Lost Speech Accessory Pack Found, Was Never Lost

Digital archaeology strikes again: we've discovered something we didn't know was missing… and we've had it in our collection all along! The true story behind the Wing Commander Academy Speech Accessory Pack, long thought to be a fan made addon, has been discovered. What we didn't know was that it was an official addon created and released by Origin in 1993.

Backing up: Wing Commander Academy shipped in August 1993 and it included partial speech. If you have a speech-capable sound card (not a given in 1993!) the game will play the taunts of the (five different) Kilrathi AI pilots you can battle. But the responses from your wingmen do not play; they display as text. This always felt a little odd to players familiar with Wing Commander II… after all, four of the five Confederation comm sets, Angel, Hobbes, Maniac and the male space station, were already recorded. However, the reason the wingmen voices weren't included was actually pretty sensible: there wasn't room on the game's three 3.5" HD diskettes to include the larger wingmen files. Cutting them, we have always reasoned, made sense because the single most expensive part of an Origin game at the time was the physical diskettes. Three disks instead of four would mean a tremendous savings and it would help keep Academy's costs historically low for a new Origin title (a mere $49.95 instead of $70 or $80!).

… except it turns out that's not quite what really happened! The team had actually intended to ship the base game on 3 diskettes and then a second speech pack SKU which would include all ten audio sets on one additional diskette. This would be sold for a low cost as it essentially already existed; it just needed an installer to drop the files in Academy's GAMEDAT directory and set the game's CFG file to play speech. Stingray's voice would be used for Lightspeed so no new recording or quality assurance was necessary; the only cost of the effort would be the (not insubstantial) packaging. In the end, Origin decided that selling an Academy speech pack wasn't a good value proposition and they dropped the physical release. It was at this time that they opted to add back the Kilrath taunts to the base game as there was room on the third disk to store them… but not the larger wingman voices (wingmen have more things they can say, resulting in files that were two to four larger than the Kilrathi ones).

Fans have known since at least the late 90s that renaming the sound files from Wing Commander II and dropping them in the right place in Academy's installation adds them to the game; they even figured out that Stingray was the best choice to replace Lightspeed. But we haven't known why. It turns out that since Wing Commander Academy had /partial/ speech, no changes to the installer were needed. It was believed this was all a happy accident, just something that happened to work because it logically might. HCl's website has a download of the renamed audio files; Wedge009 lists instructions for doing it yourself. It's a common "hack" to perfect your Academy installation. And file sites commonly included another identical set of the audio files with what at first glance looked like the usual Warez crud included as an installer. We even noted it as odd at the time but couldn't draw any conclusions. The files in this download were dated 1996 and so there was no clear tie to the actual Academy era.

What we didn't know was that this was the actual Origin version complete with an installer the modifies the game's setup! After researching the file further, investigating its internals and then confirming with developers working at the time we have established that Origin released it as a free download from their BBS on October 30, 1993. From there it spread around the pre-internet but its source was quickly forgotten! There's even evidence in there that it was being developed for sale with only the wingman audio: it reads "Thank you for purchasing WCA Wingman Voice Addition!" on quit after a successful installation! Also note that this version is even a little different from the fan created one; it uses the male Concordia pack instead of the starbase one for the space station. So the next time someone asks you how many Wing Commander games have speech accessory packs… you tell 'em THREE!

You can downloaded the 'correct' audio files with their installer here.