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Here's a really cool video of WC4 Remastered running at an impressive ultrawide 32:9 aspect ratio. We've known for a few years that the game would at least support 21:9, but this is a nice confirmation that the even wider 5120x1440 resolution will work. The example clip below might not scale up in the embedded version, so I'd recommend popping it out to a full YouTube screen for the entire effect. Also be sure it's running at at least 1440p so you can enjoy the game's beautiful graphics. If you haven't gotten a chance to give the updated WC4 Fan Remake for a spin yet, grab the demo here (900 meg exe).

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is probably the greatest example of the medium, with Hollywood budgets, real sets and an outstanding cast including Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and Tom Wilson; and unlike many other FMV titles, each benefits from outstanding direction; which

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Today we have several new pages from EmuMusicFan's slick retelling of the Hobbes interrogation scene in Freedom Flight. Now that Prince Thrakhath has ended the imminent threat, Lord Ralgha nar Hhallas turns his attention to dealing with Jahkai!

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AD found a neat Wing Commander 3 television spot that aired in Germany in May of 1995. It was dug up by magermunson. Things like this were still pretty rare to see on TV in the early to mid '90s, but WC3 was definitely one of the most profiled games around. They cover the scope and technology with a heavy emphasis on the full motion video. A common Mark Hamill interview is interspersed in the middle, but the brief conversation with Chris Roberts at the end may be new to us. You can turn captions and auto-translate on to get an English translation to play along the bottom. Enjoy this tiny time capsule!

Interviews and behind the scenes with Mark Hamill and Chris Roberts from this very rare german TV report on May 1995.Enjoy!

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A profile of Digital Anvil's swanky downtown office from... ugh... the March 2000 issue of PC Accelerator. Complete with full sized Kilrathi!

...ngl this double-page StarLancer ad is also fire.

You can see pics from our own March 1999 visit to the office here!

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Today we have a nice assortment of Spanish magazine scans from Maxi de Sokar. I frequently just post these as they are since they are often visually engaging and interesting on their own, but in this case I provided rough English translations so you can read the articles as well. The first few pages come from Micromania and are a profile of Origin, Richard Garriott and the development of Wing Commander 3. There's also an Armada review from Issue 78 of the magazine, plus a pretty striking WC3 ad. Finally, there's an Armada add from PCMania. Enjoy!

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Here's a fantastic gem from the February 1995 issue of PC Gamer in the UK. The cover is all about Wing Commander 3 with a stellar piece of Kilrathi art. We haven't been able to track down the big four page review inside, so if you have a copy of this buried away, let us know! This time capsule was surfaced by none other than the official PC Gamer Twitter itself with the caption, "It's time to bring back Wing Commander with Mark Hamill. We deserve it."

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The UK-based Centre for Computing History recently tweeted about this really cool collectible phone card made as a promotion for Wing Commander 2. I realized I actually have a couple of these laying around, but somehow we've never shared them in the news before! You can find their profile page on this item here. I really like their website and mission!

Just added to the collection: A promotional Wing Commander II Mercury telephone kiosk card!

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Card for use in a Mercury telephone kiosk, with Wing Commander II design.

Mercury Communications was a national UK telephone company formed in the early 1980s, and was an early competitor of BT. Mercury's payphone kiosks were in use in the UK from 1986-1995.

The card states on the back that Mercurycards are available in £2, £4, and £10 values, however the card itself is a £1 value, so was likely given away as a promotion.

A

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FrankyFiggs14 has posted a neat French throwback preview of Wing Commander on the Amiga. The original WC1 spent several years being ported to a variety of platforms, and this comes from the October 1992 issue of Tilt. Below LOAF notes how unfortunate it is that the Sivar features so prominently, since The Secret Missions were ultimate not made for the platform. The game still reached a huge number of fans and is fondly remembered my many Amiga Wingnuts! You can follow Franky's gaming adventures on Twitter and Twitch.

It's interesting that the earliest screenshots of Wing Commander's Amiga port show the Sivar dreadnaught... they never released Amiga versions of the mission disks!

Like the PC version the original Amiga release includes an option to start the Secret Missions campaign… but it never materialized (and the button is dropped for the CD32 port).

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Shot97 has uncovered a fantastic preview of early '90s Origin plans. It dates back to the April 1991 issue of The One in the UK. This puts it very early in the development of Wing Commander 2, and as such, a lot changes between this point and release. You can see right at the head of the article is the Confederation corvette design which actually the Sabre model! It's painted up in green capship colors prior to being deemed a fighter (a similar process occurred with the Crossbow). They also talk about a mid 1991 release for WC2 and 1992 for WC3, which were a ways off from that. Speaking of delays, Strike Commander is also heavily mentioned, but it's called Ground Commander at this point. There's also mention of ports for the Genesis are arcades, whew!

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The recent Heritage Auction of material from Planet Hollywood included several Wing Commander costumes! Which means there are some great high resolution photos to share. Here's Mark Hamill's flight suit from Wing Commander IV:

And here is Malcolm McDowell's Black Lance uniform from the same game! (Note that the rank insignia on the cuff is there incorrectly.)

Here are some photos of the event where these costumes were donated to the restaurant in 1996 just a few days before the game was released. They got some good press out of it!

On the other hand, I didn't even know Mark Hamill's Wing Commander Prophecy flight suit had been in Planet Hollywood's collection. Guess the same trick doesn't work twice! (Or three times, Planet Hollywood got a movie Rapier at one point too...)

There was also a great photo by of some loose rank insignias up close. Can you identify them?

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Here's another Spanish retro review from Maxi de Sokar. We've seen several of these articles recently, but this time OKPC really liked Wing Commander Armada! It earned a whopping 93% to beat out other top scorers like WC2 and Privateer each at 90%. The game got a four page spread littered with screenshots. They credit Armada's replayability, option to play as the Kilrathi and the multiplayer - including split screen mode. These are all things I love about Armada, but I don't often see reviews agree so enthusiastically. "Excitement will be served!"

