Strike Commander

Strike Commander is a combat flight simulation video game designed by Chris Roberts and released by Origin Systems for the PC DOS in 1993.

Gameplay
Strike Commander is set in what was at the time the near future of 2011. After a tumultuous decade governments and organisations routinely hire mercenary jet fighter squadrons to look after their interests.

The player is second in command at the Wildcats sqaudron which is unique as only accepting missions which aren’t immoral.

The game was a Hollywood-style blockbuster with the player as the lead character. Patterned after the great military action movies of the 1980s, F-16s battling in the skies against other familiar modern aircraft,  a father figure to avenge, a beautiful seductress with a hidden agenda… and rendered cutscenes that strove for the proper atmosphere as much as they did high tech polish.

Development
Strike Commander took more than four years and over a million man hours on background development, far over budget and a year overdue. Very little of that production time turned out to be actually usable in the final product, as at least one and possibly several complete project "reboots" were required to refine the graphical engine to a playable state. Nevertheless, some successful gameplay elements from Strike Commander were re-used by other more notable Origin products such as Privateer and the Wing Commander series. Chris Roberts, in the game's manual, compares the game's long development time with the events in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a film account of what it took to get the 1979 film Apocalypse Now made.

The 2D sprites were gone and the game is in full 3D with texture mapping. Its 3D graphics-engine used both gouraud shading and texture-mapping on both aircraft-models and terrain, an impressive feat at the time.

One of Strike Commander’s innovations was the inclusion of a ‘virtual cockpit’ where the player’s head and the environment could be controlled separately. Players could adjust their view in any direction rather than just left, right, forward and backwards.

When it came out this was probably the most hardware-intensive game yet released. Strike Commander supposed the abandonment of the 386 processor by Origin Systems, the game is absolutely excessive in everything and although it runs on the aforementioned processor, a 486 was necessary to make it work well. It required eight 3 ½" floppy disks, four megabytes of RAM and an installation time of half an hour to an hour, and once unpacked the game with speech pack came to about 45 Mb in an era when most gamers didn’t even have a hard disk that big.

Strike Commander was a financial fiasco for Origin: too many delays, exaggerated requirements, and pressure to get it out as soon as possible from Electronic Arts made the product clumsy and lacking in Roberts' polished style, which doesn't mean it's not a great game. Roberts, for his part, decided to return to the saga that made him famous and he does so by reinventing the concept of a mixture of simulation and space commerce created by Elite in 1984. Wing Commander: Privateer was released in 1993 and instantly became a cult game.

Strike Commander was re-released in 2013 on Gog.com with support for Windows and macOS.