Starr Long Talks Origin History with Arcade Attack

The Arcade Attack Retro Gaming Network has posted a wonderful podcast interview with former Origin developer Starr Long. He's well known and respected in the industry as one of the creators of Ultima Online, but his resume extends to quite a few Ultimas, other Origin titles and recent Richard Garriott collaborations. He also worked in QA on Wing Commanders Academy, Armada and Privateer. At about the 26 minute mark in the conversation, the discussion turns towards his experience with the WC franchise. Check it out below!

Starr Long: There were some hamfisted decisions that happened along the way, but Electronic Arts poured a lot of money into Origin Systems. Unfortunately there was a good side and bad side to that that. Ultimately I think Origin overextended and overexpanded. It became too big too fast. But Electronic Arts tried really hard to make Origin work, and I think that we became victims of our own expansion and success. We weren't necessarily equipped to be that big. We would have been better at being small.

Interviewer: Did you work on any Wing Commander games?

Starr Long: I only worked on those when I was in QA and I worked on Wing Commander Academy [Armada], which was the only multiplayer Wing Commander. I also worked on Privateer, which was awesome. I was a tester on both of those and they both were really unique titles in the Wing Commander Universe.

Most people know about Wing Commander one, two, three and four because those are the big - especially like Wing Commander 3 and 4 - because those are the big movie title where Mark Hamill is there. Those are the ones that most people are familiar with, but Academy [Armada] was pretty cool because it was multiplayer and you got to fly Kilrathi ships. So it's not a very well-known Wing Commander title, but it's really cool. Like one player can play Kilrathi ships while the other player is flying the human ships. Flying the human ships versus the Kilrathi is pretty killer. As far as I know, it's still the only Wing Commander title where you can do that.

Privateer definitely took its inspiration from Han Solo and the the whole idea of being The Smuggler. It's all about moving and building your own spaceship and being a commercial Smuggler Privateer fighter. So you build up a custom ship over time and you get to customize the ship, what the weapons are, the engine and the shields. While you're in combat you have to manipulate that stuff. It was really cool and also way ahead of it time.

One of the projects right before a bunch of us left Origin that what was going to be really cool was Privateer Online, which would have been amazing. It was in a conceptual phase but it never really got in active development.

Interviewer: Do you think there's room for a new game in the series?

Starr Long: Absolutely. I mean every few years we ping Electronic Arts about some of the intellectual property they own like Ultima and Wing Commander. They always claim that they're going to do something with them. We say, "Hey, you know, if you're not doing something with them, we'll gladly do something with them." But they always claim that there's something in the works, so we can't do anything. (I don't believe them.) We were happy to pay a license, but you know, oh well.