You Know You Want This WC4 Ad (June 1, 2004)

[ChrisReid]

Filler found this old advertisement for Wing Commander 4 in the June 1996 issue of PC Gamer. It's a fold out cover flap ad. Open up page 1 to reveal pages 2 and 3. Cool!

​

This truly is the vanguard of the next generation of electronic entertainment. 4.5 out of 5 stars. - Computer Gaming World
Origin's latest science fiction spectacular is even more impressive than its predecessor. - PC Gamer

That color scheme looks familiar..

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Original update published on June 1, 2004

 

[Bob McDob]

I actually still have this issue of PC Gamer (the cover story is on X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter). It's actually not a fold-out cover at all - it's one page on the right which you flip and then a two-page spread.

 

[Wojo]

"CD-ROM Warfare"?

I just get this image of a whole military force built around throwing CD's at each other... You know, high-tech weapons built for firing them, used as ammunition in catapults etc. etc. And lets not forget ninjas throwing them like shuriken... Heh.

 

[Wedge009]

Well, you might not laugh so much if you consider one of the very early MythBusters episodes investigating CD-ROMs shattering in high-speed drives. Dangerous stuff!

 

[Death]

"CD-ROM Warfare"?

I just get this image of a whole military force built around throwing CD's at each other... You know, high-tech weapons built for firing them, used as ammunition in catapults etc. etc. And lets not forget ninjas throwing them like shuriken... Heh.

Well, there was that "Revolution X" arcade game...

 

[Bob McDob]

Well, there was that "Revolution X" arcade game...

That's funny; that came out around the same time and was reviewed in the magazine three months later. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an image of the cover on the internet, but it was the one with the photoshoot where Richard Garriott dressed like this:

The cover story was titled "ORIGIN'S CUTTING EDGE", showing Garriott brandishing a sword, the right of his face hidden in shadow, and spanned twenty pages (ads included), covering Ultima Online, Wing Commander Academy, the then-imminent Kilrathi Saga release, Ultima IX, Privateer 2, and a brief seque into Chris Roberts and Digital Anvil ("but don't hold your breath — the first Digital Anvil game probably won't appear until at least the end of 1997.") But the real gem was a four-page interview with Richard Garriott. For posterity, I've typed it up here..

Some highlights:

Every year at shows like CES and E3, the hardware manufacturers are trying to predict where they should invest their development time, and so we get asked what we would rather have — surround sound audio cards, 3D graphics cards, Windows accelerator cards, or streaming video cards. And tons of people always say "streaming video!", but I'm going "No no no, virtual environments! Let's get those 3D things going." I'm still a devout believer in the virtual environment, but the quality level of what you can do with video, in the sense of what a real actor can emote to you, and how real an actual movie set can be, is currently so far superior to the virtual environment. So I think the best of all worlds is to capture the aesthetic of what you get from an interactive movie, but in a virtual environment.

There's been an interesting pattern ever since around the time of Ultima III, and whenever I talk to people about the series, they always say that their favorite Ultima is not the current game, but the one we did a couple of games ago. And for a while I was really paranoid about that, like during the periods of Ultimas III, IV, V, and VI when people would tell me that Ultima II was their favorite because that was the last one where you could kill everybody, without having any of this ethics stuff on top.

By the time of Ultima VIII, we really felt we had driven ourselves into this Ultima niche where we had lots of historical Ultima customers but we weren't getting very many new customers. So what we wanted to do with Ultima VIII was focus a lot of attention on the animation and the presentation, but the trade-off was that the world detail suffered, and so the game didn't go down quite so well with the old school of Ultima players. But we were prepared for that; we anticipated that it wouldn't. The idea was to try to bring new people to the storyline. The real test is going to be Ultima IX, because after VIII we're not sure if we have the same audience. We've picked up new players, but we may have alienated some of the old.

We have kind of an unwritten theory here — unwritten but often spoken — which says you never hear anybody say "That's the best game I've ever seen that still runs on a 386." It's either the best game you've seen, or nothing. I believe there's nothing to be gained by having access to the lowest common denominator. Active game buyers also tend to be active hardware buyers, but the question is: How far can you push it? It's always hard to know exactly. You start a game anything up to two years before it releases, and you're guessing what your final frame rates will be, and you're also trying to predict what the market will be like. Fortunately, PCs get faster sooner than we expect, and the amount that our frame rates are slower than we'd hope balances things out.

It's certainly interesting stuff, especially in light of what Mr. Garriott's doing now.