the money on a DVD transfer and associated authoring costs, as I would have thought that there would have been a market for it, even if it carried a substantial premium.
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Speaking as an industry professional when it comes to video and DVD codecs, the likely reason they never bothered to order a run of a DVD version after preparing it for DVD is simply that they didn't see that the market was large enough. Prepping the video for DVD would actually be practically free because the same files they had created for video to integrate into the CD version would just need to be re-compressed with the DVD Mpeg2 codec instead of the more compressing codec they used. DD 5.1 might have taken a little more effort, depending on how the audio engineers did the mix in the first place. At the time, DVD media was more expensive than CDs by a fair enough margin, and with a smaller market of people who had DVD drives, it wouldn't be worth their effort from a sheer profit standpoint to have to ship two versions of the same product and try to convince their retailers to carry both. Shelf space is valuable. In retrospect, it would have been probably worth their effort to print a DVD version and just sell it online, but first they have to believe that there's enough demand. Definitely shows us the waning interest in the Origins products by the EA bigwigs; they went to extra effort with previous WC titles. That'd be the big problem with a large fish in a medium-sized pond ending up in the Pacific...
 
The DVD version was developed later and the intent was to bundle it with Creative Labs DXR cards - the same way the WCIV DVDs were released. For whatever reason, Creative Labs decided to go with DVD versions of Freespace instead of Prophecy -- which ended up just being Freespace on a DVD.
 
Oooo... interesting foreshadowing of Freespace putting a real dent into WC. Although I enjoy Freespace, I just don't see how people can make the comparisons between the two games. Freespace is clearly inferior to WC, except for one or two details such as scaling, etc. There's just no attachment to the characters of Freespace. But I guess it all goes back to what we say about Wing Commander - it's not all about the space combat, we REALLY DO pay attention to the story in Wing Commander. Honestly, throughout all of WC3 and WC4, I was looking forward to the FMV sequences that would show me just another part of the story. Combat almost felt like it got in the way.
 
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