Wing Commander: Secret Ops is a free, downloadable, fifty-six mission episodic follow-up to Wing Commander Prophecy released in 1998

All of the information in that sentence is correct, and yes, even at the time it seemed just as crazy as it does today. While Steam and Half-Life 2 are largely credited with firmly establishing digital releases as the way of the future, Secret Ops predated it by a full six years. And while developers had dabbled with episodic gaming prior to 1998, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s when Telltale would popularize the format for the mainstream, a full eight years after Secret Ops. And to top it all off, the game was free! So how did such an insane project come into being?

In a 1998 interview with Gamespot, (Dunkin) Origin general manager Neil Young offered two reasons behind Secret Ops. The first reason he offered was that they “wanted to do something for the user’s support for the Wing Commander products.” A skeptical response to this might be that they were trying to win favor with the fanbase, and given what was going on with the series at the time and the industry at large, you would not be wrong to suspect that may have been a factor.

Prophecy is a somewhat difficult game to contextualize. The first Wing Commander game was released in 1990. Wing Commander II would follow shortly thereafter. While both games sold well and firmly established the series as one of the best on PC, it was the games that would follow that the series is most remembered for. Wing Commander: Privateer, a spinoff game more in line with open-world space exploration games like Elite or the modern date X series games came out in 1993. But it was Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger that would be the defining moment of the series. Roberts switched from in-engine cartoonish cutscenes to full motion video. And while most FMV efforts at the time were cheap and featured amateur actors, Wing Commander III featured the likes of Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davis, Thomas F. Wilson, and Malcolm McDowell. A similar in vein sequel soon followed in 1996 titled Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. Both games were critical and commercial hits and are still regarded to this day as perhaps the best games to feature FMV ever made.

However, Roberts would leave Origin in 1996 after the release of Wing Commander IV to form Digital Anvil. Wing Commander III and IV had done just about as good a job as one could ask of concluding the primary conflict of the series and wrapping up any lingering narrative loose-ends. Meanwhile, while Wing Commander had enjoyed little competition outside of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games during the first half of the 90s, 1997 and 1998 would see the release of Descent Freespace, Independence War, and even Rogue Squadron and Colony Wars on consoles. Prophecy thus represented a critical juncture for both the series and for Origin.

While it’s difficult to find anything approaching reliable sales figures numbers from that time, Prophecy was thought to be a step back in sales. While both Wing Commander III and IV were said to have sold around a million or more copies, Prophecy was said to be closer to 700-750k. Meanwhile, while review scores were largely positive, the fanbase was somewhat split on the direction of the series. While Roberts had moved the series to being much more story-focused in the previous two games, Prophecy dialed back the amount of FMV and the budget spent on it in favor of gameplay focus. While it’s incredibly difficult to remember objectively how fans reacted to this direction, I recall reaction in fan circles being rather mixed. Though it is not the best snapshot of the time, Wing Commander III and IV certainly seem to be remembered more fondly than Prophecy has been.

The other reason offered by Young in the same interview was that the company wanted to prototype a new digital distribution system. In the same interview, Young spoke of Origin wanting to make extensive use of this system to deliver content to users in the near future. What the extent of those plans might have entailed unfortunately is left to some speculation, however, 1997 also saw the release of Origin’s incredibly successful granddaddy of the modern MMORPG genre, Ultima Online, so one can make some guesses as to why digital distribution would be something the company was exploring.

Most digital game content that was available during the mid to late nineties was fairly insubstantial. With the average consumer limited to 28k to 56k modems using dial-up Internet, it was difficult for many consumers to download files of significant size. Small-scale demos comprised most downloadable gaming content up through that point. Total Annihilation is typically seen as the first modern video game to feature the modern concept of DLC with its Core Contingency expansion. (Total Annihilation Information) Core Contingency was released on April 30th, 1998, mere months before the release of Secret Ops in August of that same year. So for the sake of perspective, while Core Contingency was more akin to an expansion pack Secret Ops was more of a full-scale free game release.

Secret Ops was released episodically over a period of seven weeks. In order to fit the game into a more reasonable file size to accommodate Internet download speeds at the time, the game utilized in-engine text-based cutscenes in place of FMV. The player no longer had the ability to customize loadouts unlike previous entries in the series. For those unfamiliar with the series, the Wing Commander series is famous for featuring some of the most complex mission trees in the history of video games. Based on your successes in any given mission, the game would push you along different narrative tracks and missions. While Secret Ops lacked dialogue choices and branching narrative based on those choices, the mission and narrative path you moved along was still decided based upon your successes and failures in missions.

If you want to see a short demonstration of just how complex this could get, consider this scenario: you start in the Courage System. If you succeed or fail, you still move on to mission 2. No matter how you do in that mission, if you succeeded in mission 1 you move on to mission 3a. If you failed mission 1, you move on to 3b. And so on. If you want to see the full extent of this branching structure, I suggest checking out the excellent mission guide from Wing Commander CIC. Needless to say, while the developers were forced to dial back some of the branching structure the series was known for, they did their best to maintain the feel of a full-scale Wing Commander game.

