Chris Roberts saw the game Battlehawks 1942, that used sprite-based WWII aircraft and thought, "Lets do that in space!" I was there. And he did. We knew we had something special when playtesters were literally falling out of their chairs dodging enemy fighters. I'd be working on the art and hear a thump from the playtesting room. It was wild. I think the game was designed on 16 megahertz machines, so that was the intended sweet-spot in frame rate. The wing fragment that emerges from explosions was animated from a model I built from card-stock and plastic swizzle sticks, and hung from a string. The scramble animation was rotoscoped from a guy on a treadmill! I designed and fought for the radar screen they used. That was my one significant contribution besides the art. The art was done with DeluxePaint II, with Autodesk Animator assisting with palette construction. (You can thank the DPII gradient tool for the atmospheric look of the hanger scenes.) The amazing Glen Johnson did the faces and characters. I did the cockpits, cutscenes, and space debris and backgrounds. Also fonts and box cover. Some of the best work I did at Origin!

I was in Customer Service & QA at Origin starting in 91. One of the most common customer questions about the start of Wing Commander was how to not die in the arcade sim just after starting. I always explained to them it was expected and it was just there to capture your callsign.

I haven't played this game in over 30 years and when the second enemy ship came on screen I thought to myself "Hey that's a Salthi". Made me laugh thinking about how embedded this game is in my memories. Great nostalgic video, I'm really hoping you keep this channel going.

The capital ship battles in Wing Commander 2 were far superior. They were a welcoming and challenging change. Capital ships in the second game had something called phase shielding (I think). And you couldn't destroy them with guns at all. You either had to fly and escort bombers or fly a bomber yourself to take them out. The bombers were slow clunky ships with tons of armor and shields. But the big advantage they had was they carried torpedoes. These things would do significant damage to cap ships, but some took several. The very challenging aspect was that the torpedoes needed something called "phase lock" (at least that's how I remember it). You basically had to sight a cap ship for several seconds, maybe even 10, for the torpedoes to figure out the shielding phase and be able to penetrate them. So the challenge of having to be a sitting duck while fighters and flak hammer on you, or break the lock and give your shields time to recharge and try the lock again. Some missions there is a time limit to take out the cap ship, so you don't always have the luxury of taking out the fighter cover before making a torpedo run. Also the bombers were horrible at dogfighting. I found this change added some decent mission variety and varied the challenge and strategy. Look forward to see you review that game.

The Strategy Guide for Wing Commander 2 actually broke down how the AI worked in both games and it's kind of neat. There's an environmental checklist of conditions, and each condition has a percentage chance of provoking a reaction. Which defines a lot of enemy AI, except this went deeper than "Where is the player, where am I, what can I shoot with?" For example it'd check to see how damaged you were then compare it to it's relative damage to determine how aggressive it gets, and if it thinks it has the upper hand, there would be a chance of firing guns until dry or a smaller chance of firing a missile, etc. It was very simple in a way, but most AI designers to this day don't have their AI checking so many relative conditions.

This game had a profound impact on me and anyone who played it back in early 90s. It was ground breaking and astonishing this was possible in 1990s!

Fun fact - the allied fighter plane from Ww1 called the Sopwith Camel could famously out turn anything to the right. It was a side effect of having an extremely powerful engine with high torque. The weakness was turning left, where it was slow and tended to climb instead.

I loved Wing Commander back in the day. It was way more accessible than any of the other flight sims I tried, almost like an arcade game. I still really like the character animations and the pixel art. That stuff is timeless to me. The Super Wing Commander remake looks horrific.

I remember that each of your wingmen also had a "pain tolerance" where they would allow only x number of friendly fire incidents, and finally treat you like enemy #1. Maniac was the worst.

I love how in the 2nd game, they took the Hornet and Schimitar and mashed them into the same ship, the Ferret. Which is, unironically, an awesomely fun fighter to fly in WC.

