Wing Commander IV and the FMV future that never quite was - Ars Technica
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C:\ArsGames
We love games here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, from modern to ancient and all points in between. With that in mind, we’ve partnered with the folks at GOG.com to create a store page featuring a curated list of some of our favorites from GOG’s catalog. At the end of every month, we’ll rotate a couple of titles off the list and add a few new ones; altogether, we have about 50 games to set in front of you.<br>Once or twice a month, we’ll publish a personal retrospective like this one, where we’ll feature one of the games from the list—perhaps a retro game you’ve heard of, perhaps a modern title you missed. Regardless, GOG will have a DRM-free version of the game ready to go. Be sure to check out the earlier articles in the series!
If I had to pick a chunk of the 1990s that feels the most 90s-ish to me, it’d be the two-year stretch between 1996 and 1997. 1996 saw me graduating from high school and starting college; 1997 saw me meeting my future wife and falling in love. While I tried to figure out how to navigate the University of Houston’s still mostly pre-digital first-semester registration process (we had to sign up for classes over the phone, with touch-tone buttons, like cavemen!), the larger world kept turning in ways that felt inevitable and good and right. The Cold War was in the rearview mirror—how could we ever have been so worried about nuclear annihilation just a few years before? Russia was a friendly bear presided over by everyone’s favorite drunk uncle, and things would obviously keep getting better, right?
Equally obvious, at least according to gaming tastemakers like Ken and Roberta Williams or Chris Roberts, was the idea that computer games from here on would blend together the best of what Hollywood and Silicon Valley had to offer, and the resulting “Silliwood revolution” would blast us forever into the world of fully interactive entertainment. Movies and games would blend together, and neither would be the same ever again! No longer would people sit in theaters just watching movies—audiences would get to choose how the film ended! And on the computer side of things, gone would be the days of lame graphics and clunky hand-drawn art—games would have big-name actors, big-budget sets, and huge special effects!
The “Grand Assembly” chamber is one of the major setpieces constructed for Wing Commander IV’s filming (on film!).
Credit:<br>Origin Systems/EA
The “Grand Assembly” chamber is one of the major setpieces constructed for Wing Commander IV’s filming (on film!).
Credit:
Origin Systems/EA
And if 1996–1997 was the high water-mark of the 90s for me, then the game that most matched that high water-mark was Wing Commander IV: The Price of Chris Roberts Having Full Creative Control—erm, I mean, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom.
WC4 shipped on six CD-ROMs, packed to the gills with compressed scanline-filled FMV.
Credit:<br>Lee Hutchinson
WC4 shipped on six CD-ROMs, packed to the gills with compressed scanline-filled FMV.
Credit:
Lee Hutchinson
Full motion everything
Released in February 1996 after a delay that caused the game to miss its originally targeted Christmas 1995 release date, Wing Commander IV took everything that made Wing Commander III successful and dialed it all up to 11—including upping the number of CDs the game came on from WC3’s four to a truly crazy six (almost four entire gigabytes of space!). The previous game’s all-star cast returned, but now Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, Malcolm McDowell, and the rest were performing not on videotape in front of digital backgrounds but on 35mm film stock and enormous real sets—lots of enormous real sets. Developer Origin Systems, under the now-unrestrained hand of Roberts, ended up spending $12 million on the game’s production—a number that Daily Variety characterized as “The most expensive CD-ROM production ever.” (These and other facts come primarily from Digital Antiquarian Jimmy Maher’s excellent and thoroughly detailed retrospective of WC4, which you should absolutely read.)
The wildly differing scale in production is on display from the moment the opening credits roll. Check out the WC4 intro movie, which takes us from a space battle to a seedy dockside cantina that is definitely not Mos Eisley:
That matching transition at 4:20 says “I am a serious director doing serious movie things.”
This cutscene led to a brief tutorial space battle against Wilson’s Maniac, which then led to another even longer cutscene....