Like most people, I can't walk down the street without someone stopping me and demanding to know: is System Shock set in the Wing Commander universe? Buddy, I tell them, no it isn't. But there's a lot of fun backstory getting there...
Frank Savage: So at that time I was a hobbyist game developer. I taught myself C and C++. My education was in Electrical Engineering. So I knew the mathematics behind 3D stuff, but I had never applied it. I never tried to do anything with it except for a couple of courses in college. I was a huge fan of the Wing Commander series. I had Wing Commander license plates on my car in Illinois where I was living in Chicago at the time. I would go to GenCon every year. GenCon was a game convention used to be held in Lake Geneva and Wisconsin and then eventually moved to downtown. Milwaukee, and that was where I first saw Wing Commander at GenCon the year before. I went and played Wing Commander every day literally every day when it released. Went to Gen Con the next year and they had this demo for this game that that I had never seen before called Strike Commander and watch the demo and saw like unbelievable graphics for that time. There was another person watching it with me a GenCon and we were laughing. Think about how like how if you can do this on a personal computer imagine what the simulators that we terrain people must must look like.And I talk to Warren Spector who is who is there recruiting for origin at the time told him the story of how I played Wing Commander every day how I knew some of the mathematics behind this and taught myself C and C++ and he said, "Wow, you sound like someone we should hire because Strike Commander needs people to come work on it." And I said, well, okay like "I would love to get in the game is like this would be a dream job of mine." So I wrote a letter accompanying Warren back to Origin that had like my my experiences and you know the stuff that I've been doing with games and Warren told me he's like look, we're in the throes of shipping Wing Commander 2 right now. It probably won't won't come out we won't talk to you for some amount of time because the game is still about a month away and we're not sure. So I said okay, that's fine. Like I've got you know, I have a regular job that time.
I was working the IT department at a home improvement chain so you can see like how steeped in gaming I was at that point. I was a huge gamer, but I hadn't really done a lot of stuff professionally. Origin actually reached out to me that week and they were going to fly me down to Austin, Texas. I've never been to Austin in my life. And the last second they said well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to actually have you be interviewed by by one of the people on the team and over the phone. And then if that goes well then we'll think about what the next steps will be and there's probably gonna be three people talking to you that Friday night and I said, "Alright, that sounds great."
Wing Commander II Characters is a development document created during the making of Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi. It is dated December 3, 1990 and is an early description of Wing Commander II's characters and their planned story arcs. The document is part of the Warren Spector Papers at the University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center for American History (box 2008-091/6).Much of the material planned in the document is significantly different from the finished game including plans for significantly more missions to take place before the arrival of the Concordia. Some of the characters were ultimately cut or referred to only in dialogue; others, like Bear and Minx, would reappear in other forms in the Special Operations missions. The role planned for Iceman would largely go to Stingray in the finished game. Other notable changes include early references to Hobbes as "Tomcat" and different first and last names for many of the secondary characters.
The GOG winter sale is in full swing, and the series is 75% off. This makes each title $1.49 or under $12 for the whole series! st3lt3k points out that Origin's 1989 sim Space Rogue is a whopping 90% off. This proto-Wing Commander title isn't quite up to the level of the original WC1, but you just can't go wrong for $0.59!
What should you get for the Wing Commander fan who has everything? GOG is here to help with the recent addition of Space Rogue, a space sim published by Origin about two years before Chris Roberts' Wing Commander arrived on the scene. The game was designed by Paul Neurath who went on to fame with Ultima Underworld and the System Shock series. Other notable WC vet contributors include Denis Loubet, Jeff Dee, Steven Muchow, Keith Berdak, Warren Spector and Dallas Snell. It's clearly dated by its late '80s graphics, and its gameplay has never been one to challenge the WC series, but it's a charming addition to the back catalogue and an interesting artifact of the time that came before. And who can resist its dreamy cover art?! The package also includes bonuses like an associated novella and a cool star map.
Yesterday, we reported on footage of an early build of Wing Commander II digitized by the University of Texas. Today, we have a second treasure from a VHS provided by Origin producer Warren Spector: early footage of Super Wing Commander in action! The video clearly shows an early, unfinished build that has a more elaborate 'loading' screen for the VDUs (and is still using some Wing Commander I art as placeholders!) But look carefully, there's another surprise: during the course of the mission being demoed, the player faces several Salthi… and then starts to fire on a capital ship. But it's not a capital ship available in the final game!
But wait, you think, I've seen that silhouette before. You have: the ship in question was found in a file dump of 3D source assets from Origin alongside the other models from Super Wing Commander. The file labels it the Fralthi, but it is not the Fralthi which appears in the finished game. The model itself is an edited and retextured version of Wing Commander II's Sabre mesh, which may sound odd but was not an uncommon practice during the creation of Super WIng Commander's menagerie.
Adding to the mystery, no mission in Super Wing Commander has you fly a Hornet with Spirit as a wingman against Salthi and a Fralthi together. In fact, the only time Spirit, a Hornet and Salthi are present with a capital ship it's a Confederation Drayman in Enyo 2. Was this ship intended to be a Drayman or a Fralthi? Or something else entirely? (Interestingly, the Super Wing Commander intro incorrectly identifies a Snakeir as a "Fralthi target"... so there may have been quite a bit of confusion about Kilrah's cruiser.)
The University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center for American History has digitized several VHS tapes donated by famed Origin producer Warren Spector including a VERY interesting tape previewing Origin's 1991 lineup. The tape, likely created for a trade show or as a preview for distributors, walks through all of Origin's current releases. It includes a lengthy trailer of the already-released Wing Commander I, The Secret Missions and The Secret Missions 2: Crusade… and then a VERY exciting preview of Wing Commander II.
Why is it so exciting? Because it shows an early build of the game that includes a number of different graphics, features and cutscenes! Pay special attention to the more complex turret interface, the 'profile' view of Blair in the comm room and a whole host of landing and takeoff scenes which do not appear in the final game… even a sequence showing the player landing their Epee on the TCS Agincourt! This is a video that's not to be missed.
At the beginning of August, Snell unceremoniously booted Chris Roberts, the project's founder, from his role as co-producer, leaving him with only the title of director. Manifesting a tendency anyone familiar with his more recent projects will immediately recognize, Roberts had been causing chaos on the team by approving seemingly every suggested addition or enhancement that crossed his desk. Snell, the brutal pragmatist in this company full of dreamers, appointed himself as Warren Spector's new co-producer. His first action was to place a freeze on new features in favor of getting the game that currently existed finished and out the door.... and then it segues into a somewhat directionless critique of the game itself. There's a great warts-and-all history to be written about the making of Wing Commander... despite a promising first half, this isn't it (though, in fairness, the purpose of the site is discussing narrative.) The first half of the article is available here.
What should you get for the Wing Commander fan who has everything? GOG is here to help with the recent addition of Space Rogue, a space sim published by Origin about two years before Chris Roberts' Wing Commander arrived on the scene. The game was designed by Paul Neurath who went on to fame with Ultima Underworld and the System Shock series. Other notable WC vet contributors include Denis Loubet, Jeff Dee, Steven Muchow, Keith Berdak, Warren Spector and Dallas Snell. It's clearly dated by its late '80s graphics, and its gameplay has never been one to challenge the WC series, but it's a charming addition to the back catalogue and an interesting artifact of the time that came before. And who can resist its dreamy covert art?! The package also includes bonuses like an associated novella and a cool star map. Learn more about the game at Pix's Origin Adventures or find it at GOG for $5.99.
Dropping out of hyperspace, you lay a course for Lagrange Station. Suddenly, the klaxon screams out a warning. Two Darts and a Corsair, closing fast. Pirates!You roll hard to avoid the incoming plasma torps. One hits, knocking down your rear shield. Spinning to protect your stern, you launch a heat seeker...
Direct hit: the Corsair bursts into shards. Stunned, the Darts run for deep space.
Later, over a pint of Rigelian in the Lagrange cantina, you listen as a bounty hunter tells of the Scarlet Brotherhood, the most notorious band of pirates in the Far Arm. You hope it wasn't one of their Corsairs you vaporized out there ...
