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Mike Winterbauer

's Wing Commander Art Portfolio

Kickstarter

has officially launched! Mr. Winterbauer was the artist that painted the famous variant of the WC1 art that was used for the Super Nintendo box cover and various promotional materials. I spent a ton of time playing the SNES edition of WC1 during the early '90s, so this is very exciting to me! The campaign seeks to publish a book that catalogues the process that led to the creation of these items. For various supporter levels, there are some super cool rewards including art cards, magnets, canvas prints and even a metal portrait. Check out the details

here

.

This Kickstarter is all about celebrating Wing Commander and it's cool fans! In 1992, I said, "I can't believe I get to paint Wing Commander"

I have put together this campaign to get Wing Commander fans a super cool collectible signed art book and awesome signed print rewards. This is

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The LoveRetroBTW streamer is hosting a morning show this weekend with Wing Commander sound designer Marc Schaefgen. He worked on most all the WC games from WC1 through Privateer, plus some Ultimas, Strike Commander and more. It'll be part of their Cafe, BTW podcast at 8 AM Pacific time on May 8 on Twitch. Getting up early on a Saturday morning to talk Wing Commander sounds like fun to us! Check it out here.

Tomorrow on 👉CafeBTW "A Morning Coffee Gaming Podcast"☕️

Guest Host: Marc Schaefgen sound designer from Wing Commander I & II🔊

Main Topic: Sound Design in #VideoGames

Channel: https://t.co/2rjua4naml#podcast #gaming #sound pic.twitter.com/XdZaZsIROm

— Andy formerly @ProducerBTW (@LoveRetroBTW) May 7, 2021

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ZOmegaZ has been steadily shipping out batches of challenge coins over the last few weeks, and most people who pledged in his recent Kickstarter should have received theirs. Ours came this past week as well, and they're very snazzy! The pictures don't quite do the material justice. All of the gold outline is very glittery and the colors pop as well. Not bad at all - we'd love to see another Wing Commander design!

Everyone who provided me with shipping information, your coins are now on the way! I'll give everyone else a few weeks, and in the meantime I'll be working on the next round of coin designs.

LOAF: The challenge coins ZOmegaZ’s Kickstarter are here! They turned out pretty neat and now I’ll never have to pay Shotglass for another drink (or ice cream sundae in the SNES version). Yes I also got a Frasier.

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Dardael

has put together a neat live action interpretation of Enyo 1 from the original Wing Commander. It starts with the run from the briefing room, engages the Kilrathi in space and then successfully heads home to the Claw. He employed a couple clever video editing techniques to blend a small amount of green screen footage with cockpit action. The language is Italian, but most Wing Commander fans are familiar enough with what's going on here to infer the meaning. This style of Wing Commander fan tribute has a lot of potential - it'd be great to see more like this, including new missions/stories!

First mission reimagined with the help of Blender and Da Vinci Resolve

You can also find Dardael's extensive Italian WC retrospective

here

.

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Alek Specner has kicked off an attempt to create a Wing Commander conversion for the Traveller role playing game. It's in Spanish, but the test cards should still look pretty neat no matter what language you speak. I'm sure it's a lot of work to get everything balanced and coherent, but tabletop "mods" like this always strike me as pretty fun and doable projects. We'd love to see more!

Nostalgia attacked me and I got entangled in the construction of a game of #juegoderol #Traveller on the setting of the great pioneer of space simulation. #Hornet , #Scimitar , #Raptor , #Rapier ... Do they sound familiar to you? The call of duty enrolls us in #WingCommander .

The game of #Traveller in the universe of #WingCommander is taking shape. The Travelers will be members of the Navy of the Terran Confederation and in several scenarios of the plot they will have the opportunity to pilot two of the emblematic

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We're got more EA news for Wing Commander fans. Last month we reported that the Origin Access service was being rebranded as EA Play. At the time, the Origin name was to be retained as the virtual storefront for EA games. That has since changed, and the company has announced that it will be renamed the EA Desktop App going forward. For the time being, Origin still stands, but the EA Desktop App is now in beta testing and will eventually become the primary portal. As you can imagine, this has kicked off a round of "EA Kills Origin" headlines that gives us mild flashbacks to 2004. Ever-optimistic fans have wondered aloud if this could be a move intended to free up the name for a reboot of Origin Systems, but this is obviously unlikely. However, on a much more positive note, Microsoft and EA have jointly confirmed that subscribers to the popular Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service will soon be getting

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Having a grand time tonight flipping through Wing Commander I & II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide. This book is so cool. It’s written as an in-universe memoir with the main character (here named Carl LaFong) at age 73 looking back on his training and military career. There’s a neat meta layer too, he’s writing this memoir because he has just served as the technical advisor for 28th Century ‘holovid’ versions of Wing Commander I and II made by “Tristan Roberts”.

This kind of guide written as a novel wasn’t uncommon at the time. X-Wing and TIE Fighter had great ones, as did a bunch of the Sierra adventure game series.

Whoever owns the rights to these in 2023 should serve them up as ebooks; I bet there’s a mint to be made from retro gamers and general nostalgia fans. Despite being written by an Origin marketing executive the prose is wonderful. It captures the more limitless 1991 version of the IP

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It's not often you spot a Wing Commander game in the back of a television show or movie, but on occasion it does happen. Xyzzy Sqrl caught a fun one in an episode of Gridman, The Hyper Agent. It's from episode 17, "The Lonely Hacker." Nice catch!

As this was a Japanese show, what we're looking at is actually the DOS/V edition. As luck would have it, Christian Klein just added a brand new sealed copy to his collection a few weeks back. I love the plastic boxes that some of the Japanese variants come in.