25:00 Homeworld proved that space CAN have topography, but you have to think outside the box to do it. And once you open up that possibility you get all kinds of new gameplay styles and that can also directly affect the types of stories you tell in a game. Its a nice feature, but it would be many years before developers figured it out.

Great video, man! Can't wait for the WC2 one. Wing Commander was absolutely incredible back then. It might be hard for some to put yourself into that time, but when WC came out it really was like watching a movie. Also, those moments between the missions, where you basically could just "roam" the Ship (bunks, bar, training simulation, etc.) and talk to people was really unique. Made it all feel more cinematic and / or adventurous. At least to me.

I played “hells kitchen” back in the day, so I guess I was on the bad pilot path. So many neat tricks that were explained, like the ejection trick and the lone remaining fighter trick. It’s everything I wanted to know about WC in 1990. Thank you for this incredible video retrospective. The obvious follow up suggestion: wing commander 2!

Oh man! The memories of all those hours I played Wing Commander back in the day on my 386...

As a guy who played Wing Commander during it's heyday I'm glad to see such a comprehensive video. Looking forward to when you get to Privateer.

I came here expecting a rant, and i found a documentary. Great job. History of space sims are in short supply. The greatest games I have ever played are just underdogs in gaming history. Most of "gaming history" videos are about Mario and FPS. This video is refreshing.

As someone who was around at the time and really in to games like this (I was 14 in 1990), what I find most fascinating about these kinds of videos is the perspective of people who came later and are trying to understand how this thing fits into the history of gaming in general. I think you did a great job there. It really was revolutionary at the time. There are games that came earlier, but they’re mostly different takes on the Star Raiders formula. Wing Commander added so many new features and gameplay items that it felt very futuristic in 1990. The sequel did even more to further that sense of development. It was a great time to be a gamer and into “space sims.” It was sad watching the genre strangle itself, but it took a while and we got a lot of great games out of the genre before that happened. I thought this was a wonderful retrospective. Excellent work all around.

7:15 I have to tell you, that feeling I get from the alert sequence? Gives me shivers every time. I wish it would be properly remade or homaged by someone. Between it and the wonderful simplicity of "Pacific Theater WWII in Space" vibe, WC1 will always be my favorite. Am I the only one who feels this way?

StarLancer is actually pretty good at the whole "taking on Capital Ships" aspect of it tbh, usually they'll have you take out smaller components and then have either an allied capital ship or allied torpedo bombers deal the finishing blow. Other times the Ship to Ship combat will be happening as a backdrop (right in the middle) of you taking out their fighters, it's pretty cool tbh

I loved playing this game when it came out. It was mindblowingly ahead of what came before it. Great to see younger generations find value in these old classics.

I loved how operatic the game is and how lived in the world was. It didn't need the bar area at all to be a functional game. But chatting with the bartender and your wingmeen in between missions adds so much to playing/revisiting the game.

It was my favorite game at the time. Great video. Brought back good memories. I wish they would make a modern version.

I am impressed to see this production quality on a channel with only 86 subscribers. I enjoyed the retrospect.

Space Rogue had some great physics for the time. Being able to slingshot gravity wells and flip your ship around without losing momentum in the direction you last thrusted? Magnificent

I played this a lot when I was a kid. I figured out that you could do the nav points in any order you wanted to so I would avoid the asteroid and mine fields that way.

The whole thing about Capital Ships reminds me of how Battlefleet Gothic points out that you really need to wager out even the different types of capital ships and not attempt to destroy a cruiser with a destroyer or a battleship with even the heaviest cruiser at least one-on-one. Fighters are more like buzzing bees or attacking by swarm rather than a single one making much difference. One of the closest examples to doing fighter participation on capital ship possibly right (and already likely mentioned more than once) is with the Sathanas from Freespace 2 where you just take out its turrets and mainguns while the equivalent sized Colossus is dueling against it.

