Thank you for playing Wing Commander

[@ToumalRakesh]

The fact that the game always crashed on exit, and they hex-edited the crash message to change it to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander" is so on-brand for Chris Roberts, it's amazing.

[@wobblysauce]

Bug? no it is a feature...

[@ThomasVvV]

And today hes scamming people

[@Nib_Nob-t7x]

@@ThomasVvV Star citizen isn't a scam

[@ThomasVvV]

@@Nib_Nob-t7x Ok so when does the game release

[@Nib_Nob-t7x]

@@Lee-wk3cb You can literally play it now. it just doesn't have all the features yet. If its a scam why are they spending all the money they were given developing the game they said they would. By end of year they should have passed their biggest technical hurdle "server meshing", they recently have been doing 2000 player server tests. Not to mention its single player counterpart squadron 42 will be releasing in a couple years and they have been able to show off gameplay live for it.

[@smuchow1962]

I was one of the programmers on 'Wing Thing' as we called it. I have fond memories of Wing 1 and Wing 2 - although the hours we worked bordered on brutal. From a programming perspective, doing all we did in the Vertical and Horizontal blanks as the raster gun traversed the screen was amazing. You have no idea how many times we would look at compiler output to eek out every clock cycle we could.

[@Sinistar1983]

As a new indie developer, I've always looked up to your programming skills because it's so well built. Especially getting the ships to all scale seamlessly is an incredible sense of immersion

[@average_ms-dos_enjoyer]

I have nothing but respect for you and your ilk, I've recently started playing around with programming in C for MS-DOS (using DJGPP) and it's given me some real perspective of the challenges you would have had to overcome, especially once you started moving to 32-bit...

[@JimLeonard]

What Wing Commander game functions were carried out in the vertical blank?

[@bruce_just_]

Thanks! You and your colleagues created something very special. 👍

[@SomeOrangeCat]

Mad respect!!

[@andrewhofmann5453]

In 1990 I worked at Software Etc 5 miles down the road from Origins offices. One day Chris Roberts and Stephen Beeman come into the store with a 386/33 and a Roland setup for us to setup as a demo for the game. As a 16 year old I was blown away with the game quality and sound (the Roland tracks were really something we hadn’t heard of at that time). Over the weeks I got to know many of the Origin people and eventually Richard Garriot got me for an interview, and I was hired into QA (16 year olds dream job!!!!!). Fun fact: - The visible hand in the cockpit was only visible if the user’s computer had the extended memory properly installed via Himem.exe. - We had so many calls when the game first released of people asking us how to keep from dying in the first 30 seconds in the game, some people were really angry. Wing Commander literally changed my life.

[@spyhardman]

Haha, I love the detail about people being angry at dying in the simulator.

[@suvetar]

You lucky so-and-so!! What a great experience to have had though regardless, nice one Andrew, nice one indeed!!

[@donwald3436]

I sucked at the game too lol I could only play with cheats on.

[@acomingextinction]

That's seriously cool. Origin sounds like a pretty interesting workplace lol

[@donwald3436]

@@acomingextinction for real, I wish I worked somewhere cool before I got a steady boring job.

[@devmech]

The impact of this series can't be overestimated. The voice expansion pack for Wing Commander 2 led to me buying my first sound blaster card, which made me open my computer for the first time. This translated into IT skills which led into a career in cybersecurity and software development 30 years later. These games truly pushed the envelope and changed more than their developers possibly realized.

[@Osprey850]

Same. The WC2 speech pack made me want a sound card, and installing my first was the first time that I ever upgraded a computer. It gave me confidence and by the late 90s, I was building computers not just as a hobby but for my job.

[@GeddyRC]

Heh, that's really cool. I remember what got me into software engineering and it was just as seemingly (at the time) innocuous. Just a thing you have to do for another goal that ends up paving a way for your whole life.

[@r.l.royalljr.3905]

My mom and dad got divorced when I was just a baby and when I got a little older Dad got me for the summers. The last summer I spent with him, he bought Wing Commander brand new and he and me and my brother would take turns playing it on his computer. I think he had a 486 because we had to disable the turbo or the game was like playing in fast forward. Wing Commander is the game that got me hooked on flight sims. X-Wing, Privateer, F-15 Strike Eagle, F-19, F-117, Descent Freespace... Those were the good old days.

[@CyberKnight1]

To bring it back full-circle to re-enacting Star Wars, Wing Commander III had you playing as Mark Hamill's character, whose final mission is to fly through a long trench to drop a bomb in a target at the far end. Seeing real actors (Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell) in a videogame was pretty mindbending back in the early '90s.

[@Vulkans]

My favorite part of WC3 was the pre-mission 486 DX2 load ritual: Get up, grab a snack, have a drink, do your laundry, hang your laundry, sweep the porch, take a shower. Come back to find that the game is still loading, or did it crash? But the music is still playing! It was fun going back to it once I got a Pentium and more RAM.

