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Here's a nifty demo disc from LOAF's vast collection. It's similar to the Origin CD Shortplays sampler that includes Wing Commander 4 and Crusader: No Remorse plus Cybermage and BioForge. The latter two are missing here, but Wing Commander takes up an even bigger proportion of the disc art. The Wing Commander 4 demo was absolutely enormous for the time, so miscellaneous preview discs like this were one of the main vectors for people to try it out. A lot of Wingnuts obviously own the main game and didn't feel the need to hunt down the demo, but there is a really cool unique mission included. It even lets you pick up a stormfire gun in space! Fortunately you don't need to hunt down your own copy - download links to each of the three different variants are included below.
This was actually a retail product back in the day... you used to be able to buy this demo disc for $5 at Best Buy. (There was a sleeve which I haven't tracked down yet.)

Several versions of the Wing Commander IV Demo exist. The first included a cinematic trailer and was released on magazine cover discs (here - 43 megs). That was a huge file for an era when ordinary people didn't have CD burners or fast internet connections... so Origin later released a smaller internet version with the trailer removed (here - 14 megs). Even that seemed like an impossible download at the time, though! I remember sending 30-odd hastily-blanked discs to work with my dad in the hopes he could download it for me... but one was always corrupt! A Macintosh version was later released (here - 6 megs).

One secret to the Wing Commander IV demo--you can actually "pick up" a Stormfire to play with! Right after you take off, target Dekker's shuttle and follow it for about ten seconds... it will drop a new gun you can fly into (a la Arena) and then use!



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