A brief history of Wings - The best, and also the last, major game from Cinemaware

Many people probably remember Cinemaware best for Defender of the Crown, which was the publisher's first major release for the Amiga, but they were also behind classics such as The King of Chicago, It Came from the Desert, Rocket Ranger and, of course, Wings. Although Wings wasn't Cinemaware's final game, it's nevertheless regarded by many as the company's swan song and it was probably also the last game to carry the true Cinemaware DNA.

Cinemaware was founded by husband and wife Robert Jacob and Phyllis Jacob back in 1985. Jacob had become interested in the burgeoning games industry, where he took on the role of a sort of agent/middleman between the young game developers, who were scattered everywhere programming various games, and the big, cash-rich game publishers, who were keen to get their hands on these young talents' creations. At one point, Robert Jacob became acquainted with the new Commodore Amiga, which had not yet been released at that time. He was immediately captivated by the machine's many possibilities and made a decision that would change his life; he no longer wanted to be an agent for other game developers, he wanted to be part of the action himself.

So, together with his wife, he founded Cinemaware, and as the name clearly suggests (combining the words "Cinema" and "Software"), Robert Jacob had a vision that the games should "feel like a film, but play like a game", a very ambitious goal in the mid-1980s, given the hardware available at the time. Robert Jacob teamed up with John Cutter, a designer and programmer from Gamestar, who had previously worked mainly on sports games. Cutter was Cinemaware's first permanent employee (there were a number of freelancers working on a casual basis) and he served as Associate Producer on Defender of the Crown, but subsequently became the man behind the design of a number of Cinemaware's biggest titles.

Both Jacob and Cutter were deeply inspired by classic Hollywood films, which is quite evident when looking at a number of their biggest releases. Cinemaware's probably best-known game, Defender of the Crown, was inspired by the film Ivanhoe; The King of Chicago by various gangster films such as Scarface and The Untouchables; It Came from the Desert by 1930s monster films; and Rocket Ranger was inspired by 1950s sci-fi B-movies. Jacob and Cutter had long talked about making a "pilot's story", and so the choice fell on Wings when they had to decide on their next major project. Wings was named after the 1927 silent film of the same name, which was precisely a romantic "pilot's story" and, incidentally, the first film to win an Oscar for Best Picture; this happened in 1929 and it is, in fact, the only silent film ever to have won a Best Picture award at the Oscars.

There were plenty of flight simulators and other flight games for the Amiga, including 1942, Banshee and, not least, Knights of the Sky. However, Jacob felt that none of them captured the "romance" and the stories surrounding the pilots of the First World War, including the German Manfred von Richthofen (also known as "The Red Baron") and the French René Fonck, who was the most successful Allied pilot with 75 confirmed kills. Jacob felt that these same stories were entirely absent from the Second World War, where the focus was more on weapons and machinery rather than the heroism of young men who, when they climbed into those simple aeroplanes, did not have the odds in their favour when it came to returning home alive.

Development of Wings began in 1989 and John Cutter took on the role of producer and designer, as he had so often done at Cinemaware, where his commitment to narrative depth and cinematic presentation had helped to shape the studio. Compared to other games in the late 1980s, the visual aspect of Cinemaware's games was always in a league of its own, compared to the graphics in other games, which usually consisted of small square pixel figures or small angular sprites. A sign of Cinemaware's commitment to high visual quality can be seen in the fact that, for their first truly major title, Defender of the Crown, they hired the legendary Jim Sachs as art director, resulting in one of the most beautiful and atmospheric games ever released on the Amiga.

The problem with Cinemaware's games was often that they weren't the best-playing games one could imagine, and criticism had begun to emerge about this here and there, and this had not gone unnoticed by Robert Jacob and John Cutter. So they decided that Wings should be the best-playing game Cinemaware had ever produced, and no compromises were made anywhere. Not even with the narrative, for in fact Wings was probably the game that told the most complete Cinemaware story.

