Moment of Praise for the Amiga Wing Commander Install Icon

The Amiga Love Twitter account recently shared this shot of the Amiga Wing Commander Installer icon. While some might look at this as incredibly trivial, we see it as an important piece of history imbued with memories of excitement and promise. Installers are something of a lost art and personal curiosity of mine. The first couple WC games were fairly simple, but by WC3 you had memorable moments such as the spinning Victory or Privateer 2's Tri-System backstory. The Command & Conquer series also did some fantastic installers around the same time.

It was wonderful when developers took the time to lovingly craft something that otherwise could be so mundane. In theory, gamers would only ever see these things once briefly before jumping into the actual play space, so it showed a high level of craftsmanship when they took the time to put some effort into the installer. And because players did only see these briefly, sometimes people forget some of the cool nods included therein. This Amiga installer icon would have been one of the earliest embellishments on a bare bones install program. It's pretty cool how they included the one-pixel wide main logo above the arrow and desktop unit. It's something that may not have been fully appreciated at the time, and very much probably wouldn't exist today, so we'll acknowledge it here. All of the tiny little finishing touches where developers went the extra mile and put in extra effort to top of some element of Wing Commander is why we're all here today.

You don’t see this every day. Origin /Wing Commander showing the glorious A2000 some love! I would have made it a tiny bit more accurate, but I’ll take it. :)