[@whitslack]

@@Vulkans I lived that unique brand of hell as well. Especially irritating were those few missions near the end of the game where there were FMV transitions of your spacecraft between space and atmospheric flight. Transitioning back to the sim from the FMV took just as long as the initial "turbines to speed" sequence on the cockpit computer. I too recall revisiting the game on much faster hardware and being blown away by how negligible the load times became.

[@radish6691]

⁠How could you forget Maniac, aka Tom Wilson, aka Biff from Back to The Future!

[@AppNasty]

My best memory as a kid was rushing home from school…..going to my real space ship……that I built in my room using books and printers and other stuff my mom had. So in front of me was my screen with Wing Commander, then all around me was techy stuff to make my room look like a real ship. So when my eyes left the screen I would be looking at a large calculator or printer. I would then pretend to hit buttons on them as if they launched my weapons. I would be talking to crew mates etc. it was glorious.

[@fearlesswee5036]

I remember I did a similar thing as a kid with my brother after we'd constantly replay the Flying Fortress bomber segment in Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. Except our "simulator" was entirely imaginary; we'd arrange dining room chairs in a rough plane-like shape, covered it all in these camouflage pattern blankets we had, and then mounted our Nerf Vulcan blasters at various points, and would switch between them like how you switch between turret positions in the game. We'd pretend to fire at imaginary Japanese Zeroes, shake the hull to pretend we were taking flak fire, etc. I think at one point we ended up using the PSP we shared to pretend to control the bomb display, I can't remember what game we'd put it on, though.

[@jonarsenal]

Please never give up producing these videos it's just gold a big thank you

[@Tainted79]

WC Privateer, SW Tie fighter, SW Dark Forces, Ultima 3, Heroes Quest 2, Warcraft Orc & Humans, DnD Eye of the Beholder, Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, and Civilization; Were my favorite PC games to play on my family's old IBM386 and Packard Bell Legend 486. Great memories being 9-13 years old rushing home from school to play games.

[@naswinger]

only 34 more years until star citizen releases!

[@Just.Kidding]

*until the pre-alpha demo, at which point it will have been "reimagined" as a paid Starfield mod

[@Tom_Neverwinter]

you have been able to play starcitizen for over a decade...

[@albeceldariu]

​@@Tom_Neverwinteryou have been able to be scammed for a never-ending development game for over a decade you mean

[@COSMiCxpl]

​@@Tom_NeverwinterAnd? It's still in alpha.

[@Tom_Neverwinter]

@@albeceldariu so why is starcitizen out and why do you keep plagerising a moving goalpost narrative that failed year one....

[@FoxbatStargazer]

There is an official period win95 port called the Kilrathi Saga that caps the game speed so it can run smoothly on any recent CPU. Its even playable on win10/11 with the fan patch WCDX. (and a mod wing commander loader to inject the Sega CD voice into WC1!)

[@KopperNeoman]

Ooh, I remember being hyped for the voice acting in the Win95 version, but haven't checked back in about a year. Now I want a co-op mod. Hey, if geniuses can make Might & Magic 6-7-8 into one campaign and make the resulting mod also be multiplayer...

[@jasonblalock4429]

Not to mention having toggleable invisible cockpits, which might break the original design a bit, but would probably be appreciated by modern players.

[@JelloFluoride]

Wait, that might and magic mod has multi-player?! 🤯​@@KopperNeoman

[@volvoguy804]

Yep, I bought a complete copy on Ebay in '02 for $110. Most I ever spent on a game. Before, I had to purchase a used older computer locally just to play the dos version I had.

[@Renk1]

Bought Wing Commander on my Amiga 600 (stock) after seeing it on a friend's 386. It ran very poorly on the Amiga, but I didn't mind, loved it so much. Didn't finish the campaign, though (did so later on the PC). Now just this summer I found my old Amiga disks and the save file was still intact. It was great going back 30 years and try to finish what I started in my teenage years. Nostalgic.

[@trueakuma777]

I remember playing games like Battlehawks 1942 and F-19 Stealth Fighter and wishing we had a decent Star Wars space combat game that was better than the Star Wars arcade game we had at the time. Even though we had a copy of the PC port of Star Wars Arcade, and so didn't have to spend a ton of quarters playing it, it still wasn't the same. Then Wing Commander came along and changed all that. I would play for hours and hours doing my best to win every mission so I could get the best path possible, and finally succeeded! Eventually Star Wars X-Wing came out and satisfied that desire for a true Star Wars space combat experience, but there will never be another experience the same as Wing Commander. Thank you for the wonderful video and stay safe out there!

[@voldem0rt]

Memories. I was 8 and my dad the medical I.T. guy loved PC's and Power Macs, Compaq was in my backyard and I had connections for the best hardware of the era. Wing Commander blew my mind and then some. MVG, thank you for doing classics justice.

[@mariobrito427]

Thanks for this video 😄Wing Commander was a really big part of my teen years, and i spent more time than i care to admit playing it and reverse engineering portions of it. Those were fun times, wouldn't trade it for the world. The Wing Commander series (and the first one in particular) are gems that just can't be praised high enough

[@AllieT-wq8eq]

My first Wing Commander game was Wing Commander III. As an 11-year-old, it was just phenomenal with its 3D texture-mapped graphics and FMV featuring Mark Hamill himself. It would take another 5 years to realize the final mission was ripped straight from Star Wars, and another 10 years to find out who G.L. Allen was

[@IskandarRahmat]

Same - Mark Hamill as Colonel Blair aka Maverick was awesome!

[@Jammet]

@@IskandarRahmat Don't forget Tom Wilson and John Rhy Davies!

[@twolechesconquick]

Like wise !!

[@daakrolb]

And now hamill is a total idiot.

[@dallesamllhals9161]

.."another 10 years to find out who G.L. Allen was"... late bloomer? 😛

[@d.ryan96]

Wing commander could definitely have some Nightdive magic applied

[@titanic_monarch796]

I feel like some open sourcing could get some pretty clean enhancements.

[@Daimo83]

@@titanic_monarch796 This is EA we're talking about

[@titanic_monarch796]

oh right i forgot, damn.

[@MarkDell]

I really loved the 3DO port of Wind Commander, my favourite version by far!

[@crxtodd16]

Wind Commander? Is that like a farting simulator? (Please say yes)

[@MarkDell]

@@crxtodd16 haha. I noticed that typo after and thought it was too good to fix! Farting simulator is exactly what it made me think of!

[@Imperious685]

Here in Brisbane back in the early 90's there was a shop in the Myer Center called "Games 'R' Us". I had an Amiga 500 and they had a whole wall dedicated to Wing Commander 1 and 2 and the various addons for the PC. That was when the PC started to become the dominant platform for flight sims and other 3d games. Finally in '94 I bought my first PC, a 486 dx2-66mhz and Wing Commander and Xwing were the first 2 games I bought. Had to run WC1 with the turbo off. I did buy it for the A500 when it came out but on an non accelerated A500 it was an unplayable slideshow. It plays well with an accelerator though which I now have in my Amiga.

[@scherge]

Wing Commander is a lot of fun, but I like Privateer even more. You have more freedom, a working economy, and you can become a bounty hunter. Awesome. In the second game you even play as Clive Owen in the main role and Jürgen Prochnow is the main antagonist. Finished Privateer 2 again just recently and it's still a great game, too.

[@IM-xs3uv]

Man, the hours I sunk into Privateer. Loved that game.

[@MichaelPohoreski]

Spent a LOT of time playing Wing Commander and Privateer. The *animated pre-rendered city scenes* could have been a screensaver!

[@IM-xs3uv]

Privateer was my intro to the Wing Commander series. Once you'd edited your batch and config files it was such a blast. Really fun series overall.

[@JazzMan2001]

First VGA game I ever played, it was jaw dropping at the time.

[@twistedtxb]

im old enough to remember that Wing Commander had crazy high system requirements when it came out. A rich friend of my had a PC beefy enough to run it, and we were both amazed at the graphics. origin systems games usually meant rich kid games only

[@stephenelliott7071]

Yeah, partly why I never played it. X-Wing and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter were excellent though and I loved those games! They improved upon the genre IMO.

[@phat-kid]

same. my computer couldn't run it. i think i could get it to run with like 2-5 fps so i gave up, but i always wanted to play it.

[@WarttHog]

My dad ran his own computer repair business which was just barely enough for our family to get by, so we were far from rich, but we did have the hardware for it. I saw the game first when visiting a supplier with my dad. Blew my mind! On the way home we got a freak ice patch on a back road in March and literally nearly both died. We were both completely fine except for assume scratches from the windows viewing in, but the it was hard to find an unbroken part in the car, and the computer parts we'd just bought we're ejected 20 from the car. That's completely unrelated, but forever connected to Wing Commanders graphics in my mind.

[@nathanddrews]

As a kid I remember getting really excited about the game, but my 286 couldn't run it. A couple years later we had a 486 machine, but then I was way more into Star Trek 25th Anniversary as a TOS nerd. I came back to Wing Commander years later when I saw Mark Hamill's face on the box. EDIT: I hope that this video is a low-key way of announcing that you're involved with a remaster project... :D

[@SinisterPuppy]

I was horrible at Star Trek 25th Anniversary as a kid; I only finally beat it 3-4yrs ago. :P

[@poonsamurai]

Wing Commander 2 actually was playable on a 286, after removing everything possible out of the config.sys, ditching the mouse driver etc. The cutscenes and transitions ran at a glacial pace but surprisingly the gameplay itself was fine. I should add that this was using PC Speaker for audio.

[@Osprey850]

@@poonsamurai That was my experience, as well. WC2 was playable on our 286, but the cutscenes played back at something like a quarter speed. It was agonizing, but worth it.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

I loved the copy protection gimmick in Star Trek 25th Anniversary. You needed the map in the instruction manual to figure out the right place to go. If you went to the wrong star system you would be ambushed and enter into a 3-on-1 battle. You were supposed to lose quickly in these scenarios, but I liked the combat so much that I was eventually able to clear out these ambushes with ease. I liked the mission where you are supposed to gather parts to reassemble and operate the broken transporter but the mission actually has multiple solutions along with awesome animations for "set to kill" phasers.

