Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

In the SFF world there are few writers more beloved or missed than Sir Terry Pratchett, the British author of the Discworld series and a host of other classics. And he wasn't just a famously warm person and brilliant writer… he also had great taste. You see, Terry Pratchett loved Wing Commander! We've found several interviews where he talks about our favorite series. Here's one from the October 1993 issue of PC Gamer where he's promoting an upcoming game adaptation of Discworld:

Do you keep many games on your hard drive because you play them so much?

I don't actually keep many games permanently on hard drive. But I have got a fair number of games at home. I bring a couple with me whenever I come back from the states. I've flown my way through Wing Commander, X-wing and, well, most stuff I suppose.

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Is there a Terry Pratchett top five?

Let me think, because I've played a lot of games of one sort or another over the years. The point is, is a game good because it grips you for a week or two? I can, if a game's really got me by the throat, sit there for a whole afternoon until my eyes are like furry boiled eggs. It's only when I've got to the end that I can stop playing the bloody thing and get on with some work.

What kind of game grips you like that?

Wing Commander. All the way -- because there's always something new. And Tetris. Not only did I wipe it off my hard disk, I threw it away and used Norton's Utilities to make sure I could never use it again. It's a computer virus which human beings can catch. But Wing Commander would definitely be in my top five along with Prince Of Persia. The way the kid runs 'n' jumps is so smooth.

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Are you concerned about how the humor of your novels will be represented in the game?

I think it's got to be a game, more importantly. Thats one of the drawbacks of say, Wing Commander. The first time you play it, it's just fantastic, but by about the fourth or fifth time... A lot of stuff is only funny the first time round. I hope that Discworld will be a good playable game. I think it would be a mistake just to go for gags all the time.

Here's another interview from the November 1996 issue of PC Review where he uses Wing Commander IV as an example of why you should make sequels to video games:

The first Discworld game was very well-received. Was DiscWorld 2 just a question of doing more of the same?

Well, lemme see... there’s Doom 2, Wing Commander 4, and a whole slew of games that are in a series. We just thought, people liked the first one, another one would be fun - and there’s better sound and graphics tools around.

And here's an interview from the April 1999 issue of PC Gamer UK where he talks about the series extensively!

You've been reported as being a long-time videogame fan, all the way back to the 8-bits and classic isometric adventures. In all your years of playing, what would you say would he your favourite game of all time?

The one that most impressed me, without a shadow of doubt, was the first Wing Commander. You look at it now and it's kind of flat, but for those days it was very good. They've improved on it over the years. I played my way through that, and the secret missions and the special operations and Wing Commander II and IV, then Privateer 2 and 4.

There are lots of similar games to Wing Commander. Have you ever been tempted to play any of its competitors, like X-Wing?

The difficulty I found with the Star Wars games was that they were too realistic at times. Half the time you were up against little dots that went (Terry makes a dramatic gesture) Zoing! Let's be honest: Wing Commander was really just aerial dogfights with no gravity, with absolutely no relation to how space-fights would operate, like flying inside the big ships so you could strafe them from there...

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As an author you're a professional storyteller. What do you make of storytelling and plot devices in games? How important do you think such elements are in a game?

I would have to say that I regard that in the sense of a narrative, if the game pretends, or suggests, that it should have one. On the whole you don't expect Duke Nukem to have a narrative. Go in. Get out. Shoot them up. Get to the end of the level. Kill the big boss. It's different if the game, as it were, has the sense of a narrative. I enjoyed the Wing Commander games because what you did, even in the early ones, affected the course of the later ones. Did you ever play Wing Commander I?

Yes.

You remember that then. When I played it was a new game on the block. I played it without too much experience. You go out with Paladin. He's old. The chances are that he's going to get creamed, because he's programmed not to be able to fly very well but to back you up all the time. You get back, you succeed in your mission, but he's dead. The commander says, "Oh, that was a shame as he was going to retire in a couple of months." And it's like "Oh shit!" So you reload the game... That's narrative. Then there's Maniac. Anyone in their right mind who goes out with Maniac would get out of sight of the mothership and shoot him. Or you'll let him take out a few of the ships around the place, and the minute there's only one enemy and the two of you, kill him first because he'll shoot through you to get the other one. I like the series because there was a narrative flow. I particularly liked, I think it was, The Price Of Freedom. The nature of the decisions you made throughout the game changed the nature of the big debate at the end. You felt you were involved in a story.

What do you think of the narrative in the games you mentioned earlier? How would you compare the second two Tomb Raider games? Or Unreal?

Oddly enough, I think that Tomb Raider 2 had a better narrative sense to it than Tomb Raider 3, which seemed a little more broken up. I think it's vitally important. Once you get beyond the "Hey! Let's get a shotgun and shoot everybody!", which is quite valid, there should be a sense of narrative. That's what I disliked about Unreal. I got the impression that there was a narrative there, but you couldn't get your head around what was going on, except that you were going to various places and shooting different types of bad-guys. We are homo narans, which is story-telling man. We make up stories. All through our lives we picture things in terms of stories and we project them even onto games. It's a good thing to find a good story structure behind a game. I remember being so pissed in, I think it was, Wing Commander II when you had the Prince in your sights. He's bailed out. You could shoot him... you should have been able to do it. What actually happens is that on-screen the guy winches him in and he becomes a prisoner. I thought, "No." At that point you decide whether to shoot him or not. Anyone in their right mind will think, "Hmmmm... Hollywood. Shooting him isn't going to make for a good game." Doing the decent thing and wheeling him in is going to make for more interesting gameplay. In The Price Of Freedom you realise that all you're having to do is make decisions. If you make honourable decisions like "I will not wipe out these millions of civilians" then you're a good guy. In reality it's "Cream them!" You're making Hollywood decisions, Samurai decisions all the time. That's good. Because you're working out what the story is and taking part in it. That's how you try to play the games. You're trying to get inside the mind of the person who wrote the game.

The L-Space Web continues to keep Pratchett's memory alive. Their collection of annotations has a couple more quotes from interviews about Wing Commander:

"I have played Elite, Wing Commander, X-Wing and altogether too many outer-space-shoot-em-ups. I mean, don't they all have shields, missiles and stuff?"

"Well, right now I'm storming through Privateer under the callsign of Flash Bastard, whose career has progressed throughout the whole Wing Commander series."

"Let's say I've played Wing Commander and Elite and X-Wing and loads of other games, so writing that first page was easy for me :-)"

The third of these is in reference to his novel Only You Can Save Mankind which was... inspired by Wing Commander! The setup for the book, the first in a trilogy, is that the main character plays a Wing Commander-style space sim only to have the Kilrathi-equivalent evil alien race surrender!

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