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The Gathering isn't a great movie... or even a good one. But it's FULL of heart and in spite of its meandering, confused mystery plot you can see the bones that will be used to create a pretty distinct television show down the line. It's also extremely easy to see why Chris Roberts and the Wing Commander III team were so impressed: it has exactly the same kind of 'we can do it ourselves without the money!' attitude that was behind their project. Babylon 5 will never look as flawless and magical as Star Trek, but it does constantly remind you that there are people with heart doing a lot with very little to make it work.

Here's the biggest Wing Commander connection at this point in the show, the famous establishing shot of the Babylon 5 space station and how it compares to 'Babylon 6' in Wing Commander III!

None of the shared actors we mentioned in the announcement post appeared in The Gathering... but I

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Heaven's Gate (1980) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 6 PM PST/9 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time! Please note that the movie is starting one hour earlier than usual to accommodate its run time.

And don't forget our sixth Wing Commander Cartoon party is early tomorrow!

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Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, passed away earlier this week. Mr. Adams had become quite a crank over the years and precious few people are mourning his passing... but we can take the occasion to mourn our youth! No matter how we might want to deny it today, Dilbert was a massive part of the pop culture of the early 1990s that produced Wing Commander. And the comic inspired the development of the series several times!

Dilbert began in 1989 and reached the height of its popularity in the early 1990s. The strip lampooned white collar office work and was celebrated by tortured engineers and creatives around the world for capturing exactly how they felt about their pointy haired bosses. Fridges, cubicles and offices everywhere sported favorite Dilbert strips... and Origin Systems was not immune. Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander III describes art director Chris

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A few weeks ago, we mentioned wanting to post about the history of the 'green Salthi'. Well, that just made me realize that there were a LOT of interesting appearances of Wing Commander I's slightest fighter across the Wing Commander canon… and it would be fun to gather them all in one place! So here's a brief history of the Salthi, from its original appearance in 1990 all the way to novels, cutscenes, spinoffs and movies! Did you know the little ship was so versatile?

The Original (1990)

The initial Salthi light fighter was designed by Origin Systems artist Glen Johnson and modeled by Mary Bellis and Steve Spear. It made its first appearance in the original Wing Commander rolling demo shown at CES that summer before serving throughout the original Wing Commander and both expansions. It's perhaps best remembered for being the fighter flown by Kilrathi ace Bhurak Starkiller (Bhurak nar Caxki).

It's not

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Wing Commander Discord regular Justice recently acquired a 3D printer and over the past two weeks they've been sharing their progress putting together a fleet of Wing Commander ships for tabletop gaming! I've enjoyed following the little updates so much that I thought it would be good to post them in an update for everyone to see. Justice says "I intend to keep doing more ships, though I'll probably slow down a bit for now. Except for Voidfighters, the games I want to try with these are more capital ship oriented anyway, and for Voidfighters ideally I'd scale up the fighters and print them bigger." They are using 3D models available from Tyrel Lohr.

Came out not too bad considering how tiny these bits are, and considering that I still haven't installed a 0.2 nozzle. Gotta be more careful to not touch the teeny tiny fins on the Hornet. Or use a sturdier material. I only have sturdier filament in colors

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No one wants it to be 2026 but the fact of the matter is that it is... and we're halfway through January! Which at least means we can get together for another Saturday morning cartoon marathon. Which, once again, will include no cartoons. We're watching two movies with big Wing Commander references in them, both of which seem to indicate that the characters would rather be playing Wing Commander. And the difference is the point here, we're going to be going from a poorly preserved 1990s Lifetime movie to a pixel perfect HD sci fi story about space Nazis. No, not Wing Commander IV. We're watching:

Children of the Sun (1994): The lineup starts up with a 1994 made-for-TV 'Lifetime' movie that's about the trials and tribulations of children born allergic to the sun. We haven't watched the full movie before but reviews online are almost exclusively from people who remember being absolutely terrified of it

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It's time to bite the bullet and watch the longest and most controversial movie in our queue: Heaven's Gate (1980), Michael Cimino's deeply troubled, sprawling western. At the time of release, Heaven's Gate's massive budget, troubled production and hasty after-release recut earned it the title of the worst movie ever made… but today opinions differ greatly, with many critics now seeing it as a true masterpiece. We will be watching the commonly available Director's Cut, which is extremely similar to the original version of the film that was withdrawn from theaters. Because Heaven's Gate is a very long movie, 218 minutes, we will be starting an hour early at 9 PM Eastern this week. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Most Wing Commander fans will see the Heaven's Gate reference straight off: it's the name of Wing Commander II's fifth series' star system and the infamous captured

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We've been working on new, more comprehensive guide pages for WIng Commander Prophecy as part of the great WCPedia project. To try and better understand how missions work, I decided to try and learn more about how the game's mission data works… and once I'd done that, I made some pretty shocking discoveries: Wing Commander Prophecy is full of undocumented nav points with hidden enemy ships!

Over the next few weeks, we're going to premiere the new guide pages one series at a time alongside a news post that points out some of the interesting discoveries. This first update covers the game's first series, the H'rekkah missions. You will play only four missions in H'rekkah but there are a total of six; Wing Commander Prophecy's mission tree is actually very complex!

You can find the individual pages for the first series missions below. Each guide now contains a complete object index, links to the relevant

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Project Freelancer The Nomad Legacy have published version 1.1 with a lot of useful changes for new players (not mandatory for old players)

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WingNuts, are you curious about how the other half lives? Well, for the past two years a YouTuber named Majuular has been putting together spectacularly detailed histories and playthroughs of the entire Ultima series, starting with Akalabeth and recently reaching 1993's Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds. These videos are well researched, well produced and thoroughly entertaining… even though each one is hours long! You can find the complete playlist here. Here are a few options that might be of special interest to Wing Commander fans... though it's really worth starting from the beginning as the story of Ultima is significantly the story of Origin Systems itself!

Ultima VII: The Black Gate includes what is probably the most famous Wing Commander crossover, a side quest which includes an appearance by Prince Thrakhath's Bloodfang starfighter trapped in a cornfield!

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian

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Class of Beverly Hills certainly was not high art but we had a great time revisiting 1990. The Beverly Hills 90210 pilot aired roughly two weeks after Wing Commander shipped and it had a massive cultural impact. Its embrace of California culture helped define America around the world to a generation of kids that wanted to be Brandon or Brenda. It was also shockingly tame compared to anything on television today; crazy to think that this was once the razor's edge of the generation gap!

The Wing Commander connection, "Brain 90210" on the Super Wing Commander trainsim board, remains elusive. But here it is compared to the series' titles!

... so let's look at the OTHER TrainSim pilot names! They change from port to port. We'll try to identify which developer each represents where known!

Wing Commander (Original)

• Dibber - Chris Roberts
• Gryphon
• Potshot
• Seggallion
• Sutek - Paul Isaacs
• Zoro - Ken Demarest III

Wing

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is The Gathering (1993), the pilot film that kicked off Babylon 5, and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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Here's a pretty insignificant but also interesting little behind-the-screens detail I only just noticed: the 1993 Origin catalog lists the yet-to-be-released second Wing Commander novel as "Intruder/End Run". It looks like the Christopher Stasheff novella that kicks off the book was at one point named Intruder instead of Milk Run! The name certainly fits the story just as well. The idea behind End Run was that Stasheff's story would set up the scenario and Dr. Forstchen's novel would bring in Bear and company to explore that setup. We're betting that the title was changed late in the process to better connect the two stories which do seem to end up further apart than the original idea just on account of their very different writing styles.

Wing Commander: Intruder/End Run (April) $4.99
by Christopher Stasheff and Bill Forstchen
What are the Kilrathi protecting on the remote world of Vukar Tag? Mission

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The Distant Worlds working group has issued a call for mined and manufactured materials to support the construction of a new deep-space facility, intended to aid future exploration of remote galactic regions far beyond established survey routes.
Hermine Delarue, Executive Operative for Deep Space Surveys, stated:
"DSS has longstanding experience in supporting large-scale exploration efforts, most notably the construction of Explorers' Anchorage during the Distant Worlds II initiative in 3305."
"This new project focuses on preparing a remote site for long-range scientific operations. We aim to establish essential infrastructure for survey crews venturing into seldom-charted regions. Independent pilots are invited to help lay the foundations for the next era of deep-space discovery."
Timotheus Haddard, quartermaster for an affiliated Distant Worlds support carrier, added:
"Initial requirements

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It's time to mark your calendars! The fact that it's now 2026 means that we will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of quite a few Wing Commander releases. 1996 saw the initial release of three major projects, Wing Commander IV, Kilrathi Saga and Privateer 2... along with lots of related media! It was also the year that gifted us all thirteen episodes of Wing Commander Academy. Who wants to watch them in real time starting in September?!

February 12, 1996- Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (MS-DOS) Wing Commander CTCG Promo #2: Admiral Tolwyn Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom

March 27, 1996- Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (PlayStation)

May 30, 1996- Wing Commander IV Demo (Macintosh) - download it here

June 4, 1996- Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (MS-DOS DVD)

June 8, 1996- Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (Macintosh)

Septeber 21, 1996- Wing

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Space Cadet Rewind, the able YouTuber that has done in-depth reviews of several Wing Commander games, is back with a video covering Wing Commander's lesser known cousin: StarLancer! And unlike the Digital Antiquarian, they actually did proper research into Digital Anvil and the making of the game. It's well worth a watch.

And if this inflicts you with a dreaded case of StarLancer fever, be sure to check out our article about how the game reuses assets from the Wing Commander movie in a surprising number of places!

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The Wing Commander movie club had a pretty good time with the Beverly Hills 90210 pilot; it wasn't high art but it was a lot of fun... and gave us a good picture of the pop culture world Wing Commander was born into. This week, we're finishing our TV miniseries by looking at a second pilot that's a little more relevant to Wing Commander's world: The Gathering (1993). It's the telemovie that kicked off the Babylon 5 franchise! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Babylon 5 was midway through its first season when Wing Commander III's development was in high gear and we're confident the team included some fans. In fact, the Blackmane base model was a nod to Babylon 5's titular station. It's even stored as "BABYLON6" in the game's files!

The 3DO version even references this in the game: the name "STATION 6" is clearly visible on one of its textures!

And here's Art director Chris Douglas

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There's some pretty exciting news from Remi Leonard's libRealSpace project, an attempt to recreate the RealSpace engine originally built for Strike Commander as an open source platform. They've released a new build of Strike Commander with VR support just in time for 2026! Check out the video below which seems just about perfect.

RealSpace was created for Strike Commander and the game's "virtual cockpit" mode actually lends itself to VR very easily. Pacific Strike and Wings of Glory also had this feature and WoG actually supported 1996-vintage headsets like the VFX-1! But even more exciting, RealSpace was the engine for Wing Commander Armada, III and IV so we can dream about this somehow being adapted to our favorite series. You can download the build here.

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Condé Nast's longtime tech news website Ars Technica has published an article on, of all things, Wing Commander Privateer! It's a short--and to our ears accurate--look back at the game and how it managed to pull of something very special that still hasn't quite been repeated in the genre. Don't expect a detailed history or any shocking news (they're ultimately just trying to collect GOG affiliate sales) but it's nice to see the game celebrated... and thanks the prominence of the outlet there's already been a lot of chatter about Privateer on social media!

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We had some anime superfans in the audience for Arcadia of My Youth but we also had a lot of people who had never seen any anime at all ever. The former knew what to expect and I think everyone else was surprised. From the opening Goethe quote it was was clear this was going to be a serious space opera and not frivolous sex and violence. Just what Wing Commander fans want!

Here's Captain Harlock's distinctive skull logo as seen very, very briefly on Wing Commander Academy!

And here's a great example of how Tim Eldred's Wing Commander Academy storyboards were often inspired by shots from classic anime:

Sully is a young cat so his life is still pretty much Arcadia 24/7.

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