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It's certainly not every day we get to see new Origin concept art or unused designs from the classic Wing Commander games, but we've got a birthday treat today! Joe Garrity recently uncovered an amazing set of cockpit art and animations from a fighter we've never seen before. The lock and autopilot lights are unmistakable, and there are vertical and horizontal bars that could definitely be for a gun capacity and afterburner fuel. However, there are some remarkable differences as well. There seem to be two radar displays, and the VDUs flip open and closed. There appear to be supplemental heads-up VDUs that overlay on the windscreen, as well as something that resembles a very large targeting crosshair in the center of the dashboard. It has a very cool illumination startup sequence as well.
So, what is the ship? And what's up the functional differences we don't see elsewhere? Joe uncovered these on a 5.25" floppy labeled "DISK 9 - PANEL X-LBM SCREENS.ANM" from artist Dan Bourbonnais. He had to get the proprietary "Deluxe Animator" software going to read the files properly. The still screenshots are dated April 22, 1991, while the animation has a December 11, 1992 date stamp, which could be artificially delayed due to backing up or disk transfer. The brown durasteel could imply a Kilrathi design, but it lacks overt alien markings that the Dralthi II and Jrathek art contained. It's also interesting that this concept dates back to the time Secret Missions 2 was released, but the animations are ahead of their time and the different dashboard elements (quadruple 5.25" floppy drives are a nice touch though!) raise more questions than answers. LOAF's thoughts on the subject are below. Do you have any theories about what this could be? Post them in the comments!
A potential Wing Commander mystery is afoot! Dashing game archaeologist Joe Garrity recovered it from an old Origin-internal diskette... it certainly looks like a Wing Commander cockpit, but it isn't one that ended up in any of the games (and it doesn't quite /work/ like other WC cockpits.) Any ideas? What we have here… is a good, old-fashioned mystery! To preface this: I don’t KNOW what it is, but I can make some educated guesses as to possibilities.First: I know that this immediately screams ‘Kilrathi cockpit’… but I would caution that I think that’s a bit of an anachronism. It is the same color as the Kilrathi cockpits we see later in the series, including the Jrathek and the ships in Wing Commander Armada… but in 1991, that color scheme had not yet been established. Wing Commander II (in development) was using the lighter tan color for the Kilrathi space camo… but it also used this same color for the cockpit of the human Rapier (as did Wing Commander I.) This would have also closely followed The Secret Missions 2, which showed the first Kilrathi cockpit… which was steel and purple. Finally, there’s no Kilrathi writing. At the time, Kilrathi text was a series of dots and dashes arranged vertically. The Dralthi Mk. II cockpit in Secret Missions 2 is full of them (and has human text on sticky notes added over them! Immersion!) while this cockpit has only English writing. [One other thing that makes it feel like a Kilrathi cockpit is the fact that the large, red central display immediately looks like the red Kilrathi armor indicators used in all five of their cockpits in Wing Commander Armada. It’s not the same graphic at all (and Armada was three years later, an eternity at the time), but it feels very similar at first glance!)
One thing I can say for certain is that it is NOT a ‘working’ (gameplay) Wing Commander cockpit. While the cockpits in Wing Commander I and II vary wildly in shape, color and overall design, they have several common elements that this lacks:
- Identical blank spaces for VDUs. These need to be the same size because the images the game overlays in real time are the same for all the ships. The mystery cockpit has two small black squares that imply the same VDU setup, but they’re proportionately much too small to function in the game. (After the ‘flip’ animation, there is more space… but the shape still isn’t right.)
- Similarly, Wing Commander ships have all have identical (across each game) circular radar displays. Again, this cockpit seems to have one (two, actually!) but they’re again much too small and when you look closely you’ll see they aren’t Wing Commander radars at all. The Wing Commander scanners divide space into four quadrants with an X, while this uses a cross +. That seems like a small thing, but it means the radar wouldn’t be functional in a WC game because it’s not showing you what’s in front of and behind you. (Credit to Toast for noticing this one!)
- There is no shield/armor indicator. These DID have a different style in each ship in the early games, but they were always distinct enough to be identified. I don’t see any equivalent here.
- There is no space for the set and actual speed indicators. (Though, one small point in favor of a Kilrathi ship is that the Dralthi didn’t have such indicators either and instead had a small computer ‘added’ by humans to display them.)
