You’ve probably heard of the famous ‘thank you for playing Wing Commander’ story. It claims that a programmer on the original Wing Commander was stuck getting an error message when the game unloaded its memory during a quit. Pressed for time, instead of fixing the issue he simply hex edited the memory manager’s error reporting to print ‘thank you for playing Wing Commander’ instead. A funny and relatable story!
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Wing Commander I fans, meanwhile, have been understandably cautious about the anecdote and particularly the included screenshot. For one thing, Wing Commander I’s default install direction isn’t c:/wc1 and the game doesn’t actually print “Thank You for Playing Wing Commander!” when you quit. Is the story even real?
Eagle-eyed readers will immediately notice two minor changes between the original version and the 2015 Reddit version (which itself was sourced from a LinkedIn share by a third party in 2012): the original does not have the screenshot and the wording of the quit message has been slightly edited apparently with the intent to make the ending punchier.
Good lord, I spent WAY too much time on trying to find what about the wording was changed. They put an exclamation mark instead of a full stop.
I noticed an interesting thing about Wing Commander 1 that I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere.
If you pay close attention to the dialog of characters and their talking animations, you’ll notice that all dialog has accurate lip syncing, even though they never made a talkie release of that version (the 3DO version has voice acting, but it’s essentially a remake with totally different assets).
I figured a clever programmer synced up certain phonetics with an appropriate animation frame, or someone hand animated all the dialog for a potentially planned but never implemented voice over.
