The year was 1990. A small computer game company called Origin Systems, best known for the popular Ultima series of role-playing games, had just released a new title. When I first saw it, through a haze of alcohol and social joy, running on a friend's wicked-fast 386-33, I fell in love. I had to have it. Within weeks I had purchased my very first computer, with a Sound Blaster card, and was lost in a new universe. It felt different from any other game I had ever played. I felt like I was the star of an epic science-fiction movie.

Nearly twenty years have passed, and most games of that era simply fail to live up to their nostalgia. I find that today I struggle to play through Ultima V, or even the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. Thus it was with some trepidation that I loaded up Wing Commander under DOSBox, running on my Media Center PC, hooked up to my 42 inch LCD television. For control, I had the best joystick ever made, the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2.

The graphics are, of course, crude. The PCs of that era couldn't quite manage fully texture-mapped 3D polygons, so Wing Commander faked it with a bunch of pre-rendered shots of each ship at various angles. (Ironically, the images were actually rendered on Amigas!) Then the game engine smoothly rotated and scaled each bitmap depending on the yaw angle and distance to the ship. Up close, the ships devolved into a mess of giant pixels.

Here's the weird thing: after a few minutes of playing the game again, none of this matters. It's all about the gameplay.
Wing Commander had a fast-paced engine that encouraged fun but risky gameplay. Using your afterburners liberally you could race around, get out of trouble quickly, and dart in with flanking attacks. You had to save up your weapon energy to get a bunch of bursts at once. Then, with your enemy's shields down, you could pop off a missile and finish the job. With practice, you became like a god, flipping around while sliding at high speeds, dealing out bursts of flaming death with perfect deflection shots. However, you had only so much afterburner fuel for each mission, and if you weren't careful you could easily afterburner right into an enemy ship, a capital ship, or even an asteroid, and blow up. In the Secret Missions expansions, running out of afterburner fuel became a real issue, as the game threw tons of enemy ships at you for each mission.

Not everything is perfect, of course--missiles seem somewhat underpowered (although this becomes a lifesaver when you are faced with enemy missiles trying to take you out) and capital ships have very weak anti-ship defence and are about as strong as tissue paper. There is one mission where you are charged with defending an enemy Ralari destroyer that has been captured by the good guys. No matter how fast you get there, it is immediately beset by five heavy Gratha fighters. Saving the Ralari requires huge strokes of luck: I have never been able to do it successfully more than one time out of every ten attempts, and this has not changed in twenty years. The only way to do it is to afterburner like a bat out of hell and hope to take one Gratha out immediately, use liberal amounts of taunting (the enemy will sometimes turn from their target towards you if you insult them, but these Gratha seem rather hell-bent on their target), fire all your missiles at separate targets, and even use your craft as a battering ram to finish off enemies without shields (this is extremely dangerous, however, as you are flying a Rapier with light armor, and if you aren't careful you will blow up instead).

The feeling of relief and pride when you successfully complete this mission and autopilot home, the giant Ralari in tow, is beyond measure. It hasn't diminished one bit with the passage of time.

Now, there were other good space games that followed in the intervening years. Wing Commander II added many more cutscenes and plot-related dialog, as well as giving the enemy a voice during flight. X-Wing and its sequels put the player into the Star Wars universe and had interesting shield management and a wide variety of missions. Wing Commander III went to high-resolution, fully texture-mapped polygons and featured real actors in full-motion video for the cutscenes, and Wing Commander IV turned those cutscenes into a movie that was far better than the cinematic abortion that was the "real" Wing Commander movie. Prophecy, the last of the Wing Commanders, added a new (if uninteresting) enemy and utilized the new generation of hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards. And of course, many still claim that Freespace 2 was the defining moment in space combat simulations, with crazy fighter-versus-capital ship action and a modding community that extended the game to new heights after Interplay open-sourced the code.

This is all true. It's also true that none of these games ever gave me quite the feeling that Wing Commander 1 did, and apparently still does today.

Even Chris Roberts doesn't quite understand how the original game worked so well. Everything just sort of came together. Like the proverbial lightning in a bottle, it isn't something that is easily recreated.

Still, I find that I have to try. That will the subject of a future post.