I will note that none of that excludes it from being concept art for a Wing Commander, and in fact many of the same failings this cockpit has are repeated in another bit of lost cockpit that we DO know is from Wing Commander from three years later (pictured right). This so-called mystery cockpit was used in advertising for Super Wing Commander, but does not match any of the art used in the finished game. It, too, lacks VDU spaces, reuses art from earlier Wing Commanders, is missing certain displays and so on!
It also has some elements that are distinctly not functional in Wing Commander II:
On the other hand, it DOES include elements that ARE unquestionably from Wing Commander:
- The large, central ‘target’ area doesn’t match a function in the early Wing Commander games. It seems to be the focal point of the cockpit, but if this were a ship you fly there’d be no reason to ‘use’ it. (Which I believe suggests that this was for a cinematic; more on that theory later!)
- I can say from experience that it’s unlikely the 5.25” drives on either side of the cockpit would have made it past a Chris Roberts art review! :) (Though there did seem to be a pair of IBM M-Type keyboards in the Orion in Privateer…) In fact, I’d venture to say that having the ‘cute’ diskette drives there is much more the sort of nod you’d see in a Richard Garriott or Warren Spector project.
- No Wing Commander ship at this time had used a ‘glass cockpit’ where displays appear over the game area (as this does in the animation.)
- The fact that it has a ‘startup’ animation means that it doesn’t match any of the other Wing Commander cockpits at the time. There’s nothing in those games that has the cockpits turn on/off with resultant changes to the lighting.
So, what games COULD it be from? To narrow down the options, I went back to the Point of Origin (Origin’s internal company newsletter) archive and found that the very first issue was published just under a month after the date on these files. At that time, Origin had five product development groups working on four original games:
- The ‘LOCK’ and ‘AUTO’ lights are from Wing Commander II’s cockpits. I believe the specific buttons here match the Epee cockpit.
- The rectangles of green and red lights adjacent to the diskette drives are modified from similar panels on the Wing Commander Rapier artwork. They aren’t specific to Wing Commander II, though, they were originally created for the Rapier in the already-published Wing Commander I.
I include the scheduled release dates because it tells us where each game was at the time. Martian Dreams went to beta about a month after these images were finished, which suggests that it was getting close to wrapping up. Wing Commander II would have been midway through development, making it the most likely to be having new art created at that specific time. Ultima VII and Strike Commander were very early in the process, but demos of both were being created to show at Summer CES around this same time. (It also lets us rule out a few other projects that might have been tempting options: Wing Commander Academy, which DOES feature a similarly-colored Kilrathi cockpit, and Privateer weren’t on the table yet.)
- Martian Dreams (Scheduled for May, shipped on time)
- Wing Commander II (Scheduled for Summer, shipped in September)
- Ultima VII: The Black Gate (Scheduled for Christmas, shipped April 1992)
- “Air Command” (Scheduled for Christmas, likely shipped April 1993)
- (The fifth group was working on the CD-ROM conversion of Ultima VI for the FM Towns. I strongly suspect that ‘Air Command’ was a working title for Strike Commander rather than a cancelled project, as it vanishes the next month and mentions of Strike begin.)
With all that analysis, I’ve come up with several possible theories. I suspect Strike Commander and Ultima VII are not likely (while Ultima VII had a Kilrathi ship, it wouldn’t have been the focus at this point in development!), which leaves Martian Dreams and Wing Commander II. I believe it could fit into either game:
- It could be a cutscene from Martian Dreams. Martian Dreams does end with a cutscene in which the characters return to Earth aboard Jules Verne’s spaceship (you see the ship take off and then in the next shot landed.) It’s possible this was created for that sequence and then cut to save disk space. In that case, the Wing Commander elements (and the disk drives!) would be intentional nods of the sort Origin was often fond. The startup animation would then be where you see it take off and rocket out of the Martian atmosphere into space.
- It could be a cutscene from Wing Commander II. We have hard proof (from the box itself!) that backgrounds and faces were cut from Wing Commander II, including a younger Blair head and courtroom backgrounds. The intro was rewritten late in the process to cut down on disk usage (and so instead of seeing young Blair at a trial, you have old Blair talking to Admiral Tolwyn in his same office set used for the rest of the game.) The place I can imagine this is the attack on the Tiger’s Claw: if it’s a Kilrathi cockpit (as noted, not a given!) then I could see an alternate version of the shot where you see the action from inside one of the stealth fighters. This would also explain why it doesn’t have parts needed to function, why there’s a startup animation (as it’s decloaking) and then large central ‘target’ area, since the point of the cockpit would be to see it lock and fire a torpedo at the ‘Claw.
