Amiga

Wing Commander

Trivia

Wing Commander was named #7 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on May 01, 2008.

The game manual, like other Origin games, is written inside the universe and titled "Claw Marks: The Onboard Magazine of TCS Tiger's Claw". Inside is various stories and articles that might be interesting to an active pilot, including a set of ship's schematics under the heading "Joan's Spacecraft". This is a various obvious nod to the Jane's Information Group which for years published encyclopedic specifications of ships, aircraft, tanks and other machines of war. In the video game world, the Jane's branding has been attached to multiple products.

There have been eight novels written and published set in the Wing Commander universe; unusually, most of them have been at least partially written by the same author, and hence for game novel adaptations can be considered to contain extraordinary degrees of internal continuity:

1. Freedom Flight (1992), by Ellen Guon and Mercedes Lackey;
2. End Run (1993), by William R Forstchen and Christopher Stasheff;
3. Fleet Action (1994), by William R Forstchen;
4. Heart of the Tiger (1995), by William R Forstchen and Andrew Keith;
5. The Price of Freedom (1996), by William R Forstchen and Ben Ohlander;
6. Action Stations (1997), by William R Forstchen;
7. False Colors (1998), by William R Forstchen and William H Keith; and
8. Pilgrim Stars (1999), by Peter Telep -- a novel specifically inspired by the WC movie.

The Amiga version of the game runs slowly on a stock A500 and is much better played on a faster Amiga such as a A1200.

The standard Amiga version has only 16 colors. Some early demos were made in 32 colors, but the number of colors had to be reduced as the game was too slow on unaccelerated Amigas.

Due to the way the game has you auto-piloting to different nav points where the action takes place, most gamers would think that the engine simply has a generic "endless" space and it simply spawns the required objects when you use the autopilot feature. In reality the game actually generates the entire area you see on your nav computer with all its objects.

How do I know this? Because for the first couple of missions or so I didn't know of the autopilot feature and actually flew to each of the nav points manually!

The standard Amiga version of Wing Commander has only 16 colors, as it was released just before the Amiga 1200 which added the 256-color AGA version. The only 256-color version is the one bundled with the CD32 system, which also runs on A1200s with CD drives.

Wing Commander was made during an age when a decent sound card could easily cost 250-300 dollars...and yet many people bought them simply to hear the game's legendary music!

Wing Commander featured a full "winning" and "losing" branches of a campaign tree, with some "neither" branches where you can turn yourself around. Unfortunately, most players simply replay each mission until they win (or else they eject and reload the old savegame), thus NEVER experiencing the "losing" side of the campaign, thus wasting all the effort put in by Origin.

Origin simplified the campaign flowchart in all later games (and the mission packs) so that they no longer need completely separate campaign paths for the "losing" branch, to save on development costs.

The Sega CD version of Wing Commander features voice acting for all the dialogue in the game. There are not even any subtitles.

This game was almost canceled the quarter before it shipped. The sales & marketing director at Origin did not believe it would sell.

Of course, this was the same person who had tried to position Chris Roberts' previous game, Bad Blood (an action RPG in the days before that genre existed) as an Ultima-like game, and the same who later rejected a friendly offer for a Clive Barker game license because the idiot "had never heard of him so he must not be important".

The great soundtrack really contributed to the game's atmopshere. Team Fat under the lead of the famous Fat Man did it - and they'll release a completely redone Soundtrack-CD soon. At least, they tell so... But you can already find the bonus track of this CD online - a surf-version of the WC-Theme... Check it out!!! http://www.gamasutra.com/galleries/audio/george_sanger/index.htm

When you fly a mission with "Maniac", there's the name "Joker" written on his helmet, however if you fly with the other pilots, the right name is on their helmets. Probably Origin changed this before the Final Release too. At least this happens when you play the original Wing Commander 1 Missions with the sm2.exe from Secret Missions 2: Crusade.

Chris Roberts had NEVER done any action/flight games before Wing Commander. His previous game at Origin was "Bad Blood", an RPG where you play a mutant in a post-apocalyptic world full of radiation and unfriendly creatures.

In the 200th aniversary issue of Computer Gaming World, the readers namede it the fourth best game of all time. In the top 10 from issue 150, it got the number seven spot.

Wow...a blast from the past for me. Here are a couple of points of "trivia" for Wing Commander:

1) If you look at the "weapons ratings" you will notice that some are rated in "ESK's". This stands for "Earth Shattering Kabooms!", as per the Marvin the Martian cartoon.

2) In Wing 1, the Player Character had no name...no one ever addressed you as "Lt. So and So". Well, in later WC games, the main character has a last name of Blair.

In the original game, when the portrait for the PC was created, his black hair was "highlighted" with lots of streaks of blue (there was a limited color pallete). Within Origin, he came to be referred to as "BlueHair" when discussing him. I firmly believe that was the basis for "Blair" in later releases of the game.

The original package came with blueprints for the 4 Confed fighters in the game: Hornet, Scimitar, Raptor, and Rapier. The copy protection ask you questions from those blueprints!

A complete version of Wing Commander is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured in the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine.

Contributed by rstevenson (680) on Jun 23, 2000.

The game was originally going to be called "Wingleader" and had that name until very shortly before it was shipped. It was changed at the last minute when it was discovered a board game had the same name and they didn't want to risk trademark infringement. Some beta-test pictures can still be found which contain that name.

There's a large blurb on the back of the original box that says "Every screenshot taken from this game - What You See is What You Play!" However, that's incorrect. Most of the shots on the back were taken from a beta version of the game, featuring weapons, names, and graphics not seen in the final version. Isn't it ironic?

Most of the major cutscenes are random in themselves (e.g. everytime the briefing starts people sit down and stand up in different order).

Unique for its time, Wing Commander used a hybrid 3D system that took place in true 3D space, but used bitmaps drawn from different angles for sprites. The end result was a 3D system that looked decent and was very fast without the speed penalty of rendering polygons in realtime (bitmap scaling and rotation was employed instead). A similar method was used in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but not until several years later.

Wing Commander has been so successful that it became both a cartoon and a movie. Check "related sites" for details.

Contributed by Trixter (8895) on Mar 01, 1999.