You probably haven't been reading The Digital Antiquarian over the past five years. The site is an enormous dissertation on the art of interactivity. You could

You probably haven't been reading The Digital Antiquarian over the past five years. The site is an enormous dissertation on the art of interactivity. You could call it an attempt to put every major development in narrative gaming into context for their era. Jimmy Maher went all the way back to the early Plato-era mainframe games. He's covering everything from Adventure to Zork. [I'm joking, those two games happened almost at the same time.] But for "the point of writing this", that's why. It's a history of all the major games and being included in it is a pretty serious endorsement of Wing Commander IV's cultural value. In the context of the history of interactivity Wing Commander IV doesn't do that well. They spent a ton of money to make a game that's arguably less interactive than the earlier games in the series. That was how the 90s went. More and more money spent on bad full-motion video, fewer and fewer actual game choices. It's hard not to snark on the production values when they spent $12 million to make it. Again, it's a historical account... videogame budgets for absolute classics six years earlier were like $100k if you were lucky. It doesn't matter if it's a fun and enjoyable game. It's part of the fall of adventure gaming. That's the story.