- It could be for a totally unknown sales demo or a failed product pitch. Origin’s sales team was aggressively pursuing distributors at this time, and we know they showed demos of all these games at CES in 1991. It’s likely the Wing Commander II demo was the version which currently survives (featuring an alternate version of the first part of the intro)… but there may have been some other, unspecified behind-closed-doors tease this was done for. As for failed pitches, ‘Wing Commander but you’re a Kilrathi!’ was certainly discussed from the day Wing Commander I came out (and unexpectedly eventually became System Shock!)… it could be lookdev for that sort of project pitch.
Warren Spector has been away from making games directly for a few years, but he's hopping back into it with the development of System Shock 3. Gamers Nexus recently caught up with him and asked some questions about the gaming industry. Discussion quickly turned to the classic Origin days and company history. Warren always has good insight on the nature of interactivity and storytelling, so it's interesting to hear what he has to say. It's great to see some of the experienced vets jumping back into the fold to share their wealth of knowledge with the next generation of developers. There's also an accompanying text article that you can find here.
Gamers Nexus also turned the camera on Chris Roberts and Richard Garriott last year in a funny clip that we missed at the time. While sitting around waiting for the interview to begin, the pair geeks out on the topic of space physics in zero gravity. It's pretty great!
PC Gamer is well known for their Top 100 lists where they annually rank the best computer games in the world. While this ranking does stretch back through gaming history, it can be quite subjective with frequent changes year-to-year and a skew towards the newest games. Their latest article attempts to create a slightly more meaningful list by selecting the Top 50 "Most Important" PC games of history. This ignores whether the individual titles themselves can compete with today's standards and instead focuses on how they changed the industry when they arrived on the scene. Wing Commander 3 makes the list thanks to its blend of well done FMV, branching storyline and space combat action. We could argue that practically every WC title was ground breaking in its own way, but the author here does a good job of not spending an excessive amount of time on particular series and mostly spreading the love around. You can find a couple Ultima games and the space sim Eve Online elsewhere in the rankings too. Check out the full article here.
Thanks to Goku for the tip!...it doesn't matter if these games are still fun (or even possible) to play today. What matters is how they changed the PC gaming landscape. How they established the blueprint of the run-and-gun shooter. Propelled adoption of the compact disc. Changed how millions of people grew and socialized across years and thousands of miles of cables.
The most important PC games of all time changed how we make games. How we play games. And they changed us. To celebrate them, we did something a bit different on the following pages of this feature. We reached out to game designers—look out for Richard Garriott, John Carmack, Sid Meier, Chris Avellone, Jane Jensen, Tim Schafer, Cliff Bleszinski, Warren Spector and more—plus many former PC Gamer editors and a few other writers you may recognize to help celebrate the legacy of the PC. Enjoy!
"Wayne, could you confirm the telemetry on H227 again please? We might need another pot of coffee, too. Looks like it's gonna be a long night..."
There’s a star system named after me in the Wing Commander universe. It’s the result of an overworked designer at Origin needing to fill a giant map with hundreds of names quickly, but it may still be the single thing in my life that I’m most proud of. But where there were hundreds of systems to fill in, there were only a handful of encompassing quadrants. They reserved the names for real legends: there’s a Roberts Quadrant, of course, and then each of the executive producers got one… Mark Day, Rod Nakamoto, David Downing, Adam Foshko.
And then a select few Maverick team members had the honor. Ghorah Khar, the treasonous Kilrathi planet from Wing Commander II, is located in the Isaac Quadrant, named after the genius behind the RealSpace engine. The Ladyman Quadrant, named after Origin’s master of manuals, encompasses the Terran Confederation’s leeward expansion. Half the battles of the original Vega Campaign took place in the Douglas Quadrant, after the man who redefined the look of the series’ ships in Wing Commander III. And my star, the Lesnick System? I’m proud to say it’s located squarely in the middle of the Shelus Quadrant.