[@fearlesswee5036]

Wing Commander Trilogy, remastered for all major platforms by Nightdive complete with physical release, would probably give me a heart attack.

[@FADE2GRY2048]

At age 27 in 1990 I had purchased a high end 836 33MHz system and played Wing Commander and it’s sequel. It was fantastic! I remember having to spend more money to buy a good joystick. I can’t remember if I already had the AdLib card or if I bought one for this game. Ultima Underworld was another game I loved at the time. Anyway, good times before kids and career took over spare time.

[@YoureUsingWordsIncorrectly]

You didn't need to remember keys with Many of the Sim games on PC in the 90s as they had a keyboard layer map in the box. Some of the Game Magazines also included Cardboard overlays for Keyboards which were reversible for a number of sims.

[@darinherrick9224]

Man I miss those.

[@polygonvvitch]

God, I have all these games on GOG, the difficulty for 1 and 2 are so damn brutal.

[@kalnaren]

They are difficulty games, but unfortunately WC1 & 2 don't work well in DosBox. Even if you get the cycles more or less acceptable there's still some timing issues that cause the player's shots to not register as hits on the enemy spacecraft which makes the games significantly more difficult.

[@scottg7660]

You ought to look at Tie Fighter and X-Wing next. How they haven’t done a direct remake or update is staggering. Totally Freeform.

[@AerinRavage]

Something I liked was realizing I didn't have to play the Death Star trench run as intended and could just fly to the port at high altitude and then dive bomb it for the win!

[@WarttHog]

I played the crap out of the TIE Fighter demo, the one with a Dodge Neon car commercial at the beginning to pay for it!

[@oohshiny8713]

Check out the TIE Fighter Total Conversion mod for X-Wing Alliance!

[@zeer0squared]

I have played, and loved, all NINE Wing Commander games over the years. They still hold up! I'm also a Star Citizen backer since I heard back in 2013 that Chris Roberts was making a new space game. I'm excited for its future.

[@chinohormann]

I played the crap outta Wing Commander back in the early 90s. I still watch playlists on youtube of all the cinematics when I'm feelin' nostalgic. I remember when we got a Sound Blaster a bit before the sequel came out, and watching the Wing Commander II intro cutscene and going "Those cats are talking!" lol

[@NeoDraven757]

I literally had the exact same experience.

[@Osprey850]

I played through WC2 without a sound card, so when I finally got one and loaded up WC2, it was surprising and surreal to to hear the cats talking because I'd watched the intro many times before, but with subtitles. I didn't know what I was missing.

[@surject]

..as long as you loaded EMM386 :) Else no talkie (and no joystick in cockpit).

[@Jammet]

Love the beautiful TIMES OF LORE theme in the background here, too.

[@TheIronSavior]

13:48 And that unmistakable voice is none other than Cam Clarke, who also voices Liquid Snake in MGS (and a literal ton of other instantly recognizable characters)

[@MikeDest]

Yep, the voice of Leonardo in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series too.

[@AdamScottPersonnel]

I was about to comment that!

[@novelezra]

I LITERALLY WENT STRAIGHT TO THE COMMENTS TO SAY THIS! I immediately recognized that voice as Liquid Snake. What an absolutely incredible voice actor

[@kri249]

I recognised him as Leonardo but didn't even pick up on Liquid Snake. I'm still trying to figure out what other voices he's done.

[@jasonblalock4429]

No to mention KAAAANEEEEEDAAAAAAA!!!!! Although he does seem a bit young (at the time) to be playing a commander in his 40s or so.

[@paradiseregaind]

Thank you for the excellent coverage of one of the greatest--and most important--games of all time! I was born in 1985, and so was just getting into PC gaming in 1989 at four years old with titles like Mixed-Up Mother Goose and King's Quest. Then Wing Commander came out in 1990. It hooked my family and I immediately. I would watch my grandfather, uncle, and father all take turns--and then they'd let me play, teaching me how to use our Gravis 2-button joystick (with the red buttons) to play. When I couldn't play, I was reading Claw Marks and studying the ship blueprints. Then came WC2.. and the Speech Pack! Then came Privateer, Academy, Armada, III, etc... I grew up with Wing Commander, and it was the first game series I fell in love with. I'm proud to still own all of the PC big boxes today, the novels, etc. My son watches me play now, and he'll randomly shout "you cannot defeat the Drakhai" as a taunt when we're playing other multiplayer games. What a game. What a series!

[@unpopularopinion-1]

my first experience with wing commander was on the Panasonic 3DO. i'm actually surprised you didn't mention this version. just like the Sega CD version, it has complete voice acted characters. However, the graphics and gameplay are near perfect to the original. No frame drops I highly recommend looking into this version.👍🏽

[@MarkDell]

Same! It’s an amazing version!

[@spyhardman]

That’s a very interesting and unique version.

[@retrosean199]

The thing I enjoyed about the branching mission path was that some of the most interesting and challenging missions were only available if you had lost a couple of times. I went back years later and discovered these.

[@WhoNeedsNormal]

Currently working on a documentary that involves a lot of devs that worked for Origin on the series. It’s an interesting piece of gaming history.

[@RyanMercer]

I even like the film, but I'm weird and also liked Green Lantern...

[@frestkd]

The cut scenes were funny ... the cut scene going to the fighter top scene bounce run, then the lower scene running normally. So the people have accordion waste.

[@hectorj.romanp.]

I played (surreptitiously) Wing Commander from a diskette in the computer lab. Also, I remember playing (at home) Descent: FreeSpace with a Microsoft SideWinder Precision Pro joystick and a Sound Blaster sound card. It was a blast.

[@silentdebugger]

8:07 I love how there's a specific key combination for "my boss is coming, press alt-B to hide the game so he doesn't catch me playing"

[@lowellhouser7731]

Found this at Cosco in like 1994 or 1995 after keeping a copy of some game mag from '89 that had featured it. Whole stack of 3.5 floppies in the box plus the expansions. We had a 486-33 and it ran perfectly. Dad would later upgrade the system to a 66 with math coprocessor and I actually managed to play it. And then I could not stop moving for about an hour just pacing because my brain needed to slow down. Haven't played this in decades because I moved on to WC3&4 + Prophecy. But yes to the whole video.

[@benjidaniel5595]

I never played the first Wing Commander game, but seeing it now I’m blown away by the sprites of the ships. So many angles and scales!

[@WarttHog]

How appropriate for Factorio Expansion Pack Day!

[@WarttHog]

And somehow I STILL don't have enough memory for all the sprites!! What gives?

[@WhatAboutZoidberg]

I love these retrospectives, please do more. Most of these games were right before my time and I didn't know anyone who played them growing up. Such a cool series.

[@skatedurr]

facts

[@harlandmountain7998]

I played the ever living frack out of the SNES port. Great game and can only imagine how fun the OG version was.

[@1084sLongplays]

Very timely with the Squadron 42 reveal

[@billcook4768]

I started with Wing Commander 2. Amazing game and yes, that music is very much burned in my brain. Fun fact: WC2 had two mission packs and a speech pack. IE paid DLC without the downloading. WC1 also had mission packs and IIRC one of the big plot points of WC2 is set up in those mission packs.

[@KopperNeoman]

"DLC without the downloading" We called those Expansion Packs back then, due to aforementioned lack of downloading.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Speech Packs were such an early-90s thing, in that brief window when digital sound cards were becoming popular, but CD-ROMs hadn't yet become standard. In hindsight, it's a little amazing that people paid ~$20 just for some VOC files, but that was the style at the time.

[@JoeCole_social]

My dad was a huge Treky, he bought this game literally when I first learned to read way back in the early 90s. This was one of the first games I played for the SNES and had a blast slowly sounding out the words and spent countless hours on the simulation because I didn’t know how to progress the game. The visuals always amazed me for the time.

[@JGKingCrusher]

Was also a big fan of the Wing Commander series. My favorite of the series was Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger for the 3DO. That was easily the best flight sim / movie / game ... thing I've ever played. Absolutely loved it!

[@justavian]

"This finally meant we were able to play out our dreams of becoming a space pilot" Yeah, i lived out my dream of becoming a space pilot, finding that i was terrible at it, and washing out of the program to become a space alcoholic. Still - i absolutely have vivid memories of playing that game in middle school with my friends! Great video, thanks for sharing it.

[@wjadams2]

Wing Commander and Privateer were my jam growing up among other space and flight sims around that time.. I used a 386 DX-40, Sound Blaster, and a CH Joystick. It was such an amazing time for PC gaming. I had hoped Star Citizen captured some of that spark, but I've long since lost hope with it and Squadron 42.

[@ColbyPerry]

I was a total Wing Commander kid growing up. We had the PC and SNES versions and I forgot how gimped the SNES version was. I recall the PC version of WC2 (maybe WC1 too) that you really had to muck w/your config.sys to get the required memory allocated right. Privateer was maybe my favorite out of all of the series (yes, even WC3 w/Mark Hamill).

[@KopperNeoman]

And nowadays I just go "meh, chuck 12 GB at it, this laptop can't run anything that would ever need more anyway"

[@elone3997]

Glad you mentioned the onscreen joystick mirroring the player input - this was indeed super cool. I got the same buzz out of seeing the gear shifting hand in RAC rally. It just felt so next gen ☺️

[@timbob9910]

I had the Amiga 500 version, played on an A1200. As mentioned in the video, it didn't look as nice as the PC version but the gameplay was definitely still there, and I enjoyed every minute of playing through to the end. Great memories.

[@josephbradshaw6985]

Yup, I played the heck out of this as a kid. One of like 10 PC games I had in the 90's.

[@digsbious]

I was hooked on WC III on the 3DO. Everything about it was amazing, the story, sound, graphics. It had it all.

[@du0lol]

I randomly got a SEGA CD a couple years ago and decided to burn a few games for it. It had a save file for Wing Commander on the system memory, so I decided to check it out and only stopped when I reached the end of the game. This was in 2017 or so. The game completely blew my mind.

[@comchia4306]

The Wing Commander franchise has always been one of ny favourites, especially with the whole Terran-Kilrathi conflict lore, and the exceptional anime-style starfighters. I especially loved the story of WC4, and the starships of WC2. And i still get tense playing WC3, with humanity on the line based on what I do. On a side note, ever read the Wing Commander books? They add a ton of cool lore between the games. I especially loved the Battle of Earth in Fleet Action, and the aftermath of the war in False Colors.

[@casedistorted]

Wing Commander and that Orion intro with the Strings was such a mind blower back in the day when we got our Sound Blaster-16 card. Being able to name my own character, and have a place between missions also felt like this was a real place that I was living and breathing in when talking to characters between missions. Wing Commander was really ahead of its time. Playing a game within a game when you sat down in the training module.. it was just so cool. 1:20 Kids just don't know how good they have got it with all the buttons and actions showing up in-game on the HUD. I still remember playing those old games and needing a print out (if you were lucky it came with the game) for flight and mech games on PC just to know what keys did what because you needed so many, and I remember thinking there is no way they could get these games onto a console with the limited number of buttons. Elite Dangerous actually did it first for me where I preferred playing on PC with an Xbox One Controller because they managed to get every single keybinding onto a controller by holding combinations of buttons, and implementing that into the HUD as well, it was such a cool game back in 2015, so much so that I got my dad hooked onto it. That was revenge for him getting me hooked on Eve Online many years prior. RIP dad 2022, miss him very much he was my gateway into PC gaming in the 90's. Did you make this video because Wing Commander 1+2 is on sale on GoG? I had to buy it yesterday. I also loved Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites on PC because it had gameplay elements of Wing Commander but they had the Enterprise and old-school Star Trek ships that I loved! Not enough people talk about those games, sadly. And there was only two like it that came out, all the rest after Judgement Rites had a different art style and gameplay.

[@infinity2z3r07]

13:46 As a late 80s/early 90s kid I know that voice anywhere--Cam Clarke Best known as the voice of Leonardo from TMNT original animated series Also Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid

[@AthanImmortal]

I have such fond memories of Wing Commander 3, I used to go to my friends house, and it wasn't a multiplayer game, but he'd fly the ship, and I'd fire the weapons. We loved that game.

[@JoseMVelazquez]

Oh man! This was my favorite game back when I was 14, used to stay up really late on friday nights playing it.

[@etiennesharp]

As a C-64 then Amiga 500 veteran, we used to look enviously at Wing Commander and the PC master-race!

[@BoGy1980]

C64... that was the best machine I ever had.... I kept using it long after its lifecycle ended, deep into the '90s. I had like over 2000 floppies stacked with games. I remember often loading in games, and not ever starting them because the demo's from the crackgroups were so amazing and that i used them as a form of what we nowadays call Spotify... :)

[@theohughes74]

I played the heck out of that game on my A-2500, the 020 speedup and running from hard drive was a great experience for young me

[@drewnewby]

Played them all, Privateer is still my favorite of the series, and tied with MoO II for favorite DOS game.

[@sdf39882]

I wish it was possible to play WC 1-3 for the first time all over again. MVG is right, it was such a marvel for its time. The cinematic feel of the game was like nothing we had seen on the small screen. I remember the voice pack really changing the game even further. And, the story wasn't just a throwaway either. There was some decent plot points and even some themes by the time it got to WC3. The limitations of DOSBox are a pain. I wonder if there is a way to dial it in. There are a lot of setting that most people just leave on default without really testing how to tune. This is critical for things like old Demoscene titles.

[@NickEnchev]

Crazy that you just put this up, I just started playing it again 2 nights ago for the first time since the 90s! I even ordered a thrustmaster joystick, getting it tomorrow so I can appreciate the game properly (according to the WC dorks).

[@tsht]

I had Wing Commander III, the first one I played, and it was mind blowing. I did Wing Commander II some years ago. Those games were one of the rare space opera war games with a great story. Only other one I loved and played was Mech Warrior IV. Ofter, other simulation games did not have those cinematics. I'm still waiting for the Squadron 42 solo mode ^^;

[@MrGeekGamer]

I never played the first Wing Commander, but I vividly remember playing X-Wing when it was new and really enjoying the genre. My introduction to the series was Wing Commander IV, which fuelled my interest and I picked up some great games like Starlancer, Freespace 2 and the later Wing Commanders. Never finished Prophecy.

[@C4nn15]

Loved Wing Commander, I was about 9 when it came out and remember it being put on the family pc. Though at the time i was also playing the original Red Baron

[@OneRedKraken]

My older brother who worked at a computer store around xmas 1992. He bought me a Sound Blaster Pro with Wing Commander 2. I had been gaming on PC for almost a decade and going from PC Speaker to Sound Blaster Pro was such a mindblowing experience for me as a kid.

[@ToddsNerdCave]

Oh man, Wing Commander. I remember summer of 94 getting a 486 sx/33 pc for college and also getting one of the cdrom multimedia kits which had a sound card, 2x cdrom drive and bundle of games. One of those games being Wing Commander. It ran so comically fast on that low end 486. It wasn’t till some time later that I found out you could disable caches in the bios to slow it down enough to be playable.

[@ephemerallyfe]

I have only ever played Wing Commander 1 (on stock Amiga 500+) and Wing Commander V. Some of my best gaming memories ever, especially WiCo1, despite the atrocious frame rate.

[@KerrijaGryphon]

I first played Wing Commander 2 on my 386SX-20 on one of the very early CD-ROMs I remember it being a single spin and having Wing Commander 2 on CD-ROM was just so amazing at the time.

[@beartackle]

Awesome video! With Wing Commander, my memories are the ones with Mark Hammil. I remember being blown away that videos could play in a video game!

[@NunoGT]

Indeed one of my childhood games. I remember going to a friends house after school to play on his 286. It felt slower because of what you explained, compared to my older brother's 386 16Mhz PC. I remember I coulnd't kill the first named enemy, he always got away 😂

[@jeffcourty6321]

There was no pc in my house back then, only a snes. A friend had geek parents, with a pc and lots of games. This was such 'elite stuff', even booting it was a challenge for us. One day his dad fired up Wing Commander. My jaw dropped at the opening sequence, the whole 'mind blowed' experience, with goosebumps and all! My killer Castlevania/Megaman/Contra thing instantly seemed like child toys. Needless to say me and my friend were hooked instantly. We played non-stop, getting our asses wiped out over and over, but we don't cared. With the joystick and great speakers, the level of immersion was unmatched. The music was printed in my soul and would not leave me for months. We were obsessed with it. We designed spacecrafts on his superior lego sets, tons of them, even motherships, carriers and docks. This went for years, leading us to the mechwarriors stuff... wich we began to replicated on lego too, always more advanced. We eventually got to full working, interchangeable body parts. So much great memories... Thank you Wing Commander

[@NeoDraven757]

This was the game that got my dad to finally buy a Soundblaster back in the early '90's. I remember how mindblowing it was to hear actual voices coming out of our family computer. I still to this day cannot get it running properly on modern machines.

[@u0000-u2x]

Loved playing the SNES version. The soundtrack is definitely stuck in my memory.

[@RemnantCult]

We take cinematic games for granted these days. Here, it was an entirely fresh concept that had been pioneered off and on in the 80s, like with Defenders of the Crown. Wing Commander gave a space sim a narrative with music and characters and that blew people's minds.

[@TheReimecker]

I love the series. I still have Wing Commander 4 on 6 CDs with scenes where Mark Hamil and Thomas Wilsons play, the game was really good

[@snawbadde2371]

I loved this game. Somewhere I still have Wing 1, 2 & Privateer with all the additional content.

[@mlegarth]

A landmark game. I played it when it came out. And thanks for the Battehawks 1942 reminder, another classic. Finally Privateer was the culmination for me, one of my top 5 games to this day. P2 with Clive Owen was cool too but not quite the same.

[@Choralone422]

I can still remember seeing the original Wing Commander back in 1990 at a friend's house. He had a 386SX 16MHz PC and WC1 was mind blowing at the time. At that time I only had a NES and my family had borrowed a C64 from an uncle for a while around 87 or 88 so WC1 and it's VGA graphics were jaw droppingly impressive! Back in 1993/94 I played through both WC1 and WC2 on my 486DX2 66MHz PC. I used a DOS utility called Mo'Slo to slow that PC down enough to make them and other older DOS games much more playable. One of the biggest technical feats of WC2 was the add-on speech pack. Before the days of CD-ROMs some PC games had a little speech in them, but WC2 with that speech pack add-on really helped make the game that much more immersive for it's time.

[@spacechannelfiver]

IIRC some of the effects in WC were RAM locked, the joystick hands spring to mind. You had to have a dab hand in autoexec.bat, config.sys fiddling alongside some judicious use of himem and emm386. I think that also held true for some aspects of the audio. (that may have been soundblaster specific due to samples - it was a long time ago)

[@ThePopolou]

Wait, you could have ejected!? Never experienced that cutscene. WC was the first game on our first PC and as a 12yo, i was super stoked. Imagine then when after my ol'man came to set it all up, he followed the PC manual wrong and issued the command "format a:" on Disk 1.... I also remember upgrading the RAM at some later stage (to 4MB?) and suddenly the cockpit joystick appeared. For someone eagerly after a cool hobby, it really opened my eyes to what made PCs so special.

[@reddragon27284]

I used to play this on my A1200 with an ‘040 accelerator and it ran sweet. I remember there being a 3DO port that had FMV cutscenes though that might have been Wing Commander 2.

[@AceStrife]

Privateer, which I played in the 2010's, still holds up today, especially with its art; it's crazy.

[@tensaibr]

Excellent documentation about this gaming milestone classic! Though I miss a note about the Super Wing Commander for the 3DO ^_^

[@mrwasi99]

Thank you for going through the different ports! Always wondered which ones could compete against the original PC version.

[@CompleteAnimation]

The only thing I remember about Wing Commander is that in our family's big binder of PC game CDs, there was a Wing Commander game that came on about 6 CDs. I tried installing it, but my 9-year-old self couldn't make it work, so I gave up on it. It wasn't until much later that I learned that the only reason it was on so many CDs was because of all the FMV. I bet the entire game minus FMV could easily fit on to half of one CD!

[@phizc]

Wing Commander 4: The Price of Freedom. It also had a double sided DVD in the box that you could use instead of the CDs if you had a DVD drive.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

The floppy disk version of the original Wing Commander was 3x 5.25" disks. That'd be around 3.6 MB, assuming full disk usage and no compression. Early-to-mid 90s DOS games didn't get much larger than a few dozen MB. Doom was something like 15 MB, for example. Command & Conquer had an install base of something like 20-30 MB with the soundtrack and FMV taking up the other 95% of CD.

[@DanSnipe-k8o]

It was a phenomena among my friends. It was one of those games, like CIV, where it flashed around our circles.

[@TheJamieRamone]

10:11 - Well, it was used in Dark Forces, that much is true. But it was developed for LucasFilm Games' adventure titles. Michael Land got the idea for it in 1990 while working on the music for The Secret Of MonkeyIsland, and the first one to use it was Monkey Island 2: Lechuck's Revenge.

[@breaque]

IIRC Wing Commander's CD32 port was one of the very few games on the console which actually made use of the on-board Akiko chip for chunky-to-planar (while other games did use it for CD control etc). That would explain why it was such a decently running port.

[@Dorelaxen]

13:47 Nice. Cam Clarke.

[@3dkiwi920]

SNAKE!

[@whyme1980]

I played this game so so much as a kid. My friends would come over and play as well. When it came out on SNES I remember a friend seeing it in a magazine and telling his parents he had to have it. They got it for him. Then we took turns playing on SNES. Somewhere in a box around here are the Wing Commander books. :)

[@iroll]

This game absolutely blew my mind, I played the trilogy like my life depended on it. 30 years later I distinctly remember the bombing mission I was on where my jump drive was damaged - but in Wing Commander you could just find your carrier in the navigation thingy and slow-boat it home! I remember feeling like it took HOURS to get back - it just nailed the immersion. The cockpit was sparking, I wasn't sure if the family shitbox 486 would crash before I got back, and then finally the carrier grows in the screen and hot damn I beat the mission. Pretty sure these were among the many games I had that had to be coaxed into running by using the demonic power of a boot floppy. I had literally no idea what I was editing in that thing, just that if I mixed and matched enough permutations of the various power words it would eventually work.

[@rokinz3270]

Still remember coming home from a friends birthday party to find my older brother playing a new game that looked like fun which was wing commander. Replayed it quite a few times over the years . Best was getting wing commander 3 the special edition in the film case for Xmas . Good memories

[@lurkerrekrul]

I first became aware of Wing Commander when I opened a computer magazine and saw a full page ad for it. That was when I knew my beloved Amiga was doomed. I didn't get to see it in person for about a year after that. Eventually, my friend showed it to me, running on his 386 system. It was impressive, although I was a little disappointed that the beautiful graphics didn't move and rotate smoothly like I originally thought that they would. I eventually played the Amiga version of the game. I had a Supra Turbo 28 accelerator for my A500, which made the game very playable. In fact, it had a toggle switch and you could change the speed on the fly. Many people were shocked at the dramatic change in the framerate when I flipped the switch on during the intro. I was always disappointed that they never brought the secret mission add-ons to the Amiga. It had an option to load them, but they were never made. I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody has ever ported the DOS versions over to the Amiga. I mean, people port entire games from scratch, you'd think porting a mission pack would be relatively easy. I've been meaning to play through the games using DOSBox, but I never seem to get around to it. I once downloaded ISO images of The Kilrathi Saga, which is supposed to work flawlessly in Windows, but I never got around to trying it. I did once try to install Wing Commander 3 on my WIn98 system, but it crashed after playing the intro. Then again, I didn't know much about troubleshooting problems. Now I know about twice as much. :)

[@honorablejay]

I only got to play this game on the SNES, and it still blew my mind how addictive it was. The fact that the fighters you were playing with could die permanently was a true game changer for me. Suddenly I was tasked with not only taking out the enemy, but protecting my friends. Total game changer. I remember after beating the game I played through killing all of my comrades and seeing where the story would take me. Really awesome part on the devs for taking that into account.

[@michaelnewman1151]

First game my roommate purchased for his new 386 our freshman year of college. When he had his 386 built he provided a sound blaster card that he had picked up at a computer store and asked them to install it. I remember the guy in the shop asking what a sound card was and what you could do with it. Life changing experience firing up Wing Commander for the first time.