The Video Game Project
A Closer Look At The Prototypes That Became Your Favourite Games!
Wing Commander
Originally entitled Squadron and later renamed Wingleader, Wing Commander was the first game in Chris Roberts' science fiction space flight simulation franchise. The game was first released for MS-DOS in September of 1990 and was later ported to the Super Nintendo as well as several other systems (Amiga, CD32 and Sega CD).
The game was a departure from the standard space style formula of old, instead aiming to create a space combat game similiar to the Star Wars films. As development for Wing Commander (MS-DOS version) came to a close, the EMM386 memory manager the game used gave an exception when the user exited the game. This error would cause it to print out a message "EMM386 Memory manager error...". Try as they might the team could not isolate / fix the error and they needed to ship it as soon as possible. As a work-around, one of the game's programmers, managed to hex-edited the memory manager so it displayed a different message. Instead of the error, it would dispay the message "Thank you for playing Wing Commander." It was never seen by the public however because a different bug in the game meant it went through another revision before it was shipped and the original bug was fixed.
Proto - Front
Proto - PCB
