Happy Birthday Wing Commander Arena! Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

We’d like to spend time in today’s news taking a moment to recognize Wing Commander Arena’s belated 15th birthday! We reached the milestone on Monday, but the unfortunate passing of the legendary David Warner preempted this story. Arena was released on July 25, 2007, which feels like a lifetime ago now. It was one of the few 2000s WC releases, including other notable titles like Prophecy for Gameboy Advance and EA Replay on the PlayStation Portable. Arena was made for Xbox Live Arcade, which was the platform for downloadable games on Microsoft’s Xbox system. As such, there were some major constraints. The size limit for DLC games at the time was a mere 50 megabytes and the selling price was just $10. So the game was built within some pretty major technical and budget limits. Despite these challenges, the team at Gaia Industries and EA Vancouver managed to pull off some impressive achievements worthy of the Wing Commander franchise. It was the first 16 player multiplayer game on XBLA, but despite the multiplayer focus, a handful of single player modes were also included.

The game leaned heavily on familiar ship designs like the Arrow, Darket, Dralthi, Rapier, Paktahn and Longbow and creatively added a number of variants for each. The Rapier even pushed deep into the WC lore and borrowed the Super Wing Commander look. Although in some ways it’s a more simplistic experience than other games, there are some truly epic possibilities within. Conducting a massive cap ship strike with two full squadrons of eight fighters and two accompanying Battlecruisers is an experience like no other. We have been disappointed that it hasn’t jumped to modern Xbox Backwards Compatibility where it would surely see a second life. In the mean time, the game remains fully playable for Xbox 360 owners - and you can still buy it here! Here’s an extended clip recently posted on YouTube. It looks like a double length version of the streaming session we posted last week. Maybe we’ll catch you online some time!
Wing Commander Arena is a fast-paced space combat game where players can team up to attack other teams of ships. The game introduces the classic franchise to an arcade-style experience that allows up to 16 players online in battle at once. Players can propel their customized ship through space, fire torpedoes and unleash deadly gravity bombs as they try to climb the leader board. Online players will compete for Frag count, high score and dueling stats.

"We're really excited to deliver unparalleled multi-player arcade action," said Chip Lange, EA Vice President. "The design for Wing Commander will appeal to both long-time fans of the franchise and immediately engage anyone who wants the melee style action of an arcade shooter."

Wing Commander Arena will feature four styles of play: single player, multi-team, multi-player free for all and multi-player duel. Within the game there are eight game maps that include team maps, free for all maps and dueling maps, so Wing Commander Arena offers a gameplay experience for every Arcade gamer, whether they want a quick ten minutes of action or a longer more immersive game.


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