Display MoreThis is the fourth in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!
Here's another cool, likely otherwise forgotten collection from the VGHF Digital Library: the original black and white "3DO Club News" newsletters that were mailed to early adopters of the unpopular (but well-Wing Commandered) game console. The fourth issue is from February 1995 and includes multiple items of interest for Wing Commander historians. The first is a neat two page preview of Wing Commander III 3DO, coming in a couple of months:
WING COMMANDER III: HEART OF THE TIGER
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is more than just the sequel to the best- selling flight simulation game of all time. At a production budget of nearly $4 million, it's also far and away the most expensive CD-ROM game ever made - and the first to use full- motion, live action video from start to finish. "I wanted to make this the biggest, baddest CD-ROM game ever, with true movie-quality production values," boasts WC3 designer Chris Roberts. What he ended up with is the next big leap in interactive enter- tainment.
The cast alone puts WC3 into the Hollywood league, with Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars trilogy), Malcolm McDowell (Star Trek Generations), John Rhys- Davies (Sallah in the Indiana Jones series), Tom Wilson (Biff in Back to the Future), and Ginger Lynn Allen (Young Guns II) playing featured roles. Working with Hamill was a lot of fun, Roberts recalls, because Star Wars had been a major inspiration for the entire Wing Commander series. "It was a logical casting choice," he notes, "because every kid wants to be Luke Skywalker-though I think Blair (Hamill's character in WC3) is deeper than Luke. He's 15 years older, for one thing. He's been disgraced, and he's wasted his career fighting in backwater systems. It's still Mark Hamill, but he's definitely not the blue-eyed farm boy we saw in Star Wars."
Making WC3 was very different from regular film making, for two reasons. The first departure was that, because the player determines which character to befriend or which one to pursue romantically, the script had to cover all the options.
There was reportedly much more preparation for each scene than in a normal film shoot and the actors had to approach the same scene in response to all the possible choices. Though it was a stretch for the actors to remember which story branch they were in and keep track of the variables, they enjoyed the novelty of exploring several different endings to a single scene.
The second departure was the absence of sets. The actors performed their roles in between missions in a virtu- ally empty green studio during five weeks of shooting. Computer- generated backgrounds-including spaceship control centers, fighter planes, and galactic landscapes - were added later by artists using Silicon Graphics' Alias software. (Roberts describes the technique as "real actors on a virtual set.") After shoot- ing, Origin's artist team, led by Chris Douglas, touched up the backgrounds and added detail. Finally, Western Images in San Francisco-the same online editing facility that did the Young Indy series - edited it down from 100 hours of raw footage to the three or four hours of film you see in the game.
The final result was four CDs' worth of 24-bit color, with full Dolby CD sound. For the PC version, this was adapted to 8-bit color, with far fewer polygon faces and a much lower frame rate. "But the 3DO ver- sion looks better," reflects Roberts, "because of the 16-bit colors and the higher face count on the polygons. It also sounds more realistic, because the 3DO system supports Dolby stereo.
And the gameplay is superior, because the frame rate is very high-about 20 frames per second. This is especially true in the flying sequences, due to the polygonal engine: the planes are more responsive, and they move with more finesse. All in all, the 3DO version does far more justice to the artists, actors, musicians, and programmers who worked on it. All that money we spent on content really shows!"
Wing Commander III is the final installment in a trilogy chronicling a war between humans and Kilrathi invaders. As the hero, you're a mature squadron commander who's lost two carriers and countless friends in the 40-year-old war. Assigned to the TCS Victory, you deploy squadrons of starfighters in what could be the final confrontation that ends the war once and for all.
The early returns are already in on the PC version, which shipped before Christmas. Steve Honeywell of Computer Game Review calls it "a tremendous work, above and beyond anything that's been done." Other reviewers are joining the chorus. But Roberts isn't fazed. "They coined the term interactive movie' to describe Wing Commander I," he recalls. "It may have been a bit of hype back then. But this time, it's the real thing."But wait, there's more! The newsletter also features a preview of The Need for Speed, the then-3DO exclusive racing game coming from Electronic Arts. And that preview gives some interesting details on the old story that Richard Garriott and Chris Roberts loaned their supercars to the development team to include in the game.
Now that we know Chris Roberts' car was the 1992 Ferrari 512TR (F110) and Richard Garriott's was the 1993 Lamborghini Diablo VT I thought it would be fun to look them up in the game itself. Here are their selection screens:
And, per the NFS wiki, here are their in-game models!
Finally, the NFS community has extracted the in-game videos that introduce the cars and posted them to YouTube. Here's Chris' Ferrari:
And Richard's Lambo:
