A Brief History of Wing Commander

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 16, 2011

Okay, you may not think two full articles to be all that brief, but considering the scope and significance of the series, this seems pretty well abridged to me. G4TV has a two-part history of the series:

The History of Wing Commander, Part 1

The History of Wing Commander, Part 2

As a young gamer, there were probably many times when I thought, “It would be cool to make a career out of making video games.” But I never thought seriously about it until Wing Commander.  I even called Origin to ask about what sort of qualifications they were looking for with potential hires after playing this game. Fortunately, I didn’t take the H.R. lady’s advice, as she pretty much downplayed the whole “finish your degree” thing. And by the time I finished my degree, they were a wholly owned subsidiary of EA and beginning the downhill slide. But Wing Commander was the game that made may decide to pursue what I thought was a ‘dream job.’

Were it not for Wing Commander, who knows what I’d be doing right now?

Unfortunately, this genre – the cinematic mission-based space fighter sim – is largely dead now, though there are some indies and smaller studios that continue to carry the torch. The direction I wanted to see it go – after playing Wing Commander: Armada – was in the direction of the multiplayer strategy / action-combat direction. However, as Microsoft proved with the awesome but poor-selling Allegiance, that might not have had commercially super-powered potential.  But as the FreeAllegiance community has proven, indies and open-source can do some great things with a small niche.

In an alternate universe where the genre popularized by Wing Commander didn’t go the way it did – where Freespace and Freespace 2 were mega-sellers in spite of lacking the big cinematics of their inspirational series – how could the genre have “evolved” (much as I hate the connotations of that word). What sort of advancements could we have seen in the genre and series?

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