In the 1990s, during an explosion of popular Star Wars video games (X-Wing, TIE-Fighter, Rebel Assault, Dark Forces) Mark Hamill starred in an epic space combat simulator game that was surprisingly not Star Wars. The cut-scene heavy flight simulator Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger first released for DOS-based PCs and Power Macs in ‘94, and by July 1995, the game’s footprint expanded as it hit the 3DO gaming console. This moment solidified its massive popularity, which led to a PlayStation release in 1996.
For two full years, Wing Commander III was, without a doubt, one of the most popular sci-fi flight games on the planet, and the summer of 1995 was the eye of the storm, a moment when word-of-mouth had led to the publication of lengthy strategy guide books that basically walked you through every level in great detail. So what made Wing Commander III so special? The answer is both simple and complicated: It was a low-budget sci-fi movie with all your favorite actors, combined with an unparalleled flight simulator and oddly compelling character roleplaying moments. Three decades later Wing Commander III still holds up despite its creaky and dated flaws, even if it’s been sadly forgotten. Here’s why.
Wing Commander 101
Wing Commander III was the third game in a series obviously titled Wing Commander, created by Chris Roberts. Set in the 25th century, the Wing Commander universe focuses on the exploits of fighter pilots for Earth (part of the Terran Confederation) waging a battle against the cat-like aliens known as Kilrathi. (These cat creatures are more or less knock-offs of the Kzinti created by Larry Niven for his novels and of brief Star Trek fame.) The “wing commander” is the person who leads the squadron, a nameless character in the first two games, who becomes Colonel Christopher Blair (Mark Hamill) in Wing Commander III.
Because it retcons the previously anonymous main character as a guy who is now Mark Hamill, this three-quel, was, in a sense, a reboot and for many gamers, the real first installment of the series.
A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Sci-Fi Movie
For the time, the biggest innovation of Wing Commander III was that it put the player into an actual sci-fi movie, complete with a highly recognizable cast. Hamill, of course, was well known at this point, but he’s paired with Tom Wilson (of Back to the Future fame) as the braggadocios pilot with the callsign “Maniac.” Wilson barely disguises that he’s playing Biff again but this time as a space pilot, a concept that works well once you get yourself to the bridge of the Victory and have a conversation with him.
But before all that, there’s a nearly 15-minute opening sequence that sets everything up. Blair’s girlfriend and fellow pilot Angel (Yolanda Jilot) has been kidnapped by the Kilrathi. Blair and his old buddy Paladin (John Rhys-Davies) are mourning the loss of their old ship the Concordia, which leads to Blair being reassigned by Admiral Tolwyn (Malcolm McDowell) to the Victory, where Blair will meet Maniac and a slew of other pilots and crew including Flint (Jennifer MacDonald), Cobra (B.J. Jefferson), Flash (Josh Lucas), Vaquero (Julian Reyes), Rachel Coriolis (Ginger Lynn), and Vagabond (François Chau).
After landing on the Victory and meeting Captain Eisen (Jason Bernard), you point-and-click to take Blair to different parts of the ship. This leads to various conversations with other characters in which you often get two options for how Blair will respond to their quirky personalities or outlandish statements. At first, these choices seem innocuous, but how you treat the other pilots and crew on the ship leads to changes down the line. This can change several results in the cockpit and set up the game for alternate endings. (Hint: Don’t piss off Rachel.)
Today, there’s a charming slowness to moving to different parts of the ship and having these seemingly pointless conversations. There are cut scenes just for Blair going down a short flight of stairs, or a cutscene to show us that an elevator is moving. Sometimes you go into an empty room because you need to know it’s there for something that will happen later. It’s all hilariously unnecessary but also soothing and zen in the way it gamifies quotidian tasks like walking around and opening your locker. Wing Commander III suggests that fast pacing in sci-fi movies is overrated and that maybe just hanging out on a space-bound aircraft carrier is cool as hell.
The dialogue and aesthetics of the cutscenes feel right in line with similar military-ish sci-fi of the time — like a mash-up of Babylon 5, and Space: Above and Beyond. And if you squint, the choose-your-own-adventure movie aspect of Wing Commander III looks and feels like one of the straight-to-video Starship Troopers movies. Hamill plays Blair like the opposite of Maverick from Top Gun: he’s a rule-follower, but sort of burnt out and cranky, allowing us to imagine a version of Luke Skywalker who just stayed in command of Rogue Squadron well into his forties. Hamill was only 43 when Wing Commander III was released, but he plays Blair a bit older. Or maybe it was just the agism of the era influencing the writing.
When Wing Commander was turned into an actual movie in 1999, none of the cast from the game was used in favor of younger actors notably Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard. So if your only knowledge of Wing Commander comes from that frustrating movie, watching and playing Wing Commander III will prove to you that Mark Hamill’s version was much better.
Wing Commander’s game-changing dogfights
In the mid-1990s there were few flight simulators better than Wing Commander III. While it's natural to focus on the extensive cutscenes in the game, the majority of the real gameplay happens in the cockpit. It's here where Wing Commander III holds up especially well. After flying your first mission, you can choose between different types of fighters. You can also select your wingman in a briefing scene before that, and you can even specify which kinds of missiles you want to carry on your ship, with each type giving you different abilities in the battles.
Once you’re ready to fly, you have to figure out nearly everything yourself. Your wingman won’t break and attack the incoming Kilrathi fighters unless you tell them. On the keyboard in the GoG version you can download right now, this is accomplished by pressing the “C” button for “Comms” and selecting different orders. Same thing with locking missiles or deciding which guns you want your ship to fire. When you’re out there in space, Wing Commander is not an arcade game. It delivers on its promise to put the player in the cockpit of a starfighter and get into some intricate, and sometimes lengthy, dogfights.
While the cutscenes look jerky, grainy, and dated, the dogfights in space feel fresh and exciting. The best thing about all these moments is the near-total lack of automation. Yes, when you’re getting ready to land on the Victory again you can press “A” for autopilot, and the same thing can be true when you complete certain stages of the mission. But you can also manually complete these tasks. The environments that you inhabit are massive enough to make it feel as though you could just drive your little starfighter in one direction forever if you wanted to. And sometimes, doing exactly that, even after a mission has technically been completed, will reward you with unexpected challenges.
Wing Commander III is a far from perfect game, at least as a concept. But both in 1995 and now, what makes it so wonderful is that it’s paradoxically relaxing. It may have a lot of moving parts and unnecessary story baggage, but whether you’re in the cockpit or deciding what Mark Hamill will say, it's an elegant game, from a more civilized time.