Pete Shelus started his career at Origin working on Tactical Operations, the Strike Commander mission disk and quickly proved his mettle. His credits on Wing Commander III are confirmation of the whizbang engineer he’d quickly proved himself to be: “Polygonal Collisions,” and “Math & Algorithms Consultant.” He went on to help out with Wing Commander IV and to serve as lead programmer on the 3DO port of Wing Commander III, still to my mind the single greatest after-the-fact PC-to-console conversion ever developed. He worked on the plan for Chris Roberts’ aborted version of Privateer 2 and when Chris to form Digital Anvil he became the Maverick Team’s lead programmer on the so-technically-ambitious Wing Commander Prophecy. After all that, he went on to keep creating worlds with Warren Spector’s teams at Ion Storm and Junction Point.
But that’s all on MobyGames. I’ll tell you right here that Pete was someone special. One of my happiest memories was visiting Origin back in 1998, shortly after the Secret Ops release. Pete was one of a handful of Maverick Team members present that day, and he treated a scraggly teenage fanboy who was almost too nervous to speak like he was just as important as any journalist or executive producer. That meant so much to me at the time, and I try and carry it with me to everything I do today. By all accounts, that was the universal reaction to him. Check out his February, 1996 ‘Employee of the Month’ submission from Origin’s internal newsletter:
We stayed in touch, over the years, and he was always kind enough to answer some esoteric Wing Commander technical question or clear up some other bit of trivia from the old days. Long after anyone’s involvement with the franchise was a distant memory, he was still so gracious as to make it seem like you were making his day by writing to him to ask about this-or-that.
Several years back, after another one of these all-too-common tragedies, I put out a call for memories of the great 3D artist Paul Steed. Pete was among the first to reply with memories of his friend, and I sent him a note with my condolences and catching up. He wrote me back the following, which today brings me to tears:
Thank you and thanks to your team for keeping Wing Commander alive. I still remember the day I met Chris Roberts at some promotional event at some computer game store where he told me I should apply for a job at Origin. I did, and he hired me. How lucky can a guy be? Who gets to work on their favorite computer game franchise? Almost nobody. But I did.Pete, you were a great engineer and a better man. I’m glad to know that you appreciated those days at Origin, that you valued the experience that made so many of us happy and that you had pride in the incredible things you did and made. It’s always cold comfort, but the games and the stories your expertise made possible will live on past any of us. And you will be missed.I'm forever grateful for my good fortune, the friends I made on the way (like Paul Steed), and people like you who support the game that started my career. Thank you.
If you have a memory to share or would like to include your condolences on WCNews, please e-mail news@wcnews.com.
A bit of technical background to set the stage: the original Wing Commander doesn’t store or display its ships using 3D polygon data, like most modern games. Companies like Spectrum Holobyte were starting to use polygons for their air combat games, but the result wasn’t especially attractive at the time: untextured geometric objects that left you wondering whether you were looking at a triangle or an F-16, a set of cubes or a tank and so on. Chris Roberts wanted more detail for Wing Commander’s immersive, ‘interactive movie’ atmosphere. During the R&D phase for his next big game (then called Squadron), Chris decided to forgo polygons and instead, inspired by Lucasarts’ Battlehawks 1942, create a system based on pre-set bitmap images. It took about two months of work, but the result was stunning for the time. Each ship was stored as a set of 37 pre-rendered image showing the craft from every possible direction. The game engine would then swap, rotate and scale sprites based on the players’ perspective, making it appear as though you could be smoothly maneuvering around a detailed object from any angle. It was this tech breakthrough that helped sell ‘Squadron’ to Origin’s executives at the time; it was quick, beautiful and like nothing else on the market!
With Wing Commander in production, the next challenge was creating all those ships! The ship building ‘pipeline’ on Wing Commander worked largely the same way it does on Star Citizen today. First, a concept artist, in this case Glen Johnson, created line art of the twenty odd ships required for the finished game. You may not know it, but you’ve seen much of this art before: with a couple exceptions, it was used in the Claw Marks manual (and some of those exceptions later appeared in a Computer Gaming World supplement.) From there, a powerful computer would be used to create 3D models of each ship, which would be turned into the hundreds of individual bitmaps needed. But there was one problem: no one at Origin in 1990 did 3D artwork.
