Document Archive: Games That Weren't

The Document Archive is where we try to collect and categorize all the neat finds related to the development history of the various Wing Commander products so you can more easily research your favorite titles. These might include storyboards, early product shots, art sources, and draft scripts that we've featured in one of our daily updates, but otherwise risk falling by the wayside. With Secret Ops turning twenty this year, the time was right to expand the archive's coverage of that game. The project was more limited in scope than Wing Commander: Prophecy, but we've still uncovered a few interesting items over the years:

• Secret Ops Scripts: 30 items added, including the lost web fiction.
• Secret Ops Artwork: Six art pieces added, including the backstory of the Plunkett design.
• Secret Ops Ads: A contemporary print article providing some fascinating insights on the impact of a burgeoning internet.
• Secret Ops Design: Various bits of source code and a CD-ROM with development tools like the internal mission editor MED.

• Shadow Force Design: Various design documents, source code fragments.
• Shadow Force Artwork: Ship and character sketches.
• Shadow Force Ads: Internal sell sheet and "Maverick Mix".
• Prowler Design: History of the project, and a developer chatlog from 1996.
• Prowler Artwork: Early pre-release screenshots, box art and sketches of characters, mechs and locations.

Eurogamer Digs Up Canceled Origin Games

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."

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."

More Emerges from the Shadows

Also from Billy Cain and Shadow Force comes this twelve-page "Design Document Review." This is the Shadow Force teams' analysis of the now-famous "TCIS Eyes Only" Shadow Force proposal. The most amazing thing here is how much like Arena this game could have been--it would have included both Arena's hated powerups and a more arcade-style "chase camera" gameplay mode, with an automatic targeting feature!

Selling Shadow Force

While we were in Austin for the CIC birthday, Wing Commander Prophecy lead designer Billy Cain was kind enough to invite us over to hear stories about his days at Origin... and he shared some cool artifacts for the community, too! The first is a 'sell sheet' for the cancelled "Wing Commander: Shadow Force" project. Shadow Force was a game developed by the Maverick team shortly after Secret Ops which would have featured single- and multiplayer-gameplay, telling the story of a group of mercenaries hunting for a Steltek artifact. Sell sheets were sent to retailers to promote upcoming games, in the hopes of securing orders. It's likely that this one was only used internally (alongside this longer presentation), to promote the game to Electronic Arts executives. Unfortunately, it didn't work!

You Can't Reinvent Wing Commander!

It's not just pretty pictures today--we also have an absolutely insane sound file dredged from the depths of Origin history! Labeled "Maverick Mix", this four minute combination of music, sound effects and conversations is one of the strangest things you'll ever hear. It was part of an internal product pitch for "Shadow Force," and it begins with a Chris Roberts imitator, goes on to play some new music and ends with a conversation about what the new game was going to include. Warning--contains some language. Download it here:

• "Maverick mix" (mp3, 6.2mb)

A Series of Unfortunate Events

In 1998, Interplay decided to leap in with the confusingly named Descent: Freespace. The name was a curious marketing ploy, considering that Descent was a niche series that played like a corridor-based first-person shooter on three axes, offering only the faint whiff of crossover appeal for space combat fans. But it came at a perfect time, arriving on the heels of the disappointing Wing Commander: Prophecy, which marked EA’s attempt to relaunch the series without the input of creator Chris Roberts. Freespace received enough positive word-of-mouth to warrant a sequel, which would be released the following year.

The release of Freespace 2 alongside X-Wing Alliance was part of a confluence of events that would ultimately mark the end of what had been one of the preeminent genres of the 1990s. Roberts had long since left Origin, leaving the series dead in the water after the lukewarm reception given Wing Commander: Prophecy. Interplay was in the process of hemorrhaging money, and X-Wing Alliance marked the end of a trilogy. The stage was set for the genre’s demise.

