The original Wing Commander remains a masterpiece of interactive storytelling. Released at a time when the term "interactive movie" hadn't yet become common in the world of video games, it managed to combine first-person space combat with a surprisingly emotional storyline and turned its creator Chris Roberts into one of the hottest game designers of the era.
Roberts has since gone on to create the epic Star Citizen, but there are still many Wing Commander fans out there who would love to play a remastered version of the original game – and that's what developer Howard Day has been working on for the past few years.
Day intends to recreate the first Wing Commander using the Unity engine, under the title Wing Leader. However, despite a flurry of activity between 2019 and 2021, the pace of development has slowed, and Day has decided to release the project's assets on GitHub in the hope that the community can step in and help speed things up.
"I figure I should do this, since I don't know when I'll get back to it," Day says. "I've made the project public... I don't want this stuff to be lost should something unexpected happen to me. I will keep developing it, but if others want to take it and run, I'm all for it."