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Here's an article that many of us likely remember: PC Gamer's October 1997 preview of Wing Commander Prophecy. This was a major info dump for fans at the time… but the lack of scanned copies of PC Gamers online for many years meant that it hasn't been available for reference. So here it is for posterity! There's some interesting artwork in there, too. That Triton sketch doesn't show up very frequently.

Resolution and Hyperspace

By Todd Vaughn

SINCE THE PREMIERE of the original Wing Commander nearly seven years ago, Origin has commanded the lion's share of the space combat genre with a blend of cinematic flair and explosive gameplay — and it's safe to say things haven't been the same since. The hugely successful series has generated spin-offs (Privateer), ancillary games (Wing Commander Academy, Wing Commander Armada), and even an animated TV show, making it the jewel in Origin's crown. For some gamers, though, the sparkle has begun to fade. In recent years, the Wing Commander series has almost become a victim of its own success, with bloated budgets and overthe-top video productions threatening to overshadow the classic gameplay that made the original a hit.

Now, following the somewhat disappointing sales of Wing Commander IV and Privateer 2 and the departure of WC creator Chris Roberts (who left Origin late last year to form his own company, Digital Anvil), Origin has a new plan for its latest space combat epic. Wing Commander: Prophecy is set to bring the series full circle, with a renewed emphasis on gameplay that puts the player back where it all started, in a fast-paced dogfight against a sinister alien foe.

Origin unveiled Wing Commander: Prophecy to select members of the press at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta, and nearly everyone who saw it agreed the game's designers were up to something big -- something that had nothing to do with Hollywood stars or huge budgets. This was different -- very different -- from what most had expected to see. It wasn't last year's Wing Commander with a new movie wrapped around a serivecable space-flight engine; it was an entirely new game, built with sleek new technology that promises 3D acceleration, multi-player action, interactive missions, and wicked AI.

It was this brief demo that prompted us to pay a visit to Origin's home in Austin, Texas, for a closer look at Prophecy, and as we met up with Project Leader Frank Roan and Producer David Downing, we learned that Prophecy didn't just happen overnight; it's actually been a long time coming.

Different by Design

Wing Commander: Prophecy went into development almost immediately after production ended on Wing Commander IV, but instead of tweaking and refining the previous graphics engine and reusing the series’ video-laden formula, the Prophecy team wanted to try and make a fresh start by taking a step back and examining everything that worked and didn't work in earlier Wing Commander games.

In order to achieve that goal, the team says the "script first, game second" approach used in Wing Commander Ill and IV needed to be revised to allow more flexibility in game design.

The first order of business was to create kick-ass new technology worthy of the Wing Commander name. The new engine — dubbed "Vision" — is a stand-alone code base developed independently within Origin, and comes ready-made with all the features needed to make a state-of-the-art game: hardware access, polygon handling, sound and graphic manipulation, etc. This ready-made code base lets the designers create and tinker without the technical nightmares that usually attend bleedingedge technology.

With the Vision engine, designers could develop new tools specifically for Prophecy, like an advanced mission builder that made it practical to explore a wide variety of potential gameplay scenarios. As Downing explains, the mission editor was a key component in developing good gameplay long before a script had been written.

"From a design standpoint, we wanted to make sure the missions stood on their own," he says. "For about the first six months, we didn't even worry about the story; we just concentrated on doing the missions. We designed about 100 missions for the game, and we threw out about half of those and kept the top 50 or so for the game. We wanted to make sure thatthe missions were the best around, and when we were done, we went ahead and designed a story around the missions.

“In Wing Commander games of the past, the mission design was done very arduously through scripting language," he says, "and that made it extremely difficult to go in during the later stages of the development to put elements in that would make the missions more exciting or more intense. So one of our goals was to create a mission editor that was very flexible, so we could easily go through hundreds of iterations of mission-tweaking rather than the five or six we could achieve when the game was in late beta." The mission structure for Prophecy will work much the same as earlier Wing Commander games, with separate paths for either a win or loss. But this time around, you won't have to successfully chase down every target to win — there will be varying levels of success. In a nod to TIE Fighter, each mission will have its own set of pri mary, secondary, and tertiary goals, all spelled out in the mission briefing. If you've completed a mission and feel you could do better, you can hop right back in and take another stab at it.

The player and wingman combo that worked so well in previous Wing Commander games will return with a few new twists. You and your chosen wingman are no longer the sole saviors of the galaxy; you'll be part of larg: ale bat tles, with multiple Confederation fighters and hordes of alien ships pitching and wheeling above the superstructures of massive capital ships.

Strikes against capital ships will now span multiple missions; you might fly one mission to disable the big ship; another to take out vital sys tems; and yet another to bring it down alto gether. For the moment, the Prophecy designers aren't ready to say exactly how many ships they'll be able to throw into a single battle, but they're confident it'll be a lot more than Wing Commander fans are accustomed to.

The Story

After nailing down the missions, the designers were faced with the challenge of building a story line around them, and the new plot takes the Wing Commander saga into its darkest reaches yet. The Wing Commander universe has always had elements of tension, drama, and mystery, but the setup for Prophecy delivers all of the above with a brand-new twist — sheer desperation.

Shortly before the destruction of Kilrah (homeworld of the Confederation's cat-like nemesis in the first three Wing Commander games), Kilrathi prophets predicted the destruction of the universe would be orchestrated by an unknown evil. In the new game, that ominous prediction becomes reality when a sinister alien race storms the fringes of the Confederation's galaxy, destroying everything in its wake. As the seemingly unstoppable aliens methodically work their way toward Terra's most vital star systems, you'll lead strikes against the alien shield-killers (massive ships that can destroy everything in their wake) and fight off wave after wave of stealthy fighters, all while trying to learn more about these mysterious aliens in order to find their hidden weakness.

Renowned futurist/artist Syd Mead (whose credits include design work for Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Tron

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Original update published on August 8, 2026