Back in 1994, I bought my first ever videogame from a computer swapmeet in Box Hill somewhere.
That game was Wing Commander 2 – Deluxe Edition. And here’s the first of a series of posts where I’ll unbox some of the retro PC games in my collection.
This being 1994, CD-ROM and ‘multi-media’ was all the rage, this deluxe edition of Wing Commander 2 contained the original game as well as all the Special Operations 1 & 2 expansion packs, and the speech pack. All this on ONE CD! *gasp*. Sixteen years on, and my box is still in pretty good condition structurally, only having a couple of scuffs. I still think the original box art is better, the choice of bright red, blue and yellow is a real eyesore. If I remember correctly, this cost $70 at the time, which was kind of standard for PC Games at swapmeets.
The manual isn’t as great as the Claw Marks from WC1, it’s more of an straight instruction booklet as opposed to an onboard magazine. I’m not sure if it’s just the deluxe edition that’s like this, or if the original WC2 manual had a proper Concordia mag as the instruction manual. The only other inclusion in the manual is an except from the book ‘Freedom Fighters’.
Most DOS games of the era also came with an installation guide. Who else remembers having to mess around with Memmaker, EMM386, and that bullshit 640KB of conventional memory? WC1 and WC2 were the only 2 games I remember that required you to have a good balance of expanded and extended memory, which required alot of CONFIG.SYS fiddling as well.
The game also came with a double sided reference card with all of the keyboard shortcuts.
Another interesting thing that was included in the box was a catalogue for then Origin Systems’ games, such as the Ultima Series, Wing Commander, Strike Commander, and guidebooks.
