Back in the 90s, there was a stupidly popular trend in video gaming: live-action, full-motion cutscenes. Often times developers would hastily put together a green-screen room, hire a bunch of actors from an area film school (or from the accounting department, whoever was cheaper), and throw together a poorly written script as an effort to slap videos in between gameplay. Lucasarts (in)famously did this with Star Wars: Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire: Death by Colons.*

*A game so terrible I’m going to have to do a writeup on it someday.

Origin Systems saw this trend and said to themselves that they were going to go big or go home. Presumably, they threw a ton of money at Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm MacDowell to appear in the FMV cutscenes for Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom.

Shockingly, when you bring in competent actors and work out a halfway decent script, the result can be positive. Wing Commander IV in particular was fairly well received by critics in 1996, praised for both its excellent plot and decent gameplay. Gamespot gave the game an 8.1/10 in its review.

Sadly this wasn’t a game that stood the test of time. Even the biggest Mark Hamill fans would be surprised to hear that he didn’t just provide a voice, but acted for a video game in the 90s. Largely this is because Origin Systems and Electronic Arts failed to keep the Wing Commander franchise playable as technology advanced. You can’t play any of these games unless you dig out your old Pentium 133 from the shed or tinker with a DosBox emulator.