Strike Commander

Development

Included inside the "Sudden Death" manual is a 2-page article from Chris Roberts describing how difficult it was to create the game and likening his experiences to the film Heart of Darkness, a documentary on the creation of the film, Apocalypse Now

Posters

Origin had released posters touting the original release date of Strike Commander. Such posters are real collector's item now, as the game was two years late and still runs like a dog on most systems then.

Sudden Death

A mock magazine named "Sudden Death" (meant for Mercs working out of Turkey) was contained in each copy of Strike Commander (it was released in Acrobat PDF format in the subsequent CD versions) that detailed the economic, historical, and political background behind the game's "post-depression" setting. Within it were several articles portraying some of the many characters in the game, as well as a collection of humorous advertisements.

One article is the interview with a retired "enforcer" (a mercenary specializing in punishing those who renege blood contracts from "fixers" and wealthy contractors) whose trademark slogan is "Gule, gule" (Go cheerfully). The meaning of this trademark becomes apparent as well as his other slogan, "The gun for the brave, the knife for the coward."

Technology

Strike Commander was so ambitious that it began development in 1991 with features that then-current 386 processors couldn't handle adequately, (such as real-time true 3D texture mapping with Gouraud shading, fractal terrain, and atmospheric hazing of distant objects). Numerous optimizations were made in an attempt to get the game running smoothly, but Strike Commander was one of the first games to attempt such a complex engine, and optimized 3D texturing techniques weren't prevalent in the industry. By the time the average gaming machine was a 486/33, the game shipped, nearly two years later.

The game's notoriety for being unplayably slow on average gaming machine's reached far and wide, even into PC Magazine cartoons (one particular joke was about how trying to run Strike Commander on OS/2 with a defrag running at the same time used up so much power that lights dimmed throughout the house). By the time a greatly-optimized version (almost 3 times as fast) version was released, it was too little too late.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #15 Top Vaporware Title in Computer Game History
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #95 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
• PC Powerplay (Germany)
  • Issue 11/2005 - #9 Game Which Absolutely Needs A Sequel

Information also contributed by Chockydnutman, Kasey Chang and WildKard