Unlike companies today, Origin in 1990 didn’t have a large in-house production staff. It’s largely forgotten, but the company primarily published independent authors’ games at the time, taking a cut of the proceeds and letting the creators retain the rights to their properties. Those creators would set their own budgets, hire their own people and so on in addition to using resources provided by the company. Chris himself wasn’t an Origin employee until the day Wing Commander shipped! Wing Commander started life with just two artists on the team, neither of whom worked with 3D (not unexpected, since 3D art was in its infancy, and unheard of in games.) Chris opted to solve this problem by outsourcing the creation of the ship models and images to a company dedicated to such tasks. With that charge, producer Warren Spector reached out to a small company located in downtown New York City: Process Animation.
And that’s where Mary comes into the story! A tiny operation, Mary’s company Process Animation took on the task of creating Wing Commander’s now-beloved spacecraft. Working from Glen Johnson’s striking line art, she created a 3D model of each Wing Commander ship. Using a program called Sculpt 3D on her Amiga, Mary created the exceptionally (for the time) detailed, ray traced ship images you see in Wing Commander. The Hornet, the Rapier, the Dralthi… all created outside Origin, on an Amiga by a woman in New York City! Each image was done individual byte by byte, until the ships were ready for primetime. She delivered the individual motion frames and the 3D files to Origin on a budget, and those became the ships that most everyone here spent their youth’s flying and blowing up.
Mary isn’t credited in Wing Commander, but she created part of the game that can’t be forgotten (per her contract, Process Animation should have had a credit... but it doesn’t appear in the intro.) Looking at the individual Wing Commander bitmaps, each one is more than the sum of the concept art. There’s a distinct style that immediately sold you on the nascent Wing Commander universe, from the tantalizing glimpses of the Confederation and Kilrathi logos to the uniform color schemes (green and white camo for human ships, tan, yellow and red Kilrathi.) Like everything else in Wing Commander, Mary’s artwork hinted at a greater world that further brought you into the game.
I was lucky enough to get to chat with her in 2013, just as Star Citizen was taking hold. She was surprised anyone would be able to track her down, but was good enough to chat about the old days with me until both of our lives got in the way. She immediately struck me as a very kind person, and she was certainly happy to learn she was remembered and that her work was still appreciated. It goes without saying, but I was genuinely saddened to learn she passed away in March… an unsung hero of Wing Commander’s development, a talented artist and an outright good person. You can’t ask for much more of a legacy than that! So here’s to Mary, and to our always remembering the folks behind our favorite games.
Star Citizen's Hornet, the great great grandson of the 3D model Mary rendered twenty five years ago. Note that the color scheme lives on today!
(For anyone interested in the rest of the story, vis a vis 3D ships. Chris Roberts introduced Origin to Autodesk 3D Studio for Wing Commander II, training up traditional artists to build and render 3D ships in-house. This technology was used for Wing Commander II and several spinoffs. For Strike Commander, Chris revisited 3D polygons thanks to another technical breakthrough by another late, great artist, Mr. Paul Steed, that would allow them to be easily textured for additional detail.)
Carl's Crazy Carnival: "This is a game made up of several small games that, together, allow the player to free 'Carny' Carl, owner of Carl's Carnival. He's been captured by a cartel of crazy clowns who have conspired to convert Carl's Carnival into complete chaos."Wing Commander had quite a few canceled games over the years. On the MMO front, there were multiple attempts at both Privateer Online and Wing Commander Online. The Maniac Missions was briefly in work in 1997, which was the same year that the Wing Commander Hazardous Duty FPS game was in development. After Secret Ops, there was to be a co-op multiplayer sequel called Strike Team, which was eventually superseded by WC Shadow Force. Privateer 3: Retribution was also an especially tantalizing game that even made it to magazine covers before being canceled! Quite a few ports failed to see the light of day as well. Beyond WC2 SNES, there were proposed WC3 & WC4 editions planned for the Saturn, WC3 slated for the M2 and WC4 for the 3DO. The campaign for Arena was also cut before release. The axe wasn't limited to software either! The X-Toys Wing Commander vehicles, SciPubTech cutaway poster, Pilgrim Truth novel and the Showscan WC Movie Ride were among the canceled physical products. Although we couldn't experience each of these first hand, the least we can do is remember them here from time to time!Armed only with a water pistol but with the ability to upgrade to better weapons through arcade-machine tickets, Carl's Crazy Carnival would have you defeat legions of amusing enemies in order to reach the Cosmic Comet Roller Coaster. There, you'd free Carl and save the day.