It feels kinda funny that in a war against literal bipedal tigers in space, that your main base in the first game is called the Tiger's Claw.

Great video. This entire series has a special place in my heart as my father and I played the ever living hell out of the original WC. Also, the original Privateer is still on my top 5 all time favorite games. While I don't agree with some takes you have on the game, I still thoroughly enjoyed this video. As a person who played this when it came out, I can tell you first hand, it blew my effing mind. 25:24 - Escort missions... Funny thing about these, in most games they are pure cancer, however in this game they are often very memorable. There are two missions that are literally burnt into my memory when I think of WC -- any WC game. First being, the escort the Drayman carrying the Watson's Disease vaccine that you need to protect it from a wing of Jalthi. The second being, bring the Ralari-Class destroyer home, and fend off a wing of Gothra. These two mission were the some of the most difficult missions in WC + SM1&2 (And yes, I killed the entire Kilrathi Fleet you're not supposed to engage while in the Hornet in SM2). While there are a few other missions that stick out, nothing compared to how god damn hard these two were, nor compared to the exhilaration I got when I finally beat them both for the first time. Also, you can 100% complete the Ralari mission and bring it home. The #1 tip for this mission is to not engage autopilot before the nav point with the Ralari, this will allow you to get a jump on the wing of Gothra. So all that said, I think they nailed it with the escort missions in WC1. 47:52 - Any ace you didn't kill in the campaign will return in either final mission in Venice or Hell's Kitchen, they appear with the appropriate wing of fighters in these missions, e.g. Khajja will spawn with the Krant wing. So you could essentially have a "boss-rush" if you really wanted to. A side note, by clearing all five waves of fighters in the Starbase mission is how you get the Pewter Planet medal. It just doesn't carry over to SM1 since you can't actually save after the final mission... If you made it to the end of this post, congratulations. Again, great video! I would love to see more deep dives on other entries in this series.

This was my absolute favorite game on the SNES. It starts out pretty easy but by mid-campaign the tone of the game really starts putting the screws to you if your missions aren't going well, and the music and atmosphere, especially when fighting enemy aces, makes your hair stand up.

I had a copy of this for my Amiga 500 plus back in the day, great game for it's time

Wing Commander was, and still is, my favorite game of all time. I remember being at a friend's dorm, slightly drunk, and seeing him fire up his brand new 386DX in a darkened room, and launching the game. To this day it's the closest I've come to a religious experience. The next day I plunked down all of my savings to buy my own 386 with a VGA monitor and a Gravis joystick, just so I could play this game. The owner of the computer store said I wasn't the first one to come in with exactly the same story. I played that game so much that I started to dream about it. I would be bobbing and weaving and dodging deadly Gratha shots as soon as I closed my eyes. While today the story seems a little thin, what I remember most is that the fact that I could interact with my wingmates both in the bar AND in space. It made it feel like they were real people. But the gameplay itself was what kept me hooked. I've been waiting for thirty years for someone to explain why, and you did so beautifully. Thank you for that. To this day, I feel like no other game has quite replicated the experience of being able to just jump into space combat, have a fun and varied and challenging experience, and then quickly move on to the next mission. Even later Wing Commander games lost some of the magic of the original--- for example, we never saw "aces" again after WC2 (or maybe WC3, because you finally fight Thrakhath, which was great). But also, we never saw enemy ships disengage and run away when they were nearly dead, IN ANY GAME SINCE. Literally every space shooter, including later Wing Commander games, just has enemies blindly keep flying around until they get destroyed. I feel like this makes the combat lose a lot of immersion, since you never have to make a decision like "will I go after that damaged ace, and get the glory, or stick around to save the transport?" That, and a bunch of other little details that are long forgotten (but detailed in your amazing video) seemed to just disappear, and then the entire space sim genre disappeared as well. It's a shame, because I feel like Wing Commander should have been just the start, not the peak, of the space sim gameplay experience. Anyway, thank you again for your video. I've subscribed and I'll definitely watch anything else you make.

