[STEAM] Wing Commander III: The game kind of sucked, but the experience blew me away

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It's Christmas of 1994, and I am 16 years old. Sitting on the table in our family room next to a pile of

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is the most incredible thing in the world: a brand new Gateway 66MHz Pentium tower, with a 540MB hard disk drive, 8MB of RAM, and, most importantly, a CD-ROM drive. I am agog, practically trembling with barely suppressed joy, my bored Gen-X teenager mask threatening to slip and let actual feelings out. My life was about to change—at least where games were concerned.

I'd been working for several months at

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, near Baybrook Mall in southeast suburban Houston. Although the Gateway PC's arrival on Christmas morning was utterly unexpected, the choice of what game to buy required no planning at all. I'd already decided a few weeks earlier, when Chris Roberts' latest opus had been drop-shipped to our shelves, just in time for the holiday season. The choice made itself, really.

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Gimli and Luke, together at last! Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts The moment Babbage's opened its doors on December 26—a day I had off, fortunately—I was there, checkbook in hand. One entire paycheck's worth of capitalism later, I was sprinting out to my creaky 280-Z, sweatily clutching two boxes—one an impulse buy, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual, and the other a game I felt sure would be the best thing I'd ever played or ever would play: Origin's

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. On the backs of Wing Commander I and Wing Commander II, how could it not be?!

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