So how was the actual response to the game? Secret Ops was freely available for only a short window. While I cannot find any reliable download numbers, it is unsurprising that many players at the time struggled to download such a large game in such a short window of availability. I was fortunate enough to have parents willing to allow me to both tie up the phone line and leave my computer running overnight, so I was one of the lucky ones able to download the game. Secret Ops would later be included in the Gold edition of Wing Commander: Prophecy. Finally on August 11^th, 2008, Wing Commander CIC would make the game freely available again via their web site (We've Got a Secret).

In a lot of ways, Secret Ops, the free follow-up, feels like the more appropriate successor to Wing Commander 3 and 4 than Prophecy was. While Prophecy was largely heralded as a quality game, it felt a little long in the tooth. For a series that was famous for innovation and pushing the boundaries of gaming conventions, Prophecy basically was the third one of those games. Meanwhile, Secret Ops was such a crazy new idea that one has to wonder how the team ever got it greenlighted in the first place.

Unfortunately, Origin would close its doors forever in 2004. Truthfully, the company had died years before then. Its final published title, the much maligned Ultima IX: Ascension, was released 1999. While the company remained open for several more years to continue to maintain Ultima Online, only one title, the cancelled Ultima X: Odyssey, received significant development. Though Secret Ops’ narrative appeared to bridge the story between Prophecy and the next game in the series, the only Wing Commander titles Origin was known to be working on after its release were a sequel to Privateer and a multiplayer “sequel” to Secret Ops that was cancelled early in development. A Gameboy Advance port of Wing Commander Prophecy done by Raylight Studios did come out in 2003, and an Xbox Live Arcade game by Gaia Industries called Wing Commander Arena would be released well after Origin had closed its doors forever.

Secret Ops ended up being rather prophetic. In the following two decades after release, both digital distribution and episodic release formats would prove to be two of the most successful evolutions of the video game industry. The fact that Origin Systems substantially experimented with both of these concepts years before most of their contemporaries would suggests a very different path the video game industry could have gone down if the release had been more successful. Just consider for a moment that the company was owned by Electronic Arts, whose Origin storefront would not be released until 2011, many years after Steam had become the predominant PC gaming storefront. Whether Origin had pushed the digital format before technology and infrastructure were ready for it or if their efforts were a casualty of a studio that would soon find itself in financial trouble, Secret Ops is sadly a footnote in video game history rather than the precursor of the modern gaming industry that it deserves to be seen as.

Works Cited

Dunkin, Alan. All About Wing Commander: Secret Ops. 24 June 1998. 29 February 2016. <http://www.gamespot.com/articles/all-about-wing-commander-secret-ops/1100-2464010/>.

Total Annihilation Information. n.d. 29 February 2016. <http://www.tauniverse.com/ta/>.

We’ve Got a Secret. 11 August 2008. 1 March 2016. <http://wcnews.com/news/update/8848/>.

Great post! Had it open in a tab for a week forgetting to reply to it.

Yeah, Secret Ops was a really fascinating thing back then. Was a bit surprising it took so long for others to attempt that model. TA came closest, though there were some weird things going on with the Quake games, where companies would hire prolific mod creators and have them make free promotional Quake and Quake II mods, such as for the TV show Special Ops Force. Later there also was that Eminem thing for Quake 3. I'm not sure since I didn't have any means for paying for stuff online at the time, but I think EA may have dabbled a bit in digital distribution using the EA Store around 2000-2001 too. It most certainly didn't take off since the later EA Downloader didn't have a store interface until shortly before they renamed it Origin.

WCNews was one of the first sites I found when I got Internet at home back in late 1998, and thanks to them, Secret Ops ended up being one of the first things I downloaded, as I think the final episode had just been released at that time, accompanied by a news post about it. Ended up spending quite a lot of time and money downloading that on my 33.6k line with a pretty pricy ISP.

@fisk0: Thanks!

Yeah it was a bit of a neat coincidence that after I decided to put this together, Jeff dug up that video on Majestic. That was another of EA's early digital experiments (that one being in 2002). And boy was that game a flop. Young was behind that game, too. I can't even recall the amount of Quake mods I installed back in college. I think I lost half a year of my life to the original Team Fortress. I was lucky enough around that point to have access to my college's T1 connection by that point. Anyway, yeah, you had a couple of others mucking about with early concepts of DLC, like Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast. There was that whole failed N64 Randnet thing.

If my bad memory serves me right (along with a little googling), it's probably Stardock Central in 2001 and then more notably with Galactic Civilizations in 2003 that gets the credit for the first big PC game that was commercially pushed as a digital release.

WCNews was one of the earliest message boards I got involved with. I think the only one I really posted on before that was for Diablo. That site was pretty great.

@cav829: This was a really interesting read, thanks for writing that up. I was pretty young at the time so I had no idea those ideas had been tried out so long ago.