I don’t have many of them but I thought I might have a look at some Origin’s demos. I’m starting with these two which are both new to me and were downloaded from WCNews. Since they are both short, I’ve put them up on Youtube.

Wing Commander 1 is a rolling demo with a good mix of cutscenes and in game action. This would have sold me on the game at the time but is the least interesting of the two as there isn’t much new here. There are some changes to what appeared in the game with the most obvious being the cockpit art and the fact that Origin FX was the Origin sound And graphics system at this point.

The Wing Commander 2 demo doesn’t show any gameplay but instead has a short piece of the WC2 intro. The majority of this was changed in the final game with several cuts to dialog, whole scenes removed and new voice acting. Some of the changes were for the better but I expect others were made to save on the already ridiculous number of floppies the game shipped with. My 3.5 DD version came on an insane 14 disks as it was, not including the speech pack. The lid barely even goes on the box.

Out of the new bits, I especially like the long flight to the palace and the sequence with Thrakhath walking past all the guards. Both would have added to the final game. I’m not so won over by the medieval style Kilrathi guards with little cat ears on their helmets.