Overview
Following the destruction of the Tiger's Claw flagship, you are unfairly blamed for the disaster and court-martialed for treason. Demoted and disgraced, you spend years flying boring patrols on a remote space station. However, when the feline Kilrathi empire launches a massive new offensive using stealth fighters, you are forced back into the cockpit to save the Terran Confederation and clear your name.
The game blends intense 3D space dogfighting with heavy narrative cutscenes. You interact with wingmen between missions, watch relationships unfold, and fight epic battles using a vast arsenal of lasers, torpedoes, and missiles.
Visual Archive
Behind The Scenes
The PC Hardware Pusher
Chris Roberts famously designed Wing Commander II to push PC hardware to its absolute breaking point. It was one of the first mainstream games to require a hard drive to play, and running it optimally required an expensive 386 processor and a VGA monitor. The game effectively drove PC hardware sales, as gamers eagerly upgraded their expensive rigs just to experience its cinematic graphics.
The Speech Accessory Pack
Because audio took up so much floppy disk space, Origin Systems released a separate add-on product called the Speech Accessory Pack. If you owned a Sound Blaster card, installing this extra software replaced the text subtitles in the cutscenes with actual digitized voice acting—an incredibly novel and mind-blowing feature for 1991 PC gamers.