I am watching the 1970s Battlestar Galatica TV show and I can see how Wing Commander is directly influenced by that. It is a heartwarming feeling.

Amazing work on this video. Lots of memories.

Love your dry humor and editing. Always wanted Space Sims to be covered this good. Subbed!

This is great stuff, man. I grew up playing (and loving) the Wing Commander series, so this was a nice walk down memory lane. Can't wait for you to get to the Mark Hamill era!

Played these as a kid. Remember it running slow on our 286 or 386. When we upgraded to a 486 though these games screamed. Had a sweet joystick as well to play them with. So addictive. Loved when they came out with the privateer.

As a fan of the old X-Wing games who's never played any Wing Commander, this was a really interesting look at the game that really got the space dogfight ball rolling. I may have to try to get wcdx up and running one of these days. Even if I will miss my power management controls.

My nostalgia. Replayed it three times. On occasionally, trying to land on TigerClaw, aiming at its nose, TigerClaw swat me like a fly, exploding, funeral, and mission red. 😅 One time, my comm system was damaged. Had to wait for auto repair. Before getting TigerClaw's permission to land. Another fond memory is improving odd by aggressively afterburner to nearest enemy, and launching dumb missile.

The issue with capital ships is rectified in Wing Commander 2. There it's noted that capital ships now have "phase shields" and your normal guns and missiles are useless against that sort of protection. The only thing that can properly damage the enemy are torpedoes, which require time to lock on and fire. Plus, the only ships that have torps are bombers or fighter/bombers (some of which you can fly in the second, third, fourth, and fifth games).

When I was a kid I spent countless hours playing Wing Commander games on my SNES and since then all I’ve really wanted were more Wing Commander games. Freelancer actually managed to scratch that itch even though it felt unfinished with the last part if the game feeling tacked on just to push it out the door. Had Roberts just dialed back the ambition a bit Freelancer could have been incredible. I felt a glimmer of hope when Roberts declared that he was going to make a new “Wing Commander” game, but we all see how that’s panned out. At this point I’m convinced that it’s never going to happen and I should just feel fortunate that we at least have Everspace.

I remember playing the SNES version a long time ago. Good times. Lookin forward to the next video.

Star Raiders on the old Atari is my first Star-Sim, but I still have such fond memories of Wing Commander. I really hope my children, or maybe grandchildren will be able to fly the freelancer I purchased a decade ago. The dream of Star Citizen is real.

60 year old gamer here. Absolutely loved this review. I still remember playing it on an old XT computer getting 1 fps at times. Tried it years later on a 386 and it was too fast to play LoL. I got up and went over to my game book shelf and found the old boxes of WC II and WC III, not sure where my WC 1 box is. Also found my Tie Fighter retail box. Such nostalgia. Thx so much for this video. You had me laughing many times. You are very talented.

I remember pouring over the blueprints for each of your four ships that came in the box with the game as a kid. I might've spent more time looking at those blueprints than I did actually flying the ships. They included them as piracy protection, but for some reason pouring over fake schematics of fictional machines was one of my favorite things to do as a little boy. As you can imagine, I was very fun at parties.

Honestly thoroughly enjoyed my time watching this. Learning about older games is always fun, especially a cult classic like wing commander. This sort of long-form review/retrospective that lets you vicariously experience an otherwise potentially frustrating game through the lens of someone good at it is great particularly for these older games. Of course these sort of videos take a huge amount of effort (to the point that even people who do content like thi full times are barely able to release maybe 2-3 videos a year) so for now i hope you don't lose motivation from low viewer numbers and look forward to more content in the far future. What I'm curious about is what sort of games you plan to cover for future reviews. Will you stick with retro games? Do you plan to make videos on all the Wing Commander games (it sounded like you were maybe already working on WC2)?

