Wing Commander

aka: Squadron, WC1, Wing Commander: Der 3D-Raumkampf-Simulator, Wing Commander: The 3-D Space Combat Simulator, Wingleader
Moby ID: 3
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

The Confederation have been at war with the Kilrathi for the past 20 years, and you're just now joining the Vega campaign. You're a 2nd Lieutenant just out of the Academy, with some good work under your belt. You're posted to Tiger's Claw, the flagship of the Confederation Fleet. Will you help the Confederation to victory, or go down in infamy?

Wing Commander is a space combat simulator interspersed with shipboard dialogs. Onboard the ship, you can save/load game, visit the bar to get the latest gossip, or go on to the next mission briefing, and the 3D space combat part.

The 3D space combat has you sitting in the cockpit, where you control the craft like roll, turn, up/down, afterburner, as well as fire guns and launch missiles. There are four different crafts on the Confed side, each with different flight characteristics and armament. You will have a wingman on each mission, and you should keep the wingman alive as the wingman will help you if you issue the right orders. You can also taunt the enemy. You'll be fighting several different types of enemy fighters and capital ships, and even combat a few Kilrathi aces.

When the mission is complete, land back onboard the ship and get ready for the next one. The campaign tree has both winning and losing paths.

Spellings

  • ウイングコマンダー - Japanese spelling
  • 银河飞将 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 82% (based on 36 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 199 ratings with 17 reviews)

An all time classic, still great after all these years

The Good
This is one of the first games I ever played, and the one that got me totally hooked on space combat and flight sims. You really felt like you were part of the story, and talking with your wingmen between missions made you feel like you were really there. I actually felt depressed when one of them died, and I had to go back to the pilots lounge and see an empty chair and KIA beside their name on the killboard. The gameplay is still great after all this time, and the campaign tree was one of the best in all the games. I must have played this game fifty times through, and has never lost its fun factor.

The Bad
Wingmen are admittedly useless.

The Bottom Line
If you've never played a Wing Commander game, start with this one. If you've played other WC games but not this one, play it. If you haven't played it for a long time, it's time to reload it and play it again.

DOS · by Shadowcaster (252) · 2001

One of those all-time classics everyone should play.

The Good
I bought this on my 11th birthday, less than a week after it came out, based solely on a preview in a magazine I liked, to go with my dad's brand-new 386/16 speedster. (old computer gurus can chuckle now) Now, a decade later, I still play it, and despite going through four computers, it's stayed on the hard drive of every one. The gameplay is still possibly the best of the series, with slower-paced, more realistic dogfights. (instead of the two-hits-and-they're-dead mentality of the sequels, you had to really WORK to take out the ships in this one) The music was incredible for its day (and still extremely good if you're lucky enough to have The Kilrathi Saga and its reorchestrated, digital soundtrack) . This and the Secret Mission addons probably still have the most interesting missions of all of them. (my all-time favorite may be the "escort the friendly Dralthi" mission) Finally, this seems to be the most overall immersive of the games. Just from talking with fellow WC fans, we've got tons of great war stories from this (and some from WC2) but few (if any) from any of the other games. (mine is when I took out a space station in a Scimitar with every system down, no missiles, and only one gun)

The Bad
Not much. The AI wasn't that great, but it was probably the best of its day. I'm probably the wrong person to ask, though - I've played it so much, I can predict what the AI is going to do 90% of the time. The Secret Mission disks were incredibly difficult at the time (old WC fans still get a cold sweat if you mention the Gwenhyvar) but seem easy if you've managed to pull yourself through Privateer.

The Bottom Line
Probably one of the top-10 best games of all time. This is one any fan, especially one raised on new games like Freespace, owes it to themselves to play for the sake of history.

DOS · by WizardX (116) · 2000

A worthy start to a long and successful series.

The Good
Wing Commander gave gamers a product that was not only a new (for the time) first-person perspective pseudo-3D space shooter, but also had a storyline with an engaging story and well-drawn characterization.

A first for games of the time, music was very well done, thanks to The Fat Man and his team. The music was also "aware" of the action, and increased or reduced tension depending how much trouble you were in.

