Although there have been no fewer than five core games in the series, four spin-off games, and five expansion packs devoted to this series, the game that most deserves a sequel is Wing Commander. Buried within the information published online a couple of weeks ago in connection with the departure of Richard "Lord British" Garriott from Origin Systems, the company he founded, were statements that revealed that Origin and its parent company, Electronic Arts, had canceled Wing Commander/Privateer Online. There are currently no Wing Commander products in development, in spite of the fact that each core game in the series was commercially and critically successful.

The original Wing Commander game essentially pioneered the space-sim genre. There were sims released prior to Wing Commander, and some of them, like Elite, were classics in their own right. But Wing Commander introduced unparalleled bit-mapped graphics, a dynamic soundtrack (becoming the "killer ap" for Creative Labs' initial Soundblaster cards), and character development and cinematics comparable to those offered by the best science fiction flicks and books. Both Wing Commander and its first sequel were tremendous critical successes and also did very well commercially. Creator Chris Roberts further emphasized the use of movie elements with Wing Commander III, which introduced effective full-motion video clips and also a completely revolutionary SVGA gameplay engine. Wing Commander III was a gigantic success on every level and reportedly transformed Origin from a $4 million a year company into a $40 million a year colossus. Take that, Avatar.

Wing Commander IV also sold well, but its $14 million budget made it considerably less profitable, and many veteran fans thought the movie elements that were traditionally a strength of the series had begun to unbalance the gameplay. Chris Roberts left Origin shortly after the release of Wing Commander IV, but production continued on what would turn out to be the final core game in the series, Wing Commander Prophecy. Ironically, even without the presence of Chris Roberts, Wing Commander Prophecy may have turned out to be the best game in the series if Origin/EA had not decided to drastically cut back the initially proposed resources allocated to the game. The resulting product still featured some of the best graphics ever seen in this industry, as well as an extremely smooth gameplay engine that ran well even on low-end PCs. But the movie elements were abrupt, and the game's developers were never given the opportunity to give Prophecy's otherwise intriguing plot the depth it deserved.

Origin and EA then decided to turn Origin into an online-only company, which resulted in the cancellation of another Wing Commander product early in its development, Privateer 3, and the departure of almost the entire Wing Commander Prophecy team. A new team was cobbled together to prepare an online-only version of Wing Commander, and flight-sim guru Andy Hollis was rumored to be heading up the new project (a claim that Andy Hollis has publicly denied). But that project was slow to develop, and ultimately it was decided to transform Origin into an "Ultima-only" company (work is proceeding concurrently on Ultima Online 2 and Ultima Online 3, or UO Next). As a result of that decision, there are currently no plans to continue what is, without a doubt, one of the most commercially and critically successful gaming series of all time. If any game has ever warranted another sequel, it's Wing Commander.

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