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Panther has dug up an interesting Wing Commander 2 review from the October 1991 issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment. A curious element is that they title this "Revenge of the Kilrathi." This is just a mistake or stylistic rebranding. The game was publicly announced as Vengeance of the Kilrathi, so this isn't a case of early marketing change (like with ACE's August 1990 preview of Wing Leader). They give the game an "800" score, and I like all those character profiles!

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It's a new year, but we're turning back the clock today with a new batch of retro reviews found by Maxi de Sokar. The first is a wonderful five page spread in PC Review for Wing Commander 3. It starts off with a couple pages of "behind the scenes" info before launching into the actual review. Then we have a quick take on Super Wing Commander for the 3DO by Micromania. Finally, there's a six page spread in OKPC about Wing Commander 4. I love how much space was dedicated to these new releases at the time!

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We've had a number of non-English language vids in the news lately... and here's another one! But in the various translation methods aren't quite your style, this one has been helpfully translated in real time by native Russian speaker enilenis. Seeing WC on vintage television programs was always a rarity, and catching an international show was even harder, so we're really lucky that opportunities like this exist! This one comes from the Russian program "Hard Off." It covers Wing Commanders 1-3, but the focus is on the flashy FMV of the latter title. WC3 was a big mainstream crossover!

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Today we've got a tiny 1992 video review from the British television show GamesMaster. Non-print reviews are quite rare from this era since we were still a couple years before magazines starting including multimedia cover discs. Wing Commander 2 is one of my favorite games, so I was anxious to see what they had to say. And boy, they did not like it! Both reviewers say the game just has graphics going for it and award it a failing 59% score. I'm honestly pretty shocked at that assessment. The graphics were only minimally refined over WC1, but there were some wonderful advances in terms of storytelling, sound/speech and gameplay mechanics (torpedo bombing, turrets, tractor beams, jump points, etc). Ah well, check out this thirty year old clip below! Thanks to Oli for archiving this.

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Looking Glass Museum has posted a brief but nifty thirty year old video. Before E3 was a thing, the Consumer Electronics Shows was one of the primary venues to showcase your big video game. This was recorded by someone at the Summer 1992 CES. It features some of the upcoming games for the Sega CD system on a cool nine-television video wall. We get lots of flickering WING COMMANDERS on screen interspersed with some nice Hornet on Dralthi action. What a show that must have been!

LOAF: Interesting video clip from CES in 1992 showing Sega’s Sega CD display look at! Obviously I want a nine TV bank that flashes WING COMMANDER but the unreleased Ultima Underworld port is probably more interesting!

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This is the last in a series of interesting video features published in the mid '90s by the CD-ROM "magazine" Interactive Entertainment. Their Wing Commander 4 review appeared in issue 23. The CD-ROM interface displayed screenshots from the game and overlaid them with low resolution videos. That experience has been recreated here rather than displaying the videos full screen. Again, while it looks pretty dated today, the setup was really cool for the time. The vast majority of internet access out there was still dialup, so this was the only practical way to experience something like this!

Text article that accompanied the video review on the CD:

The Commander Returns to Battle

A rogue band of pilots from the border worlds descends upon an innocent civilian transport and its escorts and destroy them by unleashing a mysterious device. Cut to our hero, Christopher Blair, once again played by the

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LazyGameReviews posted this image of a teaser for Wolfenstein 3D. It's from the February 1992 digital Apogee catalog advertising the pending launch of the iconic first person shooter. It's a cool little artifact unto itself, but wow, check out that smack talk (plus spelling mistakes) in the footnote!

This is very first ever "texture-mapped" three dimensional (3D) game with REAL-TIME scrolling and panning! Most 3D games use the polygon fill method, such as the flight simulators available commercially. Wolfenstein 3D uses a 3D technology that has NEVER been seen commercially. (The Wing Commander games tried to fake tuxture-mapped 3D graphics, but the results didn't work very well.)

LOAF observes, "Odd, the only Wing Commander games at the time used the exact same solution as Wolfenstein: a 3D environment with 2D sprites for enemies that scale and rotate!" Whatever the underlying tech was, Wolf 3D

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The crowdfunding campaign for the Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score is in full swing, and the project has now passed 25% of its goal with more than $3800 pledged so far. To get even more fans to join in on the excitement, if a few more people add to the total this weekend and get us over $5000, LOAF will do a live Wing Commander Movie commentary.

The Wing Commander vinyl record campaign is at 25%! To sweeten the pot in absolutely no way, I’ll do a Twitter Space watch-along of the movie if we get to $5k this weekend.

The $75 Deluxe Edition seems to be the most popular so far, but a standard LP is just $35! Learn more about the project here.

Supercade's exclusive new LP editions of the Wing Commander Orchestral Recording Project will mark the first time George Oldziey's orchestral score is available on vinyl. Working with a celebrated independent record press, we'll be sure these records

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Some fifty Wingnuts have now pledged towards the Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score, and that's brought the total up past $5300. There's still a few weeks left to get in on this special collectible, but if you're planning to jump in, there's no time like the present! The album takes advantage of George Oldziey's Wing Commander 3/4/Prophecy music that was rerecorded by a live orchestra several years ago. You can watch a short documentary on the making of this great WC music below. And contribute to the crowdfunding campaign to make this new album happen here!

Supercade Press is offering three new editions of the soundtrack:

• Deluxe Edition Gatefold with 180g Starfield Splatter Vinyl
• Special Edition with 180g Marbled Bi-color Vinyl (new colors may be issued)
• Standard Edition with 180g Classic Black Vinyl