The Bad
The artists chose to use the color blue when drawing highlights in black hair. (This is where the main character, Blair, got his nickname "Blue-Hair".) This isn't really a massive flaw, but it lowers the graphics down to the comic-book level occaisionally.

The pseudo-3D engine didn't have any minimum-distance clipping, so when you got close to a ship, you really got close to a ship. The resulting pixelicious display that resulted slowed the game down to a crawl on low-end systems.

Speaking of low-end systems, this game performed perfectly on them--but was way too fast on high-end systems out at the same time, like a 386/33. Tsk tsk, Origin... needed to do better planning. (This speed problem was eliminated in The Kilrathi Saga, a re-release of the first three Wing Commander games rewritten for Windows 95.)

The Bottom Line
An instant classic. If you haven't played it, you owe it to yourself to play the game through to completion.

DOS · by Trixter (8952) · 1999

[ View all 17 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Save the destroyer. Victor Vance (18072) Jul 30, 2014
Amazing non-linear story from a space simulator? Indra was here (20756) Nov 11, 2008
Need help landing. Indra was here (20756) Nov 8, 2008
How Many Floppy Diskettes? mobiusclimber (235) May 21, 2008

Trivia

Amiga version

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. Some early demos were made in 32 colors, but the number of colors had to be reduced as the game was too slow on not accelerated Amigas. The only 256-color version is the one bundled with the CD32 system, which also runs on A1200s with CD drives.

Auto pilot

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. This can be seen when actually flying to each of the nav points manually.

Campaign

Wing Commander features 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.

Copy protection

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.

Cutscenes

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

Development

This game was almost canceled the quarter before it shipped. The sales & marketing director Marten Davies at Origin did not believe it would sell. In an interview with the German magazine GameStar (issue 05/2016), Roberts refutes this claim and replaces it with a different anecdote: Roberts believed the game would sell 100.000 units, Davies calculated with at least 200.000 units. So Roberts did bet his car (Porsche 944 Turbo) on it - and lost because the game sold 250.000 units in a short time frame. However, with the royalties he could easily afford a new car of the same model...

Maniac

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. At least this happens when you play the original Wing Commander Missions with the sm2.exe from Secret Missions 2: Crusade.

Manual

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.

Novels

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.

Packaging

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?

PC Gamer release

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

Player character

In Wing Commander, the player character has no name and when he was created, his black hair was "highlighted" with lots of streaks of blue (there was a limited color palette). Within Origin, he came to be referred to as "BlueHair" when discussing him. It is possible that this was the basis when he was named "Blair" in later installments of the series.

References

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.

SEGA CD version

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

Soundtrack

In 2002 Team Fat announced the release of a completely redone Soundtrack-CD. The bonus track of this CD - a surf-version of the WC-Theme - can be found at http://www.gamasutra.com/galleries/audio/george_sanger/index.htm

Technology

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 was 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.

Title

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.

Awards

  • ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)
    • March 1991 (issue #42) - Included in the list Greatest Games of all Time in category Simulations (editorial staff choice)
  • Amiga Joker
    • Issue 02/1994 – Best Simulation in 1993 (Readers' Vote)
  • Computer Gaming World
    • November 1991 (Issue #88) – Game of the Year
    • April 1992 (Issue #93) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #7 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #10 Best Way To Die In Computer Gaming (receiving a funeral)
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #12 Most Rewarding Ending of All Time
    • 200th anniversary issue - #4 in the "Best Game of All Time" list (Readers' vote)
  • FLUX
    • Issue #4 - #20 in the "Top 100 Video Games of All-Time" list
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #34 Top Game of All Time
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #4 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • Power Play
    • Issue 01/1991 - Best Action Game in 1990 (DOS version)

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Big John WV, Felix Knoke, IJan, Kasey Chang, Martin Smith, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, quizzles7, rstevenson, Steve Cantrell, Thomas Perl, weregamer, Windowskiller, WildKard, WizardX and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Trixter.

Amiga added by Rebound Boy. SNES added by Satoshi Kunsai. FM Towns added by Terok Nor. SEGA CD added by quizzley7.

Additional contributors: Brian Hirt, Kasey Chang, monkeyislandgirl, formercontrib, Ricky Derocher, 梦迪 高, Patrick Bregger, Jo ST.

Game added March 1, 1999. Last modified February 20, 2024.