A fantastic vide about one of my favourite games of all time and one that defined my early childhood. I love the WC series and it even defined my family's PC purchases! Needed to upgrade the damn machine to even play the next games in the franchise 🤣 I wish you had millions of views and subs. I really hope you would do these kinds of videos on WC2, WC3, WC4 and WC5.

Man, Tie Fighter was so awesome, it was my absolute favorite space sim ever but I have fond memories of Wing Commander, it was fun! Another good one was Colony Wars.

I've always had a special place in my heart for Wing Commander 1 & 2 . Played them both around time of original release on a 386, then a 486 pc. Wing Commander had 3, 3.5 inch floppy discs to install, then you had to wait for it to unpack everything. Had to make a boot disk with manual memory management and sound card settings for DOS. You could use a multi-button joystick, mouse, and or keyboard to control the ships. I don't remember having too many of the frame rate or stuttering issues. Replayed countless times. I remember thinking I was pretty good. lol

What an awesome job, you've got a lot of talent. Thank you for walking me through this classic

I thoroughly enjoyed watching this video and think your analysis is spot on. I can’t believe I played this game 33 years ago and remember the strife I gave my dad trying to get the extended memory to work so that I could see all the extras such as your hand moving the controls! The escort missions were the worst! I have just finished playing WC2 again and in my opinion WC1 is much better due to: the less scripted nature; having wingmen who could die which meant the war felt more realistic and the opportunity to earn medals and promotions for your efforts. I come back to these games every few years and thoroughly enjoyed your video. The music is so nostalgic!

I still remember the time I was playing a mission in a Broadsword, and in the first engagement I got an unlucky critical hit that took out my entire weapon system. No guns, no missiles. Just ship and shields, and afterburner. Out of spite, I chased down the ship that hit me, hit my afterburner, rammed the enemy, and it blew up. So, with a shrug, I got away from the action, waited for my shields to regen, then chased down another enemy. Rammed it, blew it up. Since that seemed to be working, I kept it up. At the end, I managed to finish the mission, and got back to the ship. There, I learned that I got *every* kill. My wingman was untouched but got zero kills.

I own every WC game they put out. 1, 2 with speech pack (the secret missions/spec ops for both, of course!), Academy, Armada (loved this one!), 3, 4, Prophecy, Privateer (with Righteous Fire and speech), Privateer 2 (loved this one too - learned that Clive Owen was a thing from Priv 2...) Point being, WC is why I am a computer nerd today. My first big boy PC was simply so I could play WC. I somehow coaxed my folks into buying a 486 DX 50 (not DX2) with a huge 8 MB of ram, spent my own money for a second hard drive JUST FOR MY WC games, and played the hell out of them.

Great retrospective, I played the crap out of the SNES version as a kid and still am nostalgic for it. Honestly never played the 'real' version. Was a lot of fun to hear someone talk about one of my favorite games ever in such detail.

I bought the original WC in a physical box in 1990. It came on 5 3.5" HD floppy disks. The blueprints you showed for the ships came in poster-sized format, and 13 y/o me put them up on my wall. I tried to play it as soon as I got home, however, this game required something called expanded memory, which required a 386 processor. So, the next week, I dragged my mom to a computer show and built a 386 SX-20 system. When we got home, I installed it right away. I was amazed by the graphics, the music, the missions. Thank you for bringing back some of those memories. Please accept my subscription, and job well done, sir. I was wondering if you had looked at Lightspeed by Microprose. I have only found one version which still works on modern systems, and it is played via a browser. Even the version on GoG doesn't work well. Sorry to ramble, and thanks again for an awesome video!

"die by the weapons you adore" :D .. Wing Commander Privateer is still a very fond memory. The video communication in the cockpit was awesome and worldbuilding in general was great.

It's crazy how good your script, audio, sourcing, and editing are for a first video. Excited to see where you go from here.

