By 1994, the UK had already seen numerous games at #1 which aspired to evoking the experience of Star Wars, including but not limited to those with ‘Star Wars’ in their name. Even at some distance from any of the actual films in either direction, it was one of the most flexible and popular basis for games around. Wing Commander III developer Origin Systems did not have the rights to the actual thing, and didn’t ape it as closely as Epic had, but they had an idea for an alternative which is genius in its simplicity: make an FMV game about a war among the stars and cast Luke Skywalker in the lead role.
For all that Mark Hamill is central to it, Wing Commander III isn’t actually an FMV game in the same sense as Rebel Assault, since large bits of its gameplay are not based on streamed video but are a space combat sim along similar lines to X-Wing and TIE Fighter. I rather bounced off those bits, though, and the interactive movie portions of it (“Don’t watch the game, play the movie!”) weigh heavily, not least in the length of time it takes to get beyond them. The occasional feeble explosion aside, they look a good deal better than any attempts at movie-making I’ve covered to date, and while derivative come close to passing for something that might make it to cheaper TV. The look of the tiger aliens (a warmongering other, apart from the noble one on your side, of course) is particularly impressive.
Aside from just watching movies, you can move around and interact with various crew members, later on getting to make some narrative choices alongside. The isolated film footage of each actor waiting around against computer graphics backgrounds to be clicked on gives a sense of them as holograms, which works with the weird grain of video compression in a sympathetic way. The conversations, though, contain illustrations of the converse of the positives I mentioned for MegaRace – that being a player means watching movie bits in a different way which can enhance the experience of what you’re watching.
The thing is that MegaRace worked because Christian Erickson was directly addressing the player both in-universe and without. When Wing Commander III tries to bring the same talking-to-the-player role to its actors, it doesn’t work in the same way. When Ginger Lynn Allen’s Rachel tells you that you can choose your own weapon loadout or accept her default choice, she’s clearly telling you, the player, important information but she’s also talking to Mark Hamill as Colonel Blair, in a way that doesn’t make sense to the experienced pilot you’ve been watching confidently make his entrance. Layer on top of that the way she’s clearly been instructed to play flirty as well, and there are far too many contradictory messages for it not to jar.
As narratives in games get more ambitious, this dissonance will be a repeated feature. I could also point to the dissonance between the experienced pilot and the terrible piloting attributed to him as my lack of three-dimensional special awareness causes me to lose track of a hostile fighter yet again, but that’s both a deeper issue with games in general and more abstract and easily mentally bypassed. Wing Commander III hangs together particularly oddly, though, a collision of too many different modes with visibly jagged joins, none more so than when it’s intent on replicating a different, familiar form of media. It won’t be the last to suffer in that way, but games will carry on making their own paths for the better too.
Gallup Compact Disc chart, Computer Trade Weekly 9 January 1995 (chart for week to 24 December 1994)