The Lost Planes of Strike Commander

It's a long standing claim that Chris Roberts' Strike Commander was originally intended to have quite a few more playable aircraft. In the end, the game focuses heavily on simulating the flight model of an F-16 Falcon and only allows the player a second aircraft, the prototype F-22 Raptor, very briefly at the end of the game. But early descriptions of the game mention everything from World War I biplanes to Harrier jump jets. What can we find out?

The earliest surviving marketing material for Strike Commander is this press release announcing the game and providing details on the plans and the extremely qualified development team. It was published in May 1991 alongside a sales sheet with additional details. The sales sheet tells us that the game will allow you to "pilot six different aircraft" and it specifically mentions that there will be NPC's flying World War I biplanes. This is the only mention of the biplanes we've found, but the more detailed press release includes concept art showing an A-7 Corsair II and a flyable P-38 Lightning!

Origin's 1991-92 catalog, published a little later that year, drops mentions of the prop planes and instead goes all in on Helicopters. It also identifies a fourth intended player aircraft, the Harrier jet! The bullet points mention an NPC Chinook helicopter and one of the screenshots seems to show a Soviet Mi-28 helicopter. The attack helicopter also appears in a screenshot of a cutscene printed around this time in magazines!

Another source for cut aircraft is the Origin FX screensaver. It advertised itself as having aircraft taken from Strike Commander in the 'Air Show' module but four of them do not appear in the final game including the SU-25 ground attack plane, the A-4 Skyhawk, the P-38 Lightning (again) and an P-51 Mustang with a distinctive 'anarchy' symbol on the nose. It's likely that many of the "vintage" aircraft that were cut from the overall plan for Strike would've been intended to resurface in 'Phoenix Force', Origin's intended "Strike Commander 1.5" followup.

A final source for learning cut planes is Strike Commander's single release addon, Tactical Operations. Origin created expansion packs using material left over from development of their base games… so it's likely that the B-1 Lancer and the F-117 Nighthawks added in Tactical Operations were cut from Strike Commander itself! Here's a page from a November-December 1991 preview showing both the A-4 (in a cutscene) and the Harrier model.

That's a lot of cut planes but we still don't know all of the original six planned for the game. The F-16, F-22, P-38 and Harrier make four… but what were the remaining two?