Wing Commander II Demo

Wing Commander II Demo
Platform	MS-DOS
Engine	3space, Origin FX
Release Date	January 10, 1991
Language	English

Wing Commander II Demo is a rolling demo of Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi. It features an early version of part of the game's introduction showing Prince Thrakhath's audience with the Emperor. It was created by Origin Systems to demonstrate the game at Winter CES 1991 (January 10-13 1991) and was released to the public via BBS afterwards. It was the first Origin product to include recorded speech.

Screenshots

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Transcript

SUPER: Deep in Kilrathi space...

SUPER: Kirathi Imperial Palace

GUARD:

EMPEROR:

THRAKHATH:

TITLE CARD: COMING SUMMER 1991...

TITLE CARD: ONLY FROM ORIGIN

Recording

• Download: Pix_Wing_Commander_II_Demo.mkv

README.1ST

To setup the demo:

1. Make a directory called INSTALL
2. Copy all WC2DEMO files to this directory
3. Type CD\INSTALL
4. Type INSTALL

The demo will then create a subdirectory called WC2DEMO and install the program here. You will need to manually delete the files from the install directory.

To run the demo:

1. type CD\WC2DEMO
2. type WING2

Behind the Screens

Pix's Origin Adventures

On January 23 2012 Siobhan Beeman posted a reminiscence of the Wing Commander II Demo's development in reply to a post at Pix's Origin Adventures:

“You can just imagine two guys at Origin recording that on their PCs.”

Heh… yes, that’s literally what happened. We had exactly one SoundBlaster card in the entire company at the time, so our audio recording computer was the desktop PC I coded the demo on. Thrakath was voiced by Savage Empire writer Phil Brogden, the guard by composer Martin Galway, and the Emperor by me. The actors were picked not for our acting ability (clearly!) but for our presence in the building at 3AM.

“For years I wondered where the demos actually came from, assuming they were done for trade shows and store demo machines.”

The WC2 demo was a teaser created for the Origin and SoundBlaster booths at Fall COMDEX in ’90 to announce the game. It was the very first work I did on WC2–once I wrapped on Savage Empire, Chris tossed me the SoundBlaster card and said “hey, see what you can do with digitized speech”. The SDK was really easy to use, so I got voice working in a day, at which point we decided to make that the big tech advance for WC2 (much to the delight of the SoundBlaster marketers!). Start to finish I think the demo took maybe 80 hours of work… so basically one calendar week, considering the Origin lifestyle.

How to Play

The demo can be run in DOSBox.

Characters

Speaking

• The Emperor
• Prince Thrakhath nar Kiranka
• Unnamed Imperial Guard

Non-Speaking

• Unnamed Imperial Guard (10)

Ships

Kilrathi

• Star Post (Kilrathi Imperial Palace)
• KF-100 Dralthi
• Bloodfang

Download

• wc2demo.zip (1,805 K)

Links

• Pix's Origin Adventures review
• YouTube recording