Reading the pitch, it's oddly unclear what sort of game Carl's Crazy Carnival would have been. There's mention of minigames, action and overhead maps, but nowhere does it specify a perspective or specific genre. Even Warren Spector seems unsure now, describing it only as a 'console-style game' pitched by one of the artists on his team, the late ZZ-Top and Ultima artist, Bill Narum. "I liked the idea of a funny game and pitched it to the exec team," says Spector. "It was rejected."
Crowdfunded documentary Video Games: The Movie examines the transition of video games from niche product to billion-dollar industry. It features several big names in game design, like Cliff Bleszinsky (Unreal, Gears of War) and Kobayashi Hiroyuki (Resident Evil). The only familiar name in the credits is Wing Commander veteran Warren Spector, but LOAF managed to snap (tweet) a half second of Wing Commander 4 footage with Mark Hamill, Chris Roberts and Malcolm McDowell in it. The feature-length documentary is currently being shown in select theaters, and can also be streamed (purchase or rent) from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu. Check out the trailer here.
Video Games: The Movie, a feature length documentary, aims to educate & entertain audiences about how video games are made, marketed, and consumed by looking back at gaming history and culture through the eyes of game developers, publishers, and consumers. The film is not just another film about the games industry, but attempts something much more ambitious; the question of what it means to be a 'gamer', a game maker, and where games are headed. Storytelling and the art of the video game medium are also explored in this first of its kind film about the video game industry & the global culture it has created.
This post is a bit out of date, but when it comes to sharing stories of Wing Commander enjoyment, 'better late than never' always applies! Together Retro Game Club chose Wing Commander for one of their group playthroughs last spring, and they even whipped up a nifty Arrow Scout graphic to kick things off. Their adventure was very much like the community replay that the CIC conducted a few years back, but in our case it took over a year to get through the main story games in the series! If you'd like to read about the fun that they had, check out the Racketboy forums here. Dundradal's CIC replay is also summarized here.
Wing Commander is the first game in the Wing Commander series of science fiction space simulation games, released on September 26, 1990 for the PC. It was designed and directed by Chris Roberts and produced by Roberts and a pre-System Shock/Deus Ex Warren Spector. Origin Systems was the developer and publisher. The company would later be bought out by Electronic Arts in 1992, and EA would go on to publish future Wing Commander titles, as well as use the Origin name for their future digital download service.Wing Commander was conceived to bring the space combat genre to a level as high as the Star Wars films. What made this game ahead of its time was its revolutionary 3D graphics and simulation elements. The player is able to give themselves a callsign as the name they will use, the player can interact with their fellow pilots aboard the ship, fly many different types of space fighter craft, issue commands to their wingmen and assume complete control of the space fighter’s functions.
The actions in battle and the decisions made by the player will affect the course of the game’s story through special “winning” and “losing” branches, and reaching the end of one of those arcs will determine your ending. The game also uses an extensive amount of cutscenes, a feature in PC gaming that was starting to gain traction around the time this game was released. If the player performs well, they can gain promotions, and if the player dies in-game, an elaborate space funeral scene will send them off.
Warren Spector left Origin in 1995 to found Looking Glass, the company responsible for System Shock 2, Thief and other titles. This is his company-wide goodbye letter, which is a great look back at the culture at Origin at the time.
As Origin FX, the Ultima and Wing Commander-themed screensaver, was in development, Warren Spector collected ideas for minigames and additional modules. Some of them are even Wing Commander-themed... check it out!
In 1995, Paul Steed pitched a game called Cyclone Alley to Origin. Cyclone Alley was a futuristic racing game set in space that was ultimately abandoned. At one point, Warren Spector attempted to merge Privateer 2 and Cyclone Alley into one project... and these are his notes!
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