Thanks for all the effort you put into this. I grew up playing Wing Commander III, and man that story really gripped me. It's interesting to see where it came from. The more I learn about games of the late 80s/early 90s (that i didn't learn experientially) the more I am impressed with the cleverness and depth put into so many of them.

I jumped from playing Star Raiders straight to Wing Commander Privateer in 1993, borrowing our copy from a friend. It really blew me away, and still sort of does because it nailed the atmosphere so precisely, expanding on all the little details that were in Wing Commander and giving you some trading and exploration gameplay with a MacGuffin plot. You never saw a capital ship so there was no experiencing the glitchy mess that is the cap ships in this engine. The earlier WC games, which I got around to years after, didn't engage me quite as much, but are definitely landmarks. I think that what actually changed with space sims has nothing to do with the technologies or game mechanics: it's that the narrative around space changed. Wing Commander wasn't the start, it was the anomaly, along with the Star Wars sims. The way in which Wing Commander engaged with space was to copy old space opera tropes, seat them in the Star Raiders arcade-combat formula, add a bit of Top Gun banter, and be the first to make a big, shiny game production out of all of it. The games before and after the brief Wing Commander/Star Wars era were always more...simmy. They made the aesthetic more desolate, clinical or alien, complicated the flight model and so on. Even Star Raiders itself, all the way back in 1979, borrowed a whole strategy component from the mainframe "Star Trek" game that made it a little deeper than Wing Commander. And the 90's Elite sequels, which were actually pretty graphically impressive(even when I played them many, many years later), just bogged you down with fuel calculations and time compression options and all of those gory details of running a trading business in space. But you could actually enter the atmosphere of a planet, land, and see buildings! Pretty cool stuff! But not a lot going on in terms of human elements. Wing Commander is also the subject of an old game design drama: Chris Crawford saw it as the turning point the industry made to embrace Hollywood thrill rides, and wrote and spoke about this. He wanted games - a concept which he also wanted to move beyond in favor of "interactive narrative" - to be crunchy, rationalist simulations with deterministic outcomes and minimal scripting, and if you look at any of his output, you can see that in just about every case, he made an incomprehensible game for aliens, albeit one that nonetheless inspired critical attention at the time and influenced later, similar experiments like the oft-memed "Facade" (aka Trip and Grace kick you out simulator). I'm pretty sure all the effort and attention in that space has moved towards LLM AI now. Meanwhile games have mostly spent the years refining the essentials of narrative: there aren't many brilliant never-seen-before gimmicks left to sell a product with, and it's settled down into genres that are relatively more or relatively less heavy on story.

As someone who only played the SNES secret missions version... it all makes sense now! I also played Wing Commander Privateer which as I recall I quite enjoyed.

I would not have guessed this was your first video. The production value, information, and entertainment were all top notch. I hope it didn't suck your life force out to make.

This really is an excellent insight into this game. It must have taken you absolutely ages to pull off! You've done a really good, thorough, entertaining and subtly very funny video here. I hope you keep making videos like this!

I loved the Wing Commander series when it came out, remember saving up to upgrade my processor to a 486DX just to play the 3rd one. What was even better was Privateer which was set in the same universe.

I just found this channel, and this video, and it was marvelous. I always knew wing commander by name, as a seasoned space sim enjoyed, however, I never quite "got it" when I tried playing it. Your analysis makes approaching it much easier, placing it in the timeframe of history that is according to itself.

I've been such a big fan of space sims, but never really knew much about their history or their origins. This video solved that and now has inspired me to try out the older space sims which I was previously averse to actually trying out. Thanks a lot for that!

Oh man... I sunk countless hours into this, the sequel, and the Secret Missions as a kid. My playtime was probably only eventually beaten out by Doom. Thanks for this video dude! Edit after watching more of the video: When you said "if you're extremely good at Wing Commander you just might pull it off!" and then play cutscenes I definitely saw when I was a little one. I played it *a lot.*

Wing Commander, Tie Fighter, Strike Commander were some of the most fun games I ever played. Missed those mixes of a simple story-driven campaign and great gameplay.

