Wing Commander IV: The Six-CD FMV Movie That Tried to Redefine Gaming
Ars Technica revisits Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, a 1996 project that turned the medium into a cinematic event with six CD-ROMs, 35mm film sets, and a $12 million budget under Chris Roberts. The game blended a sprawling, movie-like narrative with cutscenes and hundreds of pages of branching dialogue, while space combat largely mirrored Wing Commander III. The result was a dramatic Senate duel as the climax, but the overall package felt hollow to some critics and, in 2026, remains a nostalgic artifact of a path to interactive cinema that mostly wasn’t taken—worth a few dollars for history and entertainment, but not a lasting template for storytelling in games.
