Wing Commander III

Development

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger was developed and released by Origin Systems. It was released in 1994 for DOS and Mac OS, in 1995 for 3DO, and in 1996 for PlayStation. A Sega Saturn version was also announced and advertised, but not released. Wing Commander III made the move from the sprite-based graphics used in previous titles to software-driven texture-mappedpolygonal3D, and used FMV for cutscenes. Wing Commander III featured an entirely new line of ships and fighters, abandoning the technology of Wing Commander and Wing Commander II. Terran Confederation craft were redesigned from "airplanes in space", while Kilrathi craft were totally redesigned into asymmetrical ships with prongs, barbs and fang-like surfaces. The new, blockier forms were made necessary by the then-primitive state of polygon graphics, as WCIII was released a few years before the first true 3D video cards and all 3D effects had to be calculated by the CPU.