Display MoreThe Wing Commander IV demo was released online on October 19, 1995, a full four months before the game finally shipped! As a result there's some interesting things in the demo that are a little different from the final game... so we thought we'd take a look. We'll start with the controversy. The... stupidest controversy in history. When the demo was first released, a 43-megabyte download was an impossible thing for most dialup users. I remember having my dad bring several dozen blank disks (that I hastily formatted from AOL offers and unwanted shareware games) to work to download it overnight and PKZIP span back to me. And most people weren't that lucky! So Origin game up with the smart solution of offering a version that was just the mission without the trailer... just 13 megs! That was still a huge download in 1995, but it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE. One impact of this was that when the game started it displayed a single frame from the cutscene instead of the whole thing. It hung on this image as it started up:
What's that? A starfield background for a space game? Not if you were terminally online before the phrase existed! That's clearly a signal from Origin: it's an image of Ralgha "Hobbes" nar Hhallas formed in a nebula. An important clue that Wing Commander IV's story was going to be about resurrecting Hobbes with space magic (and of course, this meant it was going to be bad). Yes, people actually insisted this. And angrily fought with each other over it on the Usenet. Really, really!
The demo mission is a timed gauntlet where you must destroy as many pirate fighters as you can. You start at a nav point with several ally ships (discussed below) and then face, alone, unlimited waves of pirate frigates and fighters. There's one central frigate which respawns when you destroy it and then a constant rotation of two Arrows, two Razors, two Thunderbolts and then two Razors again... then it repeats endlessly until you run out of time. Destroying the frigate adds seconds to the clock but it doesn't generally seem to be worthwhile to do this.
There are some unique allies, too! The demo's gameflow is the Lexington's flight control room but you actually take off from the BWS Intrepid flying a Hellcat. There are two unique wingmen that don't appear in the game flying CAP in their own Hellcats, PABLO and BUCKWHEAT. There's a Confederation frigate nearby too, the TCS Bluepoint (the same name as the station from the start of the game). Internally, Pablo and Buckwheat each have a complete set of text comms though since they never actually engage the enemy all you can get them to do is report their status.
There's a wonderful Easter egg, too. Dekker's Hermes shuttle is flying nearby when you take off. If you lock onto it and chase it for twenty seconds then it will deploy a 'pickup'. Fly into it and it adds a Stormfire gun to your Hellcat! This is a chain of features that ultimately didn't appear in the released game at all.
Turrets are broken in the demo. Two of them are missing on the two frigates and the Intrepid doesn't have any. Interestingly, this reveals that the Intrepid textures don't match the game. The game version has 'destroyed' textures painted on the hull (which appear when the physical geometry turrets are lost). Here we have functional turrets painted on! Collisions all feel a little off, too, and if you look carefully you'll see the pirate frigates are actually flying backwards!
There are two unique pirate AIs named "pirate" and "unknown". Each wave includes one of each of them. Hidden in the game's guts are a number of 'secret' names for the characters, something that continues on in the final release. Buckwheat is "Chumly", Dekker is "Bilestuf", the Intrepid is "Craphound", the buoy is "Race", the Bluepoint is "Joe" the pirates are "Assmuch" and the frigate is "Border Union." Buckwheat and Pablo are designated Red 1 and Red 2, too.
The audio for your Hellcat's "bitching betty" is also different and noticealy worse than the final. Here are all the lines:
Mission complete.
Unable to complete mission.
Enemy near. Autopilot not allowed.
Hazard near. Autopilot not allowed.
Receiving long distance communication.
Receiving distress signal.
Autopilot link established.
Guns reconfigured.
Objective accomplished. Proceed to next waypoint.
The demo includes an extensive readme that includes challenges from the developers to beat their scores! It's tough but not impossible to upset asommers...
There's also a Macintosh version of the Wing Commander IV demo released much later which is based on the original but it's actually quite simplified. There are no allies at an initial nav point, you spawn directly at the gauntlet and face only a pair of Arrows which repeats forever. Nowhere near as interesting, but you might be able to set a record more easily with this later version! One other minor change: the jump buoy's allegiance is changed from Confederation to neutral! Here's a quick comparison of their VDUs:
You can download all three versions of the demo below:PC-CD Full VersionPC-CD Web VersionMacintosh Version
