This week we're taking you all the way back to August 7, 2014. Last Thursday, Electronic Arts Instagramtweeted this screenshot of Wing Commander 3 to promote their latest On The House giveaway. WC3 is available free for a limited time through the Origin digital service. Be sure to grab it by September 2!
#TBT with this classic from the early 90s! Wing Commander III is free right now with Origin On the House! Which old school game would you want On the House next?
Origin has also posted a second, more in-depth, Heart of the Tiger tie-in. The video below is referred to as "found footage" from the making of WC3, but videos such as this one have been archived at the CIC since the late '90s - not to mention your collections - so the footage wasn't ever lost, but we appreciate their effort to bring some classic Wing Commander history to the masses.
Go Behind the Scenes with Wing Commander III and Relive the '90s
In honor of Wing Commander III On the House – currently free to own, download and play on Origin – we give you found footage of the game in production from the official “The Making of Wing Commander III” video.
The games industry was in a very different place 20 years ago. On the PC, games were still shipping on floppy discs. The more intense the game experience, the more discs were required to install. The adoption of CD-ROM technology meant that game makers could access hundreds of megabytes of data for their projects.
In the early 1990s, that space usually was allocated to video introductions, cutscenes and endings, giving developers an opportunity to flex their storytelling muscles in brand new ways. Chris Roberts, the creator of the Wing Commander series, eventually took this experience to Hollywood to direct the theatrical Wing Commander movie starring Freddy Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard in 1999. From game programmer to film director in just a few short years.
In this “making of” video you’ll see what it took to bring the deck of the Tiger Claw and the Kilrathi race to life using the finest technology the 1990s had to offer.
This was pioneering stuff two decades ago. Prior to CD technology you’d be lucky to get cutscenes with still frame talking heads and text-based dialogue. The developers of Wing Commander III were leading the charge towards something that, admittedly, would mostly be abandoned thanks to more powerful and better integrated in-game storytelling tools developed over the years.
But Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davis, Thomas Wilson and other recognizable actors all on the same set for a video game is still pretty cool, more than a dozen years later.
Wing Commander III is still available On the House on Origin. Grab your copy now and experience the space epic for yourself.
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