If you take a step back, Wings is, at its core, not a flight sim at all. Yes, there's plenty of flying in the game, but it's actually more of an adventure game that tells the story of a young pilot's experiences during the First World War. The whole story is told through the pilot's diary, offering a glimpse into his thoughts, his guilt and his fear as friends die, pilots go missing and the pressure mounts on the young pilot. The stories in the diary were inspired by the accounts of real pilots from the First World War, and this helped to make the game far more personal and emotional than what was experienced in other games at that time. By this point, many other developers had gained a firm grasp of the Amiga hardware and had begun to explore it in earnest, pushing it to its limits; this meant that quite a few games felt more like playable tech demos, as there was suddenly a heavy focus on the technology and new technical details, rather than on the story and narrative.

So, whilst telling a gripping story, John Cutter and his designers addressed the criticism through the gameplay. Wings offers three different types of gameplay; standard "strafing runs" where, in an isometric view, fly at low altitude and attack targets on the ground with your machine gun (much like the hugely popular Blue Max from the Commodore 64); there are top-down bombing missions, which are slightly more tactical than the "strafing" section; and finally, there are dogfights in full 3D high above the green fields and forests.

The game reacted to how you performed in the various missions, amongst other things, the tone of the diary became darker if you performed poorly. The game contained more than 200 missions, but you risked missing out on some of them. Wings was designed in such a way that the diary spanned a fixed period, and if you were wounded or taken out of service, you could miss a number of missions whilst you were away from the front.

Wings was a major project, and Robert Jacob and his team had learnt from the problems they encountered during the development of Defender of the Crown. The game was developed in just 10-12 months, and there were more than 12 people on the team, considerably more than the handful typically involved in game production at the time. Wings was released for the Amiga 500 and Amiga 1000 in October 1990; it was Cinemaware's most complete game and proved to be both a critical and commercial success for the company.

It's regarded by many as Cinemaware's best game (though Defender of the Crown is probably best remembered by many) and one of the best narrative games on the Amiga ever. It was not a cheap game to produce either, as there are no official figures on what the development costs amounted to, but based on previous interviews and various estimates, it's thought that Wings may have cost between $300,000 - $500,000 to develop, which is around 3-4 times more than a typical Amiga game at the time.

Wings was one of the more demanding games at the time of its release, as it actually required 1 MB of RAM, which was twice as much as a standard Amiga 500 was equipped with, and four times as much as a standard Amiga 1000 came with. This meant that, upon release, Wings only worked on Amiga machines equipped with RAM expansions of at least 1 MB, and not many people had that at the time. Shortly afterwards, a 512 KB version was released; the games were largely identical, but a couple of the most cinematic sequences had been removed from this edition. Incidentally, the game was supplied on three floppy disks due to the large amount of graphics it contained, while the 512 KB version was supplied on two floppy disks.

Wings was the last major game from Cinemaware. The financial problems had begun to grow ever larger for Cinemaware, and although Wings was their best game to date, it was not enough to save the company, which had to close down the year after its release. It probably didn't help matters that, shortly after the release of Wings, Cinemaware splashed out a whopping $700,000 on a CD version of It Came from the Desert, which NEC had asked them to produce for their TurboGrafx CD console. That may well have been the project that finally drained Cinemaware's coffers. The most ironic thing is probably that the game wasn't finished before Cinemaware had to close down and it was completed independently of Cinemaware on a tight budget the following year.

Many will look back on Wings as one of the best games from the Commodore Amiga. It was only released for the Amiga in its original form, but has since been released in updated versions for the Game Boy Advance (2003), BlackBerry (2013), PC (2014), and Mac (2015). But as is typical with these updated versions, produced without the involvement of those who originally created the game, they were nowhere near as charismatic as the original game.

Cinemaware was one of the most uncompromising development studios of the 1980s and they helped make a huge impact on the entire gaming industry with Wings, Defender of the Crown and several other games. They showed us all how games could also be presented, namely with an emotional story and a visual quality that was miles ahead of everyone else. In a later interview, Robert Jacob described Wings as Cinemaware's most complete game and the one that truly delivered on his original vision for Cinemaware, namely to create games that "felt like a movie, but played like a game".