Fantastic video, especially well done for the length it is. I sank waaay too much time into Privateer back in the 90s.

I played the Wing Commander games when I was a kid but I don't remember there being any frame rate issues with the first one. My dad was an engineer and knew how to put together a PC so maybe ours was top of the line? No idea. But for the record, in any real life air force that knows what it's doing it's a wingman's job to stick on the lead's tail and not engage everything in sight. Lead does the killing, wingman watches his back. That's why the wingmen in Wing Commander don't run off on their own.

Wing Commander isn't just a game, it's an experience...

What a great video, I grew up playing the wing commander games, one of my fav series. I think my last one was the Clive Owen privateer game. Such good memories.

Thanks for the video. Was my favourite game when it came out, I recall being blown away by the graphics and gameplay. My two longest term memories were probably the Kilrathi surprise attack (when a housemate's cat ran up my back with it's claws out, whilst I was playing), and the first attempt to get my original disks to load up on a modern PC, where the speed was so high if no ship was on screen that the mission ended instantly that happened!

Thanks for the video, and for highlighting a classic. One quick note. Wing Commander 2 leans into what worked, while giving the pilots more involvement in the story, and requiring bomber-like heavy fighters armed with torpedoes to take out capital ships, after a long lock-on sequence that's ostensibly to decode the enemy shield patterns and program these very finite stand-off weapons to slip past them. For the days of Adlib and Soundblaster, it also had some great music. Unfortunately, Wing Commander 3 & 4 were products of the early 3D era, and as such, their graphics haven't aged gracefully. Which proved too distracting for me to revisit them, even as a fan of the series. Then Academy was a stand-alone mission builder, Armada was a bunch of easy 1v1 fights with a dirt-simple strategy game overlay, and the beloved Privateer is painfully short on enemy fighter types. While Privateer 2 is weird, and may as well not be a Wing Commander game, but it works. And we don't talk about Prophecy or that Xbox Live Arcade game or that movie.

19:18 or you just switch direktions very fast (up and down for example) and just afterburn through. 1:39:43 They also couldnt fit the jalthi in it so they used a reskinned salthi (green instead of brown) as a replacement sprite.

I absolutely loved that game as a kid. I remember how you would get more animations on systems with more RAM, like how you would see the flight stick move in PCs with recommended RAM. Also there was how you would see visible damage on your ship, if you were damaged, when you returned from a mission. Everspace 2 is the closest thing to Wing Commander, or more accurately Privateer/Freelancer, that I've played recently

I played the first Wing Commander on a 386sx/16MHz back in 1990 and its graphics blew my mind! At the time, most of the games would fit in a single 1.2MB diskette, and this game was a staggering 5MB in size! Right when I was thinking, how big these games could possibly become, comes Wing Commander II at 15MB while others at the time would shyly reach one third of it, and the next shock was Wing Commander 3 with its 4 CDs, Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell and Tom Wilson (Beef from Back to the future). I was really blown away with every version of this game that came out back then!

Loved WC1-WC3. WC3 with Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and Biff Tannen was simply awesome!

after 2 years in Early Access, Everspace 2 is finally out and released... and its a lot of fun. it's a little bit like Freelancer if you remember that little gem so I definitely recommend it.

Only realize the video was two hours long when it ended. That's quality documentary skills.

thank you, it brought back memories of the good, simple, straightforward gaming days of old.

Really cool. I played Wing Commander 1 on SNES. Two years or so later my buddy showed me Wing Commander 3 and it was shocking lol Like watching Matrix or Avatar for the first time. The quality was mindblowing if you only knew snes to this point.

Have you thought about doing one for WC2? This was a wonderful trip down memory lane.

Awesome. It's great this series is being recognized these days, great to hear just how well the music, the gameplay, the story, was for a 1990 game, and it's about time for a remake. A proper remake where we get the same characters but with 2023 graphics.

