Music #24

Wing Commander 2

DOS

1991

The game took a very different course from Wing Commander 1 in going more of a linear cinematic direction. Most dramatically, the game delighted in killing off the characters you knew in the first game. The introduction alone blows up the cruiser you were on in Wing Commander 1.

Most cinematics are not done well. Wing Commander 2’s were done well. I don’t fully know why. The music was very good throughout the game, of course. And the series did eventually have Chris Roberts believe he was a movie director.

The motto of Origin used to be that “We create worlds”. The worlds Origin made were very highly textured such as Ultima and Wing Commander. What do I mean by ‘texture’? Think of something like Star Trek or Star Wars in that they, too, are highly textured universes. The practice of a writer is often creating maps and other things way before the book is even begun. All of it provides texture necessary to the writer’s mind to actually make the book. The folks at Origin apparently understood the need for texture in order to craft a universe. This doesn’t appear to be well known anymore by the “Game Industry”.

My hunch is that the use of cinematics, as aside from being a ‘break’ for the player in between the intense missions, was just more ‘texture’ for that world. After all, the cinematics are all hand drawn and somewhat cartoony.

Gameplay alone, Wing Commander was just flying a ship around and pointing the aim on enemy ships. But all this texture made you feel you were in another universe altogether. The game would not be as near as much fun without all this texture.

Here are some examples of Wing Commander 2’s cinematics. You can get a feel of well the music was done and integrated in the game as well as how well crafted is the texture of the game.

A continuation from that cutscene sequence above:

Here is the first mission, gameplay included, of the Special Operations 1 expansion pack.

They just don’t make games this richly textured anymore. Most games feel so hollow and as if they were formed by marketers stuffed with cliches.