Wing Commander Privateer Alpha

As our birthday present to the community, we took a risk on something pretty exciting and a little different from usual: below you will find a never before seen alpha copy of Wing Commander Privateer that you can load in DOSBox and play today! This is Alpha 1.15, compiled on August 9, 1993 (about six weeks before the final build. We've done some preliminary studying and it already looks pretty interesting: many of the game's resource files are larger, structured and structured differently. Just starting the game you'll get a sense that things are a little different (and of course it's even more crash prone than the released version which was not too stable). We've also discovered at least one extra cutscene in the files, labeled 'Discovery' it seems like it will play when you first find the Steltek derelict. A silver florin to the first Privateer who gets that far (saves from the final game do not seem to work correctly)! You'll also get a pretty funny surprise when you quit a memory dump and "THANK YOU FOR FLYING TRADE COMMANDER". Trade Commander was Privateer's original name. Note that if you own the disk version of the speech accessory pack you can use it with this version; due to their nature, Origin's speech packs went gold much earlier than the games they serviced. At one point, this resulted in Pacific Strike speech packs showing up in stores months before the game was actually released!

Where did this early copy of Privateer come from? eBay! Several weeks ago, I noticed an unusually expensive auction listing for a set of Privateer disks. My eyes almost skipped right over it but something seemed wrong in the thumbnail. A closer look revealed that these weren't replacement disks… they were hand-written disks on Origin labels! What's more, there weren't SIX Prvateer disks like the final version… there were seven! It seemed like SOMETHING must be going on, but was it worth $500? Would the disks even read today? We decided to take the chance. Luckily, no one else bid and after mainlining anxiety for a few days the disks arrived in the mail… still perfectly usable 31 years later! But at the end of the day, I have no brain for technical things so it seems like the best thing to do is to provide this alpha to the world and let smarter folks help uncover its secrets. And who wouldn't enjoy a little return to the Gemini Sector!?

You can download the archive here here (.ZIP, 9,679kb) or the seven disk images here (.ZIP, 9,765kb).