Various angles were rendered for each fighter and object, and the game simply selected the appropriate angle to show at any one time to give the impression of 3D.
This engine, which may look archaic by today’s standards, tricked users into believing they were seeing a fully 3D universe by using rotating bitmapped sprites.
The series is perhaps best known to many for featuring Star Wars‘ Mark Hamill alongside Malcolm McDowell in later instalments (not forgetting the awful movie), but there’s far more to Wing Commander than famous faces strutting their stuff in front of blue screen, which we’ll go into here as we look at the series, beginning with the first outing. Not only was the game presented in a truly cinematic manner, a rarity for flight sims, but it featured gripping, accessible play and an absorbing story. Although Star Wars: X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter usually manages to take the lion’s share of nominations for best classic space combat flight sim, Wing Commander was treading new territory in the genre long before the Lucasarts title, and right from the get go the series featured groundbreaking technology and gameplay mechanics. Spanning several instalments and spin-offs, the Wing Commander series is considered by many veteran gamers to be one of the best of all time. With a decent flight stick to hand and a system specification that could handle them, PCs back in the day wowed anyone lucky enough to get a chance to play some of the classic flighty titles, and one of the very best was Origin’s Wing Commander. The humble flight sim is one of the oldest genres around and one of the major reasons why PC gaming managed to, if you’ll forgive the pun, take off.
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