We recently spent some time dissecting and analyzing the Wing Commander preview for the Amiga. Now we've followed that up with the same treatment for the Wing Commander II rolling demo! The Wing Commander II demo was put together by Origin for Winter CES 1991 and was first shown on January 10 of that year. It was the first Wing Commander to include speech (featuring voices recorded by the developers) and remains the release with the most time between the demo and the final product (roughly eight months). It's most famous for some of the wonderful extra graphics it contains, including an alternate model for the Bloodfang, a closeup of a Kilrathi guardsman and an animated scene in which Prince Thkrahath enters the Emperor's throne room. We've collected videos, assets, history and even hehind the scenes stories from the development team!
There's even a new patch available for download for the community, courtesy of AllTinker who noticed a graphical bug with the original demo. If you look closely at the capture below you'll see that space is the wrong color around the planet and moon. Simply download this and replace the included file in your demo directory to make them correctly transparent!
You can access the WCpedia entry here.
