Wing Commander I

Wing Commander I

Developpement started in early 1989. It was initially a proposal called Squadron.

Chris Roberts was initially thinking of more tactical top down bigger ship combat game, but he eventually decided to make something more visceral that would put you in the cockpit in 3D.

The first year if Developpment was pretty much just Chris Roberts with Paul Isaac coming towards the end and Denis Loubet doing most of the graphics early on, Glen Johnson and Bourbonnais joining as well. Then the team grew as Origin granted more funding and finally to get the game out in time for Christmas season. At the time games had to be boxed out and shipped to stores and couldn't just be downloaded.

Seeing how well Wing Commander I worked, the team decided to be more involved in a more cinematic story, to use the potential of the story and the universe, but no sequel was thought about until then. The Secret Missions add on was also based on ships that didn't make it into the main game and ended up as a mission and story pack during an Origin sale as a sale thanks to the success of the main game.

There was no speech in games at the time, everything was subtitled.

It was one of the last Origin games that could be played directly from the floppy disks.

Trivia

 * During ininitial playtests, testers would fall out of their chairs trying to dodge incoming spaceships
 * The beds in the barracks fill up with people according to the number of saves.