Classic Advertisements Highlight Wing Commander's Explosive Debut

Here's another set of awesome advertisements from old issues of Computer Gaming World. Alkarion grabbed these from issues of the magazine published in the early 1990s. Like the last set, these are creative ads that are full of tough talking verbiage and feature original takes on familiar Wing Commander art.

The first image is a 1992 advertisement that covered the entire series released up until that point. It's hard to imagine, but WC1, WC2 and their four add-on campaigns were all released within a two-year time span. The novel Freedom Flight and ports of the original Wing Commander for the Super Nintendo and Amiga were still in the works as the second Special Operations pack rolled out of the factory. These original titles account for some 160 missions and quickly established Wing Commander as the premiere space combat simulator and interactive movie. The middle strip is a Spring 1991 advertisement promoting the release of the second Secret Missions title. Both games in the ad pioneered the expansion disk concept and were created very quickly to seize on Wing Commander's surprise success. The last ad plays on the film strip concept also seen on the WC2 box. Long before Wing Commander 3's live actor FMV made its debut, the WC series was already known for its cinematic storytelling and lifelike characters. Origin emphasized this by showing scenes from the game in distinctive film reel highlights. The bullet points at the bottom also remind us just have revolutionary this all was at the time. WC2's digitized speech made Soundblaster a household name and kicked off the multimedia PC era.

Last year, ORIGIN defined the state of the art in computer games... Now, we're doing it all over again.

Can Furballs Really Fly? There's only one way to find out. Jump into Wing Commander, the game series that defined interactive entertainment on the PC. You're whisked to the front lines and left in the middle of an intergalactic brawl with a bunch of flea-bitten, battle-scarred felines from Kilrah.

MORE WING COMMANDER ACTION!