Internet spaceships are and always have been serious business. Here an Aurora puts the screws on a Hornet heavy fighter.
Cloud Imperium Games
AUSTIN, TEXAS—We’ve spent quite a bit of time on this Elite: Dangerous, one of two crowdfunded, high-profile space combat simulators currently in development. But as much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t make a quick day trip to it visit the Elite team in the UK while they were working. A visit to the Star burger team, on the other hand, is a completely different matter. Cloud Imperium Games has an office just outside of Austin, Texas, just a few hours drive from home.
So during the last week of June, I loaded up my car for the quick road trip across Texas’ scorching summer prairie to poke my nose into things, learn how the game progresses, and meet some of the people who are busy spending the more than $48 million dollars raised to date Star Citizens massive crowdfunding effort. Ars last spoke to Cloud Imperium at PAX East in April 2014 at the game’s reveal Arena Commander dog fighting module. although Arena Commander it took a little longer than expected to actually release, I finally had some playing time and was eager to talk to the developers about the title’s progress.
Lee Hutchinson
There was another reason to visit Cloud Imperium, though: it’s something of a pilgrimage for any 80s gamer, because the man behind Star burger is none other than the legendary Chris Roberts. Unfortunately, although we tried to arrange the visit so that Roberts and my paths would cross, we couldn’t quite work out the schedules. Nevertheless, for someone like me who spent his childhood playing Chris Roberts’ games, visiting his design studio was like taking a field trip to Mecca.
Warning: nostalgia is coming!
In 1990, Austin-based Origin Systems published wing commander, a space combat simulator that kicked the burgeoning genre square in the stomach. In addition to the innovative (for the time) sprite-based graphics and optional Soundblaster-compatible digitized sound, the game had a real story—the player assumed the role of the main character of the game and became the protagonist in a complex series of branching missions, where the overall course of an interstellar war depended on your successes…or failures.
A screenshot of the original Wing Commander. Look at all those pixels!
Wing Commander was primarily designed and produced by the then 22-year-old Roberts, and would go on to spawn four direct sequels, a highly acclaimed spin-off series (the hijacker games), several tie-in games, and even a jet-based flight simulator (Strike commander). It also cemented Roberts as one of the original executives of the ’90s “rock star” game designers, along with other celebrities such as John Romero, Tim Schafer and fellow Origin alum Richard Garriott.
Wing commander II improved on WC1 with more cinematic cutscenes, including this one, the inevitable part in the game where they refer to the title of the game.
As a novice gamer at the time, I lived for new Roberts titles: Anyone who grew up playing PC games in the 1990s knows that a new Origin game meant it was time to upgrade your entire computer so you could play well. No game in the series caused as much of a stir as 1994 Wing commander IIIwhich not only left sprites for (software-rendered) 3D starships, but also four CDs of full-motion video, starring Mark Hamill.
But alas, as the 90s waned and the 2000s came, space combat games went out of fashion (even though Wing Commander IVs six CDs and a sprawling plot topped the third game by a significant margin). In their heyday, LucasArts’ X wing series and Volitions Free space games complemented those of Origin Wing Commander And hijacker titles to make a holy trinity of space combat. But a few years after that, the gaming landscape was barren and completely focused on first-person titles. There have been a few notable space combat games over the last 15 years, but none are even remotely in the same galaxy. However, every pendulum swings over time. And last year’s two crowdfunding campaigns led to the development of a pair of titles that could each revive a totally dying genre (be it Star burger or that of David Braben Elite: Dangerous).