Privateer 3 (more, more, more, more, more, more and more) and Wing Commander Strike Team / Shadow Force should have continued the series as everyone expected. But then we got to those changing market conditions, unsustainable FMV budgets and rising costs. Games like Freespace 2, X:BTF and Starlancer did not sell as well as the last crop of Wing Commanders and Star Wars games. New formats such as the massively multiplayer Ultima Online were booming, and so there was a big shift in direction. Wing Commander development transitioned into Privateer Online (more), Wing Commander Online and then Privateer Online again. Electronic Arts also acquired Westwood Studios, which was further along on their space MMO Earth & Beyond. With competing products in the pipeline and a market quickly becoming saturated, the decision was made to launch E&B instead. Wing Commander Online and Ultima Online 2 were sidelined, and Origin didn't recover from the tailspin.

That hasn't kept the powers that be from attempting to pull everything back together, but so far only smaller scale projects (Prophecy Advance, Wing Commander Arena, various ports/rereleases) have made it to see the light of day. Hopefully you find this history fascinating, and someday we'll all be able to look back at this time period and see how it built up into a great relaunch of the series. It's only a matter of time until the next Wing Commander game!

Making the Games: Source Code?

Last, but not least, we present from Johnny's CD a pile of Wing Commander Shadow Force 'source code', which is likely taken from various elements of Wing Commander Prophecy and Secret Ops. There are several hundred tiny files .h and .cpp, most of which are completely incomprehensible to non-technical sorts such as myself -- but I imagine that many in the community will be interested in seeing exactly how the bits and pieces of the games fit together.

Rather than try to examine each piece, we've put the entire directory structure online, exactly as it appeared on the original CD. Begin the journey here. Be sure and let us know if you discover any amazing secrets of meanings behind any of this.

Making the Games: Multi-Commander Features

Today we present the first of several documents dealing with "Multi-Commander", which was either an ancestor or a spinoff of the Shadow Force concept. The team apparently generated some detailed concept notes as well as some fascinating Visio charts showing the three systems which would appear in the game. Today, though, it's just the basics - how the thing would have worked.

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material! The series is winding down, though, so if you're a former Wing Commander developer with a story to tell or a document to share, we'd love to hear from you.

Multi-Commander Features Download (31 kb) Date: Unknown Project: Multi-Commander Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: 2

Making the Games: Shadow Force Art Assets

This list of art assets needed for Shadow Force is interesting for a number of reasons, not the last of which because it shows that the project would have used updated versions of classic ships in exactly the same way as Wing Commander Arena eventually did. It certainly would have been great to see Paktahns and Bloodfangs updated by Origin, though!

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material! The series is winding down, though, so if you're a former Wing Commander developer with a story to tell or a document to share, we'd love to hear from you.

Shadow Force Art List Download (42 kb) Date: Unknown Project: Wing Commander Shadow Force Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: 9

Making the Games: Shadow Force Design Document - Chapter 4

This is the final of three 'chapters' of separate Shadow Force Design documents. This one describes improvements the team wants to make to the Secret Ops concept - in particular, to the 'mission movie' feature (telling the story in-engine). It also features a good rundown of the proposed Shadow Force plot... and some insight as to plans for the Nephilim (or, "Junior").

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material! The series is winding down, though, so if you're a former Wing Commander developer with a story to tell or a document to share, we'd love to hear from you.

Shadow Force Design Document - Chapter 4 Download (86 kb) Date: Unknown Project: Wing Commander Shadow Force Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: 12

Making the Games: Shadow Force Design Document - Chapter 3

This is the second of three 'chapters' of separate Shadow Force Design documents. This document describes how the game 'looks' to a player and how a lot of the in-game mechanics work. This one is particularly fascinating because it tells us that the game actually had a lot in common with Wing Commander Arena - including the types of multiplayer modes and the existence of powerups. That said, the 'align with capship' concept described here is an absolutely unique gameplay element.

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material! The series is winding down, though, so if you're a former Wing Commander developer with a story to tell or a document to share, we'd love to hear from you.

Shadow Force Design Document - Chapter 3 Download (46 kb) Date: Unknown Project: Wing Commander Shadow Force Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: 12

Making the Games: Shadow Force Design Document - Chapter 2

This is the first of three 'chapters' of separate Shadow Force Design documents. It seems to have been written to explain the game to people above the development team - exactly how it would be played, why it would be fun... and, in this particular case, what kind of online interaction would be formed around it. The "Gas Giants" faux-dialogue is kind of corny, but - well, it's a nice dream, Vaquero.

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material! The series is winding down, though, so if you're a former Wing Commander developer with a story to tell or a document to share, we'd love to hear from you.

Shadow Force Design Document - Chapter 2 Download (42 kb) Date: Unknown Project: Wing Commander Shadow Force Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: 14

Making the Game: Rogue-Shadow Document

As promised, our visit through Captain Johnny's development CDs continues with a set of fascinating documents, all of which relate to the abandoned Wing Commander: Shadow Force concept developed at Origin in 1998-99. The first is the "Rogue Ops Design Document" (internal references have all been changed to 'Shadow Force'), which provides a fairly specific overview of the concept. Fan developers could even take these mission concepts to heart when building their own games!

It also includes the same character sketches seen earlier in the month. Thanks to research on the part of Sean Murphy, we now know that these were done by Origin artist Dave Plunkett (designer of, among other things, the Plunkett-class Heavy Artillery Cruiser in Wing Commander Secret Ops).

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material! The series is winding down, though, so if you're a former Wing Commander developer with a story to tell or a document to share, we'd love to hear from you.

Rogue Ops Design Document Download (5.4 MB) Date: Unknown Project: Wing Commander Shadow Force Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: 66

Making the Games: Shadow Force Sketches

More Shadow Force material right out of the gate - these seven sketches represent six of the game's mercenary characters. From left to right: Furie, Hardware, Priest, Prime, Turk and Silver (the last two). If you happen to be at work this weekend then you shouldn't click on that final sketch -- it's rated 'M'. Everyone else would be advised to view it as quickly as possible, though.

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material!

Making the Games: The Shadow Force - Mercenaries

This is the thirteenth set of Feng Zhu concept artwork pieces. Unlike the previous sets, the origin of these is clear: they are the characters developed for Wing Commander: Shadow Force, an aborted follow-up to Secret Ops. This second half of the cast seems to consist of mercenaries, privateers and other shady characters. They're a bit more varied than the Confederation crew... and occasionally a good bit sexier.

Making the Games: The Shadow Force - Confederation

This is the twelfth set of Feng Zhu concept artwork pieces. Unlike the previous sets, the origin of these is clear: they are the characters developed for Wing Commander: Shadow Force, an aborted follow-up to Secret Ops. The first half of the cast are Confederation officers -- note the dynamic new uniforms, which give the old converted garbage-man outfits a run for their money.

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material!

Making the Games: Confederation Fighter

This is the second set of Feng Zhu "concept" ships, commissioned for an unspecified Wing Commander title following the release of Secret Ops. These Confederation fighters are unlike any seen in other games, although they may have been derived from the 'rotating parts' concept seen in Wing Commander Prophecy's Panther and Vampire. Their apparent modularity suggests that they may have been for Wing Commander Online - although we will see some other Feng Zhu artwork which clearly belongs to Shadow Force in the coming days.

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material!

Making the Games: Confederation Cruiser

Our next series of daily updates features a treasure trove of Wing Commander artifacts from former designer John "Captain Johnny" Guentzel. Johnny worked on Privateer 2, Wing Commander Prophecy and Secret Ops... along with several of the final projects attempted by the original Maverick team. More importantly, he has always been incredibly kind to Wing Commander fans - and for these updates he has dug up two CDs filled with amazing images, documents and data from his years at Origin. You'll see new images, documents and data from familiar games... as well as stunning material from projects sadly cancelled before their time. We will begin the series with several updates of unreleased artwork...

Following the release of Secret Ops in mid-1998, the development team at Origin put serious work into at least three projects which were ultimately cancelled: Strike Team, Shadow Force and Wing Commander Online. Since there was a good amount of overlap, it is unclear which project most of these ships were first designed for. What is known is their artist: Feng Zhu, who has since made a name for himself as a world-class concept designer. Today's update features several takes on a Confederation cruiser drawn in July, 1998:

Star*Soldier Gloss: Page 35

This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the first powerups page:

CONCEPT: This is a directly gameplay related section. We planned it from early in the project but didn't have a concise list of powerups until very late in the game... and when it arrived it came with these absolutely beautiful high resolution renderings of each one! I ended up expanding the section to give everyone a better view of them. Maybe we can post the original images somewhere, they're quite spectacular - if not the most interesting technology in the world. Speaking of which, take a look at the amount of detail that transfers from the source renderings to the in-game models... you can even see tiny rivets and such. A lot of love went into the graphics in Arena.

The next three updates will be fairly short, as there isn't much continuity in these pages. I wanted to make it clear that the powerups 'existed' in the Wing Commander universe (hence the repair droid technobabble on page one) and then let them stand alone afterwards. One other interesting point to note - not only is Arena not the first Wing Commander game to feature powerups (Proving Grounds, Wing Commander IV demo, WC:CCG) but we now see that every cancelled Origin project (Shadow Force, Strike Team, Privateer Online, Privateer 3) would have also used them in some way.

• "Taryn Cross, E.S." - Taryn Cross was the Exploratory Services Captain from the original Privateer; Brownhair (and every player) had a cute crush on her.
• "repair droids" - Ties the powerup game mechanics to a concept from Privateer. Nuff said.
• "nearly invincible" - Note the toning down of the game's extremes. The same occurs throughout - are phase shields in Wing Commander 2 'really' impenetrable, or are they just treated that way in the game? Let the background material decide...

Star*Soldier Gloss: Page 25

This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the seventh systems page:

CONCEPT: See the previous post!

REFERENCES-

• "Antares Quadrant" - Straight out of the Wing Commander Universe map! Note that I used the original version and not the one found at the CIC - sadly, the additions there come more from a fan's desire to include everything than from necessary logic. I do mention plenty of the missing systems, but I stuck with Captain Johnny's elegant sector map rather than the more confused update. Note that the red colored systems are the ones visited in the article, not ones controlled by the Kilrathi.
• "gold rush" - Another attempt to insist that the galaxy was colonized in ways before and aside from the incidents involving the Pilgrims in the movie's history.
• "Wu Hegemony" - The Wu, according to Action Stations, were elephant-sized sentients enslaved by the Kilrathi two conflicts prior to the Terran war. The interesting thing here is that the Confederation apparently didn't free whatever was left of the Kilrathi slave races. A topic for future discussion!
• "Epsilon Initiative" - This campaign comes from the short history included in the Confederation Handbook.
• "First Repleetah" - An attempt to square seemingly contradictory descriptions of the Repleetah battle, which differ between the Confederation Handbook and Victory Streak.
• "duration of the war" - I always wondered what happened after Special Operations...
• "Firekka formally broke..." - This happens in Fleet Action.
• "Trafalgar Outerworlds" - Not an imaginary story! This system declares independance in one of the Wing Commander III newsbriefs.
• "Steltek derelict" - This was a plot considered for many potential stories after Secret Ops, including Strike Team, Privateer 3 and Shadow Force. In this capacity I'm not refering to a particular story save the "Boomer fiction" which claimed the Nephilim RIF group was searching for something specific.
• "surplus weapons now in civilian hands" - And there's the setting for Arena!
• "Mercenaries Guild" - One of two uninterestingly named entities from Privateer.
• "letters of marque" - Another reminder that Privateers are different from ordinary mercenaries and bounty hunters.
• "Black Lance" - Tolwyn's black ops group from Wing Commander IV; as I've said before, the idea is that there are now Allegorical Nazi Hunters whose job it is to bring Lancers to justice.