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We most recently saw

Adm_Maverick

work on a large upscaled

Tallahassee cruiser

, but now he's gone in the opposite direction. His latest creations are a pair of tabletop gaming miniatures. They look very crisp and detailed, so it's hard to believe these are just cardboard layers with ship art printed on them. It's pretty amazing what people can do - even without a 3D printer!

I'm slowly getting back into my various projects. One thing I have done is built several game piece mock ups so I can at least do some play testing and development. They're fairly simple builds, just strategically shaped layers of cardboard glued together.

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Prolific model maker Klavs doesn't just build Wing Commander models. He's also well known for his military aviation and space creations. We're not sure if the Ghost of Kyiv is real, but the concept has gone viral this week. Their MiG-29 has become an inspiration to Ukraine's defenders. Klavs has put together this design as a tribute. He's also donating profits from his web store relief efforts in the region. Great job to everyone doing their part!

Here at Hangar B we usually try to stay away from modern political discourse and let the airplanes and historical documents speak for themselves. Recent tragic and horrific events in Ukraine, have moved us off the sidelines.

Inspired by the story of "The Ghost of Kyiv," we present this image without watermarks in the hope that it will be shared freely in order to bring some small comfort, and perhaps inspiration to the people of that embattled nation in

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LeHah reports that his Roku is now advertising the Wing Commander Movie as a $2.99 Redbox rental. This is an interesting development as new deals appeared frozen after 2016 as the rights reverted from Fox to Chris Roberts. Hard copies of the film went out of print and it got relatively harder to find. Hopefully this means that the wheels of commerce are starting to thaw and we'll see Wing Commander start to pop up in more places again soon!

Roku has informed me the WC movie is now available on Redbox

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Switching gears today, LOAF found a Tumblrer named NMA Nekro who specializes in fan art of Matthew Lillard. That means we get to see their glorious take on Todd "Maniac" Marshall. It's pretty amazing that people are still making content like this after 25 years. The Buzz Lightyear-style action figure is also a nice touch. As a point of comparison, the actual action figure features Maniac in his shipboard uniform and not a flight suit!

How you doing? Allow me to introduce myself. Lieutenant Todd Marshall!

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80s Baby recently posted their review of the Wing Commander movie in honor of the film's 20th birthday. Back in 1999, the author was fortunate enough to stumble on a double feature of Never Been Kissed and Wing Commander bundled together. She recounts her review as a memory of the events all those years ago. The recollections meander about as much as the reviewer did when the NBK credits rolled, but it's honestly not the worst WC Movie review I've ever read. At least there's no nerd complaining about sound in space! Check out the full article here.

Ah, memories. They can be hazy and hard to trust, but some of them — some of the lucky ones — stay trapped in your brain as crystal clear as the day the experience happened right before your eyes.

In 1999, I was living it up in one of the best cinematic years of my generation. I feel like I was at the movie theater every weekend that year, with extra

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ConMan1226 is creating a series of movie reviews called "From Pixels to Pictures," and now he's reached Wing Commander. He was unfamiliar with the series beforehand, so he played through the first WC game and based his comparisons on that, which gives this kind of an interesting point of view. The cast generally gets decent marks, and he says this is despite the lead actor not trying very hard. The author would have preferred more of the game's side characters to play a larger role and notes the death of Rosie as a high point of the story. Set design and spaceflight get quite a few compliments as well. He even though the Pilgrims worked, although they were probably too complicated. Based on some of his analysis of the contemporary reviews at the time, his final verdict is that it didn't get a fair shake and suffered in the wake of a general video game-based movie stigma at the time. Watch the

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Little discovery: the firefighting truck seen fleetingly in the Wing Commander movie is a rented Saracen tank. Now I have an excuse to own a tank.

More of the truck from AD!

AD: Don't forget to ask for the spray foam kit when you order yours! Off-camera, this vehicle is shoring up the breached bulkhead. It was shot at least twice with multi-cam setups to only show us the tires.

And its cousin, the fuel truck:

AD: I think this also settles that they used the same truck as the fuel truck in the movie, but dressed it differently with extra panels, wheel covers, and more tanks. You can spot it very briefly and a handful of flight deck scenes. You get a decent look at the back of it in an unused angle of Maniac's reckless landing, which apparently almost crashed into the fuel truck.

Concept art from the movie's set folks! You can see it's supposed to be an unmanned repair truck that sprays self-sealing goo

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Lars Ivar Igesund tipped us off about a neat feature shown at NDC Oslo. It includes a brief segment on how Wing Commander leveraged its audio design in the "A Brief History of Computer Music" panel. It's an interesting topic overall, and Wing Commander fits right in! Jump to 29:38 below if you'd like to skip straight to the WC chapter.

Computer programmed music has come a long way since the CSIR Mark 1 played a scratchy Colonel Bogie back in the early 1950s.In this talk we'll go on a journey through the history of music made with code. We'll meet the pioneers who invented computer music, visit classic video game soundtracks, learn how computer musicians made big sounds with tiny tech, how algorithms create never-ending soundtracks and the huge impact computer music has had on popular culture. Expect lots of nostalgia, vintage code on vintage computers and a musical experience of epic proportions.

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Artist Mike Winterbauer's has an update on his Wing Commander

Art Portfolio

project. Most of the rewards have started shipping. If you haven't received your items yet, you might want to check your Kickstarter message inbox for an update. The CIC Staff has received some of our items, and they're just gorgeous! We'll have more on the contents in the future. Here's a few more shots of the items preparing