Wing Commander Privateer delved into the seamy side of the Wing Commander Universe, giving the player complete freedom to roam the Gemini sector with the goal of accumulating wealth through any means he or she chose – legitimate trading, smuggling, bounty hunts, piracy, and more. The game was open ended, meaning that the player could carry on flying even when the main story-based game had been completed.
Wing Commander Privateer is currently (since 3rd June 2011) available from gog.com. A nice collection of information on Privateer and its add-on, Righteous Fire, can be found at the Old Skool web site for classic PC games. Extensive background information for Privateer, Righteous Fire and even what might have been Privateer On-Line is also available at the CIC. The latter is an on-line version of the Privateer On-Line design document, and a second version featured the ICIS style of Wing Commander Prophecy.
The Privateer manual is available as a PDF from the CIC. It is also included in many CD-based re-releases of the game.
When stuck on a mission, try the CIC’s very thorough game guide. Wedge009’s listings of commodity prices and bases from Wing Commander Privateer, which may aid in gameplay decisions, are also available.
Wedge009’s interpretation of the dialogue from Wing Commander Privateer.
A few single-file MIDIs extracted straight from the game and converted using Winamp are available here, with some RIFF information added. The complete MIDI collection (sans the Victory track) is available at the CIC, unnamed and named.
Several of the music pieces from Privateer are also available in various formats from the CIC. The higher quality tracks were recorded by Mad Hatter and C75 on the Roland Sound Canvas. The older pieces seem to be AdLib versions, and unfortunately, some of them have quite a bit of background noise. In addition, the one labelled “New Detroit” is actually the music played while on agricultural bases. Tracks 6 and 16 of the Origin Audio CD Volume 3 includes high quality recordings of a medley of combat music as well as the credits. Some arrangements of Privateer music can also be found at Scrap’s site.
Most of the inflight plot-related speech are available here as MP3s, although some liberty may been taken with the enemy comms (enemy destruction is good). At the low bit-rate used, some distortion is evident in the audio output, however, the files contain speech only and such noise should be acceptable. If not, inflight comms can be extracted from PRIV.TRE and RF.TRE using Game Audio Player (download). However, it is quite a task going through literally hundreds of VOC files and manually pasting them together into WAVs.
| Title | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 116 KiB | Self-explanatory. |
| Brilliance | 9 KiB | Oh dear, looks like the Privateer has been a naughty boy… |
| William Riordian | 71 KiB | The loud-mouthed fool whom Tayla ‘dumped’ in favour of the player. |
| Captain Seelig | 40 KiB | The poor guy Lynch is “disappointed” with. |
| Salman Kroiz Part 1 | 68 KiB | Hard to find someone with such good manners these days… |
| Salman Kroiz Part 2 | 43 KiB | …especially one with a fake English accent. |
| Felon | 17 KiB | Perhaps Regis is not so innocent after all… |
| Felon | 24 KiB | …as if anyone would take Lynch’s word for it. |
| Miggs | 48 KiB | Lynch’s intelligent henchman. |
| Hunter Toth | 31 KiB | His first name is clearly not his job description. |
| Unlawful Execution | 29 KiB | Retros on a murder spree… |
| Unlawful Execution | 31 KiB | …or so they wish. |
| Oxford Data Thief | 23 KiB | Male pirate cracking into Oxford’s libraries. |
| Oxford Data Thief | 20 KiB | Female pirate cracking into Oxford’s libraries. |
| Oxford Books | 12 KiB | Male bounty hunter looking for a finder’s fee on Oxford’s rare books. |
| Oxford Books | 8 KiB | Female bounty hunter looking for a finder’s fee on Oxford’s rare books. |
| Palan Blockade | 8 KiB | Male bounty hunter in the Palan blockade. |
| Palan Blockade | 6 KiB | Female bounty hunter in the Palan blockade. |
| Monkhouse Wanted | 50 KiB | Even the Kilrathi want to talk to Dr Lemuel Monkhouse. |
| Sticky Charts | 9 KiB | Male pirate giving a fair warning of what is out there. |
| Sticky Charts | 8 KiB | Female pirate giving a fair warning of what is out there. |
| Captain Garrovick | 30 KiB | Look what happens when you try to help. |
| Steltek Technology | 44 KiB | As if having a near invincible Steltek drone on your tail is not enough… |
| Steltek Technology | 55 KiB | …oh well, just means more cannon fodder. |
| Steltek Scout | 223 KiB | A close encounter of the third kind. |
| Admiral Reismann | 31 KiB | Since when do two destroyers constitute a “fleet”? |
| Title | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 187 KiB | Self-explanatory. |
| Oxford Transport | 28 KiB | Another merchant needing escort in Oxford. |
| Governor Menesch Part 1 | 91 KiB | So this is the guy just about everyone in Gemini wants dead? |
| Governor Menesch Part 2 | 39 KiB | Say hello to the cash rolling in… |
| Commodore Uhler Part 1 | 43 KiB | The Confederation is spread very thinly in the Gemini sector… |
| Kahl | 115 KiB | If he flew as fast as he spoke, he’d be dead already. |
| Commodore Uhler Part 2 | 35 KiB | …and cannot even handle a few Kilrathi going their way. |
| Drake Invitation | 65 KiB | An unusually polite pirate extends an invitation to visit Drake. |
| Mordecai Jones | 71 KiB | Strike at the head and the rest will fall to pieces… |
| Vengeance | 10 KiB | …as demonstrated by Jones’ would-be avenger. |
For a while, playing Privateer on a Windows 9x system was something many would-be privateers could only dream about, but thanks to Ross Ridge’s MyJEMM utility, this is now possible although it is not 100% reliable. It is only recommended if playing Privateer in pure MS-DOS mode is not an option, or only possible with severe drawbacks (eg no sound available). More recently, a popular option for Windows XP users is DOSBox (download). It attempts to emulate the DOS environment in modern operating systems, and has the capability of playing many classic DOS games.
Once the main game has been completed, this savegame editor and ship editor may be of some interest to players.
Many fan projects – and even commercial game releases – seek to recapture the gameplay and overall atmosphere of Privateer with its mix of space combat and entrepreneurism. Among the more popular of these projects is the Privateer Remake (download), built on the open-source Vega Strike engine – which in turn was inspired by the Wing Commander series. Privateer Remake strives to cover a broader range of the Wing Commander universe, while its Gemini Gold release (download) aims to remain true to the essence of the original Privateer game.
