Game:

Wing Commander (1990)

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Duration: 9:41

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A brief but exciting look at one of the games that made me fall in love with gaming! The original space dogfighter in the series that eventually spawned Wing Commander: Privateer, which in turn inspired the development of ASCII Sector.

Wing Commander was published in 1990, development headed by Chris Roberts who went on to make a frankly abhorrent film based on this game, amongst a few other films. His gaming legacy is most recently seen in Freelancer (although I think he's only credited as a consultant on that).

This original title is especially notable for the full branching mission structure. In the case of a mission fail from a destroyed escort or a forced ejection, the game would present you with a cutscene showing the result of the failure and a different mission to what you would have to do in the event of a success. It's a far cry from today's dynamically generated missions, but pretty good for 1990. Of course, this meant that a wide variety of missions that were scripted and mapped were just never played because most people would save and reload till they got it right, so they didn't really follow up on the concept in the future installments.

Let me know if you want to see more of this historic game!

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