Privateer 2: The Darkening Beta Available

As a companion piece to Privateer Alpha we are also excited to make available a beta version of Privateer 2: The Darkening! This is version 4.2 which was compiled on October 14, 1996; roughly a month before the final version that shipped in Europe (November 12, 1996). As with the Privateer release, we've confirmed that it does indeed run and there are some early signs that there are a few differences… for instance, this version is intended for four CDs instead of three, seemingly planned with a 'post game' CD that you would use to play non-plot missions. It does NOT include any of the cutscenes although we believe they could mostly be added back in using the files from the release version (see the history below for details about why this is).

The story behind these files is a little bit sketchier. In the mid-1990s, it was not at all uncommon for copies of new games to appear on pirate BBSes (and later the Usenet) before the games were even released! Sometimes these were finished copies that leaked out a few days early… but sometimes they were beta versions provided to the press weeks or months early so that reviews would be ready to publish at launch. This was a persistent issue with Origin's Ultima games in particular and it was something that developers were hoping would be eliminated as games began to fill entire CD-ROMs, effectively too large to be downloaded with a modem. But software pirates ALWAYS find a way! They quickly developed methods to remove multimedia content from new games and then ways to distribute them in as small of a format as possible… often, as here, divided into many small 1.4 mb zip files that can be split across many 3.5" diskettes.

When a version of Privateer 2 leaked about a month before launch, we in the Wing Commander community took a very negative view and refused to even touch it. As a result, we've spent years trying to locate that original pirated version… which we finally did on a Russian Warez CD released in late 1996! Software piracy is bad, stealing Privateer 2 instead of buying it in 1996 would've hurt people we cared about… but it's also impossible not to acknowledge that pirate releases like this managed–even if not on purpose–to preserve otherwise inaccessible versions of software. As noted above, this version does not include any of Privateer 2's videos, replacing them with the 'INTL_S.TGV' intro using a script that copies/renames it to match whatever video file is desired. But we're confident that an intrepid software explorer could simply port back the original TGV files from their published version (with a few filename changes).

You can download the original 'warez' archive here (.ZIP, 65,094kb) or an extracted version here (.ZIP, 65,943kb).