Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
With regards to Origin and what happened in 1996, I think the long and unsatisfying answer is that Wing Commander was caught in the midst of an era of significant and rapid change... an era that, ironically, it helped usher in in the first place.
For Electronic Arts, the mid-1990s were the end of the Trip Hawkins era. Hawkins had founded the company in 1982 and he had personally steered it through the Origin acquisition in 1991. He stepped down as CEO around that time to launch 3DO but he remained Chairman through late 1994... and until that point it was his company run the way he wanted. That might seem very small in the scheme of things, but it's really one of the most difficult, make-or-break transitions that can happen to a company. Think of Apple without Steve Jobs or Disney without... well, Walt Disney. It's a realignment of vision, procedures, processes, goals and so on on an enormous scale. And one small part of that was how Origin-as-a-studio was viewed... it very quickly went from being the jewel in the crown of the outgoing administration to being what was considered an expensive and pampered outlier to their replacements.
I always lose patience with the argument that Electronic Arts destroyed Origin because the truth is that in 1991 they *saved* Origin and for several years they treated the company very, very well. Hawkins had promised that Origin's internal culture wouldn't be disrupted and on the macro scale that promise was kept fairly well. For the first half of the 90s, Origin was allowed to maintain a whole lot of creative and financial control (including exceptional project completion bonuses.) Electronic Arts pumped the company with cash for expensive real estate and all kinds of dream projects (from live action in the Wing Commanders to motion capture in Bioforge) and they largely let them run the show down to running their own, separate marketing department. That was all an incredible expense on paper but the powers in control at Hawkins' EA believed that was what was letting Origin shine supporting top creatives (which is really an extension of the philosophy upon which EA was founded, literally supporting electronic artists.) But when you're the favorite son you also have a target on your back... and the regime making EA their own in the mid-90s didn't share Hawkins' appreciation for the company and what they were doing with so much money. (And let's be clear, a LOT of that money went nowhere; for every Wing Commander III there was a Cybermage or two.)
Meanwhile, Origin was in transition too. The top talent at the company wanted more money and more freedom and it wasn't going to happen... and so they started to move on. Chris Roberts did not want to make endless Wing Commander games and ended up leaving to form Digital Anvil... bringing with him, eventually, much of the loyal top talent he'd assembled. From Electronic Arts' perspective, the company was losing a lot of what they were spending a lot of money trying to keep... and the natural question is, if the company doesn't have the talent we want then why are we budgeting so much and paying such high bonuses for new people? (I also think we personalize Chris' departure a little too much... think about it from the point of view of someone dealing only with dollars and cents and with no personal connection to Wing Commander as an IP: the guy making ALL YOUR MONEY is gone. Steven Spielberg quits Dreamworks... do you pay the next, unproven guy the same money he'd been making?) So of course Electronic Arts in transition began to take more and more control over Origin Systems in transition... and it did so with completely fresh eyes, people looking for what will make money now instead of what made money then.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, Ultima Online was one of those things that really put the company into a spin. Chris is gone and here's this new experimental project that is raking in cash hand over fist. If you're running things from Redwood Shores what do you do? Everyone, everyone, everyone in the world knew that these massively multiplayer games would be the future but no one knew exactly how they would shake out. Do you do Ultima ONline 2? Do you do a bunch of different MMOs? Of course we know today the answer was that you focus on one game-as-service and continue to improve it and make it appealing... but no one understood that then and so EA put their budget for Origin to trying to figure out what came after Ultima Online instead of extending the Wing Commander franchise. (Worth noting, NO ONE believed in Ultima Online when it was in development... a lot of big figures immediately stood up to take credit but it was absolutely a fluke.)
Meanwhile, the consumer was in transition too. Before 1990, PC gaming was a hobbyists market... you weren't selling millions of units to mainstream audiences, you were selling a limited number to the small slice of people with a PC at home who were also interested in things like D&D or war games. Wing Commander was a big part of the push that changed that and made games appealing for everyone... and totally changed the dynamics for budgeting and making games in the process. We talk about games-as-films a lot but what that really means in 1995 is that the industry had to start learning to plan projects the same way studios plan tentpoles... they couldn't be crazy octopuses thrown at the wall anymore, they had to be crowd pleasing and expensive productions or you were out a LOT of money. Wing Commander unfortunately both introduced that idea and became something of a victim of it... because the perception at the top became that in order for Wing Commander games to keep being successful they needed to keep increasing their budgets. In the game industry, unlike film at the time, sequels sold because they were seen as objectively better... so "we spent $14 million on Wing Commander 4!" was a good angle for selling the project because the market would respond oh great, it must be five times as good as Wing Commander 3! Well, you can't spend $50 million on Wing Commander 5 (then, heh) so what do you do?
There's also a huge technical transition that goes along with that. You know what knife pretty cleanly divides Wing Commander and today? Windows 95. The move to Windows 95 is part of the last transition I mentioned but it's often forgotten the degree to which it standardized the gaming platform on the creative side. In 1990, making a hit game meant taking the machine that does spreadsheets for businesses and figuring out crazy technical challenges and odd risks to make it do something insane and shocking to people. In 1996, making a hit game meant you know exactly what a multimedia PC is, who owns it, what it's capable of and what the audience is expecting. For good or bad, that has something of a chilling effect on the creation process... (and part of that that especially matters to us is the loss of the joystick and flight stick. By 1995, the joystick was entirely dead and the flight stick was by no means standard... and you know that budgeting your game in the first place, so why spend your millions on something that will appeal to less than the built in audience?)
For Electronic Arts, the mid-1990s were the end of the Trip Hawkins era. Hawkins had founded the company in 1982 and he had personally steered it through the Origin acquisition in 1991. He stepped down as CEO around that time to launch 3DO but he remained Chairman through late 1994... and until that point it was his company run the way he wanted. That might seem very small in the scheme of things, but it's really one of the most difficult, make-or-break transitions that can happen to a company. Think of Apple without Steve Jobs or Disney without... well, Walt Disney. It's a realignment of vision, procedures, processes, goals and so on on an enormous scale. And one small part of that was how Origin-as-a-studio was viewed... it very quickly went from being the jewel in the crown of the outgoing administration to being what was considered an expensive and pampered outlier to their replacements.
I always lose patience with the argument that Electronic Arts destroyed Origin because the truth is that in 1991 they *saved* Origin and for several years they treated the company very, very well. Hawkins had promised that Origin's internal culture wouldn't be disrupted and on the macro scale that promise was kept fairly well. For the first half of the 90s, Origin was allowed to maintain a whole lot of creative and financial control (including exceptional project completion bonuses.) Electronic Arts pumped the company with cash for expensive real estate and all kinds of dream projects (from live action in the Wing Commanders to motion capture in Bioforge) and they largely let them run the show down to running their own, separate marketing department. That was all an incredible expense on paper but the powers in control at Hawkins' EA believed that was what was letting Origin shine supporting top creatives (which is really an extension of the philosophy upon which EA was founded, literally supporting electronic artists.) But when you're the favorite son you also have a target on your back... and the regime making EA their own in the mid-90s didn't share Hawkins' appreciation for the company and what they were doing with so much money. (And let's be clear, a LOT of that money went nowhere; for every Wing Commander III there was a Cybermage or two.)
Meanwhile, Origin was in transition too. The top talent at the company wanted more money and more freedom and it wasn't going to happen... and so they started to move on. Chris Roberts did not want to make endless Wing Commander games and ended up leaving to form Digital Anvil... bringing with him, eventually, much of the loyal top talent he'd assembled. From Electronic Arts' perspective, the company was losing a lot of what they were spending a lot of money trying to keep... and the natural question is, if the company doesn't have the talent we want then why are we budgeting so much and paying such high bonuses for new people? (I also think we personalize Chris' departure a little too much... think about it from the point of view of someone dealing only with dollars and cents and with no personal connection to Wing Commander as an IP: the guy making ALL YOUR MONEY is gone. Steven Spielberg quits Dreamworks... do you pay the next, unproven guy the same money he'd been making?) So of course Electronic Arts in transition began to take more and more control over Origin Systems in transition... and it did so with completely fresh eyes, people looking for what will make money now instead of what made money then.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, Ultima Online was one of those things that really put the company into a spin. Chris is gone and here's this new experimental project that is raking in cash hand over fist. If you're running things from Redwood Shores what do you do? Everyone, everyone, everyone in the world knew that these massively multiplayer games would be the future but no one knew exactly how they would shake out. Do you do Ultima ONline 2? Do you do a bunch of different MMOs? Of course we know today the answer was that you focus on one game-as-service and continue to improve it and make it appealing... but no one understood that then and so EA put their budget for Origin to trying to figure out what came after Ultima Online instead of extending the Wing Commander franchise. (Worth noting, NO ONE believed in Ultima Online when it was in development... a lot of big figures immediately stood up to take credit but it was absolutely a fluke.)
Meanwhile, the consumer was in transition too. Before 1990, PC gaming was a hobbyists market... you weren't selling millions of units to mainstream audiences, you were selling a limited number to the small slice of people with a PC at home who were also interested in things like D&D or war games. Wing Commander was a big part of the push that changed that and made games appealing for everyone... and totally changed the dynamics for budgeting and making games in the process. We talk about games-as-films a lot but what that really means in 1995 is that the industry had to start learning to plan projects the same way studios plan tentpoles... they couldn't be crazy octopuses thrown at the wall anymore, they had to be crowd pleasing and expensive productions or you were out a LOT of money. Wing Commander unfortunately both introduced that idea and became something of a victim of it... because the perception at the top became that in order for Wing Commander games to keep being successful they needed to keep increasing their budgets. In the game industry, unlike film at the time, sequels sold because they were seen as objectively better... so "we spent $14 million on Wing Commander 4!" was a good angle for selling the project because the market would respond oh great, it must be five times as good as Wing Commander 3! Well, you can't spend $50 million on Wing Commander 5 (then, heh) so what do you do?
There's also a huge technical transition that goes along with that. You know what knife pretty cleanly divides Wing Commander and today? Windows 95. The move to Windows 95 is part of the last transition I mentioned but it's often forgotten the degree to which it standardized the gaming platform on the creative side. In 1990, making a hit game meant taking the machine that does spreadsheets for businesses and figuring out crazy technical challenges and odd risks to make it do something insane and shocking to people. In 1996, making a hit game meant you know exactly what a multimedia PC is, who owns it, what it's capable of and what the audience is expecting. For good or bad, that has something of a chilling effect on the creation process... (and part of that that especially matters to us is the loss of the joystick and flight stick. By 1995, the joystick was entirely dead and the flight stick was by no means standard... and you know that budgeting your game in the first place, so why spend your millions on something that will appeal to less than the built in audience?)
. I can imagine the feeling of it (I can only imagine, though, as I never got around to playing FS2), but that endgame video (which I did watch)… man, what an awful thing that was. "We pay our respects to the great, heroic pilot... Alpha One." Ugh. The sheer awfulness of it. I can just imagine the agony the writers experienced when it suddenly hit them that the game's central conceit - you are you - is utterly incompatible with the game's story, and that this utter incompatibility becomes precisely the most glaring at the big ultimate climax.
