Wing Commander IV and the FMV future that never quite was

If I had to pick a chunk of the 1990s that feels the most 90s-ish to me, it’d be the two-year stretch between 1996 and 1997. 1996 saw me graduating from high school and starting college; 1997 saw me meeting my future wife and falling in love. While I tried to figure out how to navigate the University of Houston’s still mostly pre-digital first-semester registration process (we had to sign up for classes over the phone, with touch-tone buttons, like cavemen!), the larger world kept turning in ways that felt inevitable and good and right. The Cold War was in the rearview mirror—how could we ever have been so worried about nuclear annihilation just a few years before? Russia was a friendly bear presided over by everyone’s favorite drunk uncle, and things would obviously keep getting better, right?

Equally obvious, at least according to gaming tastemakers like Ken and Roberta Williams or Chris Roberts, was the idea that computer games from here on would blend together the best of what Hollywood and Silicon Valley had to offer, and the resulting “Silliwood revolution” would blast us forever into the world of fully interactive entertainment. Movies and games would blend together, and neither would be the same ever again! No longer would people sit in theaters just watching movies—audiences would get to choose how the film ended! And on the computer side of things, gone would be the days of lame graphics and clunky hand-drawn art—games would have big-name actors, big-budget sets, and huge special effects!

And if 1996–1997 was the high water-mark of the 90s for me, then the game that most matched that high water-mark was Wing Commander IV: The Price of Chris Roberts Having Full Creative Control—erm, I mean, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom.

Full motion everything

Released in February 1996 after a delay that caused the game to miss its originally targeted Christmas 1995 release date, Wing Commander IV took everything that made Wing Commander III successful and dialed it all up to 11—including upping the number of CDs the game came on from WC3’s four to a truly crazy six (almost four entire gigabytes of space!). The previous game’s all-star cast returned, but now Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, Malcolm McDowell, and the rest were performing not on videotape in front of digital backgrounds but on 35mm film stock and enormous real sets—lots of enormous real sets. Developer Origin Systems, under the now-unrestrained hand of Roberts, ended up spending $12 million on the game’s production—a number that Daily Variety characterized as “The most expensive CD-ROM production ever.” (These and other facts come primarily from Digital Antiquarian Jimmy Maher’s excellent and thoroughly detailed retrospective of WC4, which you should absolutely read.)

The wildly differing scale in production is on display from the moment the opening credits roll. Check out the WC4 intro movie, which takes us from a space battle to a seedy dockside cantina that is definitely not Mos Eisley:

This cutscene led to a brief tutorial space battle against Wilson’s Maniac, which then led to another even longer cutscene. In fact, by the time the player actually gets deployed on their very first real mission, they’ve sat through more than 20 minutes of establishing narrative video. It’s not quite Hideo Kojima levels of movie-ing, but it was practically unheard of at the time.

Of course, the cinematics didn’t look nearly as good as the version embedded above—YouTube is brimming over with lovingly upscaled 1080p renditions of what we saw on our 15-inch CRTs back in the day, which actually was shipped looking like this, in order to fit on those six CD-ROMs and play properly on our early MMX Pentiums:

(A single-disc DVD re-release of the game with better-looking video eventually happened, but not for a couple of years—in 1995, DVD was still a ways off.)

Ambition, or indulgence?

Wing Commander 4’s narrative is best described as “sprawling.” The short version is that after defeating the Kilrathi at the climax of Wing Commander 3, Mark Hamill’s Christopher Blair retires to a backwater world to live out a life in peace and obscurity. This is interrupted—because of course it is—by a surge of pirate activity near the “border worlds,” a splinter group of independent colonies at the edge of the Terran Confederation. Blair is called back up to active duty to help quell the pirate attacks—but, of course, there’s more going on than simple pirates. The midpoint of the game sees the player having to make a huge choice with huge repercussions, and the game comes to a thundering narrative conclusion not in the cockpit with a planetary trench run, but in a rhetorical slap-fight on the floor of the Terran Confederation’s Grand Assembly chamber. (It’s been many years since I last sat down and played it, but that’s my recollection from memory, at least.)

In short, there’s a lot of movie-watching involved with this game—hours and hours of it. The shooting script stretches to a genuinely ludicrous 652 pages when accounting for all the different plot paths (a movie script even about a third of that length would get you tossed out of any Hollywood production office unless your name is “James Cameron” or “Francis Ford Coppola,” and even Coppola might still get the heave-ho).

In terms of overall quality, the movie the player assembles out of that 652-page framework isn’t bad! It’s…it’s pretty okay! Fine, even! Everyone is clearly doing their damndest—John Rhys-Davies is at his stentorian best and Malcolm McDowell chews more scenery than a Bagger 288 bucket-wheel excavator—but in spite of being made of mostly polished parts, the whole thing never manages to outpace a feeling of amateur cheapness, even given the significant budget. The awe one was supposed to feel at watching a “real” movie on one’s computer had to do a whole lot of heavy lifting—which worked great in 1996, but not so much in 2026.

In terms of the actual game beneath the cutscenes, it wasn’t much changed from Wing Commander III. There were some minor improvements made in the game engine’s lighting, but the space combat is otherwise more or less the same as we got in the last game—except now you’re primarily fighting humans in human ships instead of anthropomorphic space cats in anthropomorphic space cat ships. My main memory of playing is that as the game went on, I started to feel the old familiar Wing Commander resentment about having to fly through increasingly difficult and poorly playtested missions in order to learn more of the story, which was the thing I was actually here for. Such is the curse of Wing Commander, I suppose.

We have Roberts to thank for the game’s highs and lows. By all indications, Roberts was about as interested in the space combat sim part of the game as I was—which is to say, not a whole lot. Maher notes in his write-up that 90 percent of the game’s budget was spent on the movie side rather than the game side, and quotes a contemporaneous PC Gamer review that calls the result “a little hollow.” That’s being very kind to the game, I think.

That ending, though

For all my gripes, I certainly played the crap out of WC4 at release. For years, if I wanted to show someone how cool computer gaming could be, this was the game I’d pull out; even if the actual spaceship-flying part wasn’t all that great, it had a fantastic attention-grabbing cinematic opening that, by the gaming standards of the day, was jaw-dropping.

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