Wing Commander

What days those were. 1990 was a stellar year for PC games, largely due to Wing Commander. Along with Ultima 6 it formed a series of releases from Origin that would put the company into some seriously high selling products, and considering PC games are only taken seriously if you're Blizzard or Valve, back then there was heftier competition and Origin struck well deserved paydirt.

I have had several honors since playing this game first at 16. My first full time boss was Wing Commander's producer: Warren Spector. The first conversation I had with a well known game audio pro was with George Sanger and Dave Govett, who worked on music for this title.

Dave would remember fondly how Alan Silvestri had some serious influence on the main theme (downloadable below), and how exciting it was to actually have music change dynamically. This was one of the first cinematically orchestrated (albeit on a sound card rather than live) soundtracks in a game that switched to dramatic effect; the player is flying in space to a suspenseful piece and when enemy ships attack the piece switches to a more frenetic tune. The music also matched the tone of the game perfectly. Chris Roberts wanted a game that played like "Star Wars" (in a different universe) and that's exactly what he got.

Check out this interview with Dave on Odeo, and... this just in, the Wing Commander soundtrack is now on sale! Enjoy all these golden greats here, along with other tracks by Team Fat:

Comments

[Falco]

Alexander Brandon, You make great music. What program do you use to make that good music?

[Jakob]

WC paved the path for what became the best space combat sims ever, the Freespace series. The first Freespace game featured some great dynamic music. Worth checking out! Freespace 2 still rules unchallenged.

I hope we'll see more space combat sims in the future... it's one of my favorite game genres! Meanwhile I'll play a little more Bioshock. Which, unfortunately, has little in the way of music and therefore fails to build as much atmosphere as the soundtrack you and van den Bos made for Unreal. The music in Unreal made a great part of the game experience.