That was beautiful! As an 80s Boomer its really fun to hear the impression from a youngster about WC. I never played the first, but II, III, IV and Armada, that was my whole world until EVE came along :-) Great to know that so much of the Gameplay still holds up. I watched this during a series of sessions over my breakfasts, and yes, I was Informed and entertained! Thanks for that

For anyone who loves the original Wing Commander and has never done it, look up the full audio recordings made from an authentic MPU-401 MIDI system. The depth of sound they crammed into the final version of the game was incredible for the time, and sounds great even now. Roberts was ahead of everyone else in the tech field for games, and it's a shame that Star Citizen has dragged on forever. Too big to fail at this point, I guess.

I still remember Wing Commander 1+2, I havn't found anything saimilar that I found to be as fun. Anyone have any suggestions?

great video - played this when I was 14 years old (and 4FPS while swapping 3.5" floppy discs) so a real nostalgia trip! I would say there was one thing you missed that made this top-notch in terms of PC games - and that's what you got in the physical box. The blueprint posters and the Tiger's claw magazine 'Claw Marks' were such high quality and drew you in by making the world seem more real. It set the standard for what you should get with a AAA pc-game, the base package was what these days you would get for an overpriced special edition. On the branching story part - that made it for me a game I loved to replay, to follow specific paths so I could play all the missions and see each different cut-scene ending. Can't believe people skipped half the game!!

Wing Commander was the first game I got for my "brand new" MS DOS PC in 1990, and to this day, probably the most memorable videogame experience of my life. It was quite amazing for its time. I replayed it a few months ago-- still fun!

The amount of keys required to fly your ship in X-Wing and Tie Fighter was classic good. Makes you feel like a real pilot with complete control over your craft.

The good old times, played it on a AMD 40 Mhz and a expensive 64 MB graphic card. I loved the first 2 WC and the X-Wing plus Tie Fighter games.

For someone who played it back then, it was a nice trip to memory lane.

I played this game a lot on my trusty old snes back in the day. Hours used to go by and I'd never even notice 😄

I'd like you to continue with the WC games as well as X-wing series. Possibly, my favorite WC game was Privateer, which was fairly wide open story wise for the time it was made.

Reminds me a lot of the snes game 'Turn and Burn'. Which is basically this game, slightly pared down and based on modern (for the early '90's) fighter jets. It even has carrier and enemy base assaults. I remember that game fondly, so I bet I'd have liked this one too.

Wing Commander 1, 2, 3 and 4 were all epic. Playing as Mark Hamil was an added bonus. It was also the first game that I played where the player could lose. You could actually be pushed back to base and have the Kilrathi invade and conquer earth if you failed too much.

Loved the video! With my only reference for space sims being a Battlestar Galactica game I played as a kid and hearing about star citizen from other people, it was great to hear someone go into depth about one, especially one of the first!

Thanks a lot for that! I really enjoyed this timetravel 😊 Good memories. I also played this one, including Secret Missions 1+2, years after being thrilled by WC3. But even that is 20 years ago. What is your motivation for devoting so much time for such an old game?

I'm 53 played the entire series. Also don't forget "wing commander:privateer" 1994 which was part of the wing commander series. That game inspired a number of games. Elite preceded wing commander in 1984 & 87. There are also quite a few other space sim you don't have listed. Vega Strike, Empyrion, spacebourne 1 & 2, No Man's sky and entire x series of games besides 4 and a lot of others.

Ah, sweet nostalgia! Though it was WC3 and the box full of CDs that really made me into a lifelong WCfan. Thanks for this trip down memory lane.

I really enjoyed your review/recap of this gem. Realy nostalgic for me as I was enthralled with it and had to complete each and every WC version that came along. Thank you for being so thorough and your words are honest and true to my feelings as well. Thanks man. And thanks for the tip on which version would be best to try today.

Man I used to LOVE this game!