MANILA, Philippines – A panel at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo on game preservation revealed that the master tapes containing high quality source video for Wing Commander III were located.
The contents of these tapes will now undergo restoration and preparation is at work for a new release of the game, tentatively called Wing Commander III 30th Anniversary Edition.
For a certain generation of gamers, somewhere above the age of 30, this is big news. Wing Commander III, subtitled ‘The Heart of the Tiger’ launched way back in 1994.
It was one of the first and most successful games to incorporate full motion video cutscenes alongside its polygonal 3D combat. For these sequences, developer Origin Systems enlisted Hollywood actors such as Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies.
It was all part of a broader trend – one I refer to as ‘the multimedia era’ – in video gaming to flex the storage capacity of CD-ROMs and the growing audiovisual muscle of desktop PC hardware.
This was before specialized 3D hardware became commonplace, so the answer to that was frequently big production values comparable to Hollywood movies, a medium that video games continue to emulate to this day, for better or worse.
Many of these attempts are now historical curiosities at best, willfully forgotten mistakes at worst.
For every The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery there is a Psychic Detective and for every The 7th Guest there was a Tender Loving Care.
Today, games like Alan Wake 2 and Immortality are better at incorporating live action performances, making artistic use of them rather than as storytelling crutches.
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The challenge of 30 year old technologies and file formats
Jim Vessella, the senior producer at EA, who hosted the panel, said that the remaster of Wing Commander III will involve brushing off video compression.
He also mentioned features such as “Kilrathi Saga Integration,” and the inclusion of community enhancement patches.
Attendees report that the uncompressed original footage is set to ship with the upscaled version, with a toggle allowing players to switch between them.
Wing Commander III was originally shot on tape with the footage being reduced to 320×240 videos and encoded in an obscure but primitive format known as ‘Xanmovie.’
By comparison, the sequels Wing Commander IV and Wing Commander Prophecy were shot on 35mm film and eventually received limited releases as DVD games with slightly better compression.
The masters for Wing Commander III were believed lost when EA closed Origin in 2004.
Vessella was a producer on this year’s Star Wars: Zero Company, and he also helped lead the charge on a similar remaster, 2020’s Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection.
Vessella’s panel at the Portland Retrogaming Expo has him listed not just as a producer, but as a “driving force in Electronic Arts’ game preservation effort.”
This role has allowed for the digitization of archival assets and the release of source code for classic titles.
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The return of a legendary series
The original game, simply titled Wing Commander, was released for MS-DOS PCs in 1990, and cast players as an intrepid pilot in a brutal space conflict between mankind and a hostile species of warlike cat aliens called the Kilrathi.
The game featured full use of modern sound card technology, detailed animations, a branching military campaign.
As Mark Hamil’s Chirstopher Blair, players wage a weary defense against the Kilrathi alongside a similarly tired crew of officers and pilots, all while pining for Jeanette “Angel” Devereaux.
Wing Commander III was itself the sixth release in the Wing Commander universe, not counting expansion packs and the many console ports of the original game.
More games would follow as well as spin-off novels, an animated series, a collectible card game and in 1999, a Hollywood motion picture adaptation starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Matthew Lillard.
Unfortunately, the market for space sims like Wing Commander never really grew at the rate of other emerging genres like first person shooters and action RPGs.
Wing Commander was a series that once burned brightly and there’s no fooling ourselves into thinking a remaster means anything more, but seeing it emerge from the black hole of history is very welcome.