Modern Vintage Gamer has done a wonderful retrospective on the original Wing Commander from the perspective of 2024. The channel has a huge reach and the video has been seen some 80,000 times in just its first day. Since a lot of these will be younger viewers, the clip provides some vital context for how groundbreaking the game was when it arrived in 1990. The narrator walks through all of the features and highlights and even details how several WC1 ports differ, which is always nice to see. Check it out below!
Wing Commander is a 3D Space Combat Simulator game that released on the IBM PC in 1990 - over 34 years ago as of this episode - and it one of the finest games ever made. It took advantage of the IBM PC to maximize the immersion of a space combat simulation. Its game design had no equal. In today's episode we take a closer look at how Wing Commander came to be, its technology, game design, ports and how it shaped the series and the genre. Enjoy!
Thanks to the many folks who sent this in (Salty, LeHah, HotT and others). One item of note: the link is titled "Thank you for playing Wing Commander," which alludes to the apocryphal story about programmer Ken Demarest replacing an error-on-quit message with that text. I see the anecdote has quite a bit of traction in the comments, but you don't have to go very far to debunk this myth. As anyone who originally played the game knows, it literally doesn't say this when you exit. Mr. Demarest has since explained that it was a true story from the development phase, but the issue was fixed before the game was finished. We have additional background on this persistent rumor here.
Follow or Contact Us