The first computer I ever had came when I was six. Six marked something of a watershed in the development of my interests—it was the age at which I first saw Star Wars, and my interest in World War II aviation was sparked around that time as well by a Discovery Channel Wings documentary on TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. So I guess it turned out that by the time I started gaming I displayed all the trappings of a proto-Wingnut.
Fast-forward to a few weeks later. My family was at Costco, and I was there with them, based on an ad in the paper reading JOYSTICK SALE. The joystick in question was a simple enough affair—Gravis, black, one trigger and two buttons—but there were two bundles, each with a seperate game.
One was Wing Commander. The other was Wing Commander II.
Looking back, I don't know what made me choose the second package. Probably it was because it was the first one I saw, or maybe there actually were differences between the joysticks that I just don't remember. What matters is that it was the one I got. And that was enough.
Wing2 was the first game that I ever became truly involved in. Despite my terrible piloting abilities (finishing the first mission by way of ejecting, for instance), I managed to get the gist of the story by using the cheat codes included with the game to skip around. I stayed up late past my bedtime on more than one occasion by persuading my mom that I "had to finish this mission", and when that excuse wasn't enough I put the game on pause while I was at school. There I would decorate my folders with Arrow cockpits and sketch designs of my own creation. Playground games turned away from Power Rangers-style wrestling (much to the relief of concerned teachers); instead, we became space fighter-jocks, dueling under the trees and on the fields. The first time I ever really got in trouble at school was when I told a classmate to "go to hell." Guess where I got that idea from?
I quite literally grew up with Wing Commander. And yet, years after my initial foray into the series, I had never played the original—didn't even own a copy. It was something I longed to do, but in that time before eBay and Amazon.com couldn't find a way of doing.
Then came the June 2000 issue of PC Gamer, and with it the original game on disc.
In some ways you could consider that disc a precursor to EA Replay—twelve games, a fourth of it practically "Origin Replay" (Wing Commander *and* Ultima I AND Ultima Underworld!) To be perfectly honest, though, I never gave most of the other games a second thought—it was Wing Commander I wanted, and it was Wing Commander I got. For the first time I really saw the original Tiger's Claw; not as a hapless target doomed to be destroyed in a few seconds, but a powerful, magnificent warship. Shotglass, Bossman, Knight, Hunter—they were all just names to me before, but now I had faces for them. Now it was the landing theme, not Oldziey's original compositions, that I hummed to the annoyance of my peers.
So I guess that on the most personal level, this is what EA Replay is: a return to that moment six years ago when I went back to the 'Claw for the very first time.
But what does it mean to me as a fan?
Some time ago I dug out my old copy of Wing Commander II for the first time in years, reinstalled it and played it all the way through. A few things struck me: how the cartonishness of the graphics seem remarkably dimmed when you're playing the game, the almost joust-like feel of combat ("pseudo-Newtonian," if that expression means anything); the big, round projectiles and satisfying smack of a hit; the crackle of an explosion. Strange, I thought, how visceral, how personal, it all felt, and how as the series went on it grew less so, until by the time of Prophecy it sometimes felt as if you were swimming around in a gigantic ocean running into entire schools of fish and massacring them en masse by harpoon.
Things were different outside the cockpit, too. Here the original stands as the better example: the individual interactions with the "band of brothers" (and sisters) among the 'Claw pilots; the medals you earn emphasizing the martial tradition in which you serve; the cutscenes and mentions of past and present battles and events that constantly remind you that, though your carrier may be a fortress island in space, she is only among the most notable in an archipelago of thousands. By IV it had vanished, subsumed completely by the script and storyline imperative; the elaborate campaign branching that had been such a hallmark of the series turned into several different paths; the crude yet wonderfully concise talking heads of the original exchanged for flesh-and-blood actors hamming it up.
What upsets me the most, though, is that there are an entire generation of fans out there who have never played the original games, and other people who see Wing Commander as "Luke and Biff in space." Perhaps those people who buy EA Replay for Syndicate or Ultima or Desert Strike, see Wing Commander and wonder "gee, I wonder what things were like back then." And then they'll load it up, without having to go through the technical hoop-jumping of DOS configuration, and hear the strains of George Sanger's overture through their PSP speakers for the first time.