Point of Origin: Vol. V, No. 3

Bioforge is GO in the March, 1995 issue of The Point of Origin. Will Origin's second big-budget 'interactive movie' do as well as Wing Commander... or will the concept of CGI and gameplay-based cinematics be abandoned for another decade? The answers, right now: no and yes.

A very special thanks to Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum for making this resource available and to Electronic Arts for sending them to him in the first place!

• Spotlight suggests that Bioforge and SWC/Mac were forced out by EA: "It all began that fateful morning last Tuesday, when Mark Chandler joined our Pre-PSM meeting in Marketing. Super Wing/Mac, and Bioforge were to ship in the quarter. Mark told us in a very Picard-esque tone that EA corporate had told him to 'make it so.'"
• In Ink has nothing but good things to say about WCIII:

Interactive Gaming, the online magazine startup from Computer Gaming World-ex Chuck Miller has awarded Wing Commander III a couple of honors. The game was given an Editor's Choice award and was named Game of the Year for 1994.

Meanwhile a couple of ORIGIN games will be battling it out for one of CGW's Premier Awards. Both WCIII and System Shock have been nominated in the Best Action category. The winners will be announced in the mag's May issue. Wouldn't it be nice if one of those two could walk away with Game of the Year honors?

Okay, what's a coverage article these days without some Wing Commander III reviews. You want Wing III reviews? You got 'em. In the March issue of Electronic Entertainment, editors anointed the game as their "Game of the Month" and Al Giovetti called it "a bona fide phenomenon. This state-of-the-art game is a must-see and a must-play."

Reviewers at Interactive Entertainment, the CD-ROM magazine, had similar things to say about WCIII. "WCIII's movie sequences must be seen to be believed," they gushed. "The cast is superb, the movie sequences are some of the best you're likely to see for a long time, and the action is enough to make you fall out of your chair."

And right up the road in Dallas, Peter Bartholow, continued the WCIII love fest with his review in the Dallas Morning News. "Wing Commander III offers the best action and drama this side of the Ghorah Khar star system."

Meanwhile, the Hollywood connection continues to pay big dividends for WCIII. Rex Weiner had a nice feature on Mark Hamill in a recent issue of Variety magazine. Hamill spent plenty of time talking about WCIII and talked about how it's knocked his pal, George Lucas', game (Rebel Assault) off the charts. And in the March issue of Home PC, WCIII got a lot of attention in a story on the convergence of Hollywood and the computer industry.

But it's not just the star power that's winning points with reviewers on WCIII. ORIGIN's translations department got a big pat on the back from the editors at PC Player in Germany. "One can hear that the flawlessly translated German is being spoken by professional dubbing voices. This is the best dubbing ever done by a game company." Congrats are in order for Kirsten Vaughan and her translation crew.

Finally, if you haven't been reading the letters to the editor lately in some of the gaming magazines, you've really been missing out. Witness these two found in recent weeks. W.S. Corney wrote to Computer Gaming World and had this to say about WCIII and the state of computer games. "Now there are only two types of computer games: those before Wing Commander III and those after."

In Computer Game Review, there's an ongoing debate in the letters section on whether Wing Commander or TIE Fighter is the better game. I think Joe Folley has finally put this argument to bed. Joe wrote, "TIE Fighter has excitement, Wing Commander has fly-by-your-seat-while-dodging-the-bullets-going-one-thousand-miles -an-hour-strapped-to-the-seat-of-a-plutonium-powered-mega-machine -whiz-your-pants-and-scream-for-mercy kind of excitement. TIE Fighter was good, Wing Commander is one-hundred-percent-without-a-doubt-the-best-in-the-world -number-one-on-the-list-golden-triad-award-100,000-copies-sold -breaking-records-best-in-the-universe kind of game." Whew!!!!!!!! Thanks, Joe, but what did you really think of the game?

Point of Origin
Vol. V, No. 3 - March 14, 1995 Contents Spotlight: Let Loose the Floodgates... Bioforge is Coming to Town
In Ink
The Number You Have Dialed...
EOM
Don't Try This at IBM
Caught in the Web
How Software Companies Work
The Gospel
Ticker
Point Man
New Hires
The Future