Development History
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger was developed and released by Chris Roberts and Origin Systems. Released in 1994 for MS-DOS and Mac os, in 1995 for 3DO and in 1996 for PlayStation (a Sega Saturn version was also announced and advertised, but it was never released), Wing Commander III made the move from the sprite-based graphics used in previous titles to software-driven texture-mapped polygonal 3D, and used FMV for cut scenes. 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.
A large number of branching ("interactive") conversations allows the player to choose what response his character will give; the choice may affect the other person's attitude towards the character, or even the morale of the entire crew. As such movie content consumes a large amount of data storage, the game was packaged on four CD-ROMs instead of floppy disks, another emerging technology at that point.
A novelization by William R. Forstchen and Andrew Keith, was published in 1995. A collectible card game adaptation was published in the same year by Mag Force 7 Productions, under the helm of noted science-fiction authors Margaret Weis and Don Perrin. The sequel, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, was released in 1996.
In September 2011 the source code of Wing Commander III was handed to the fan-community by a former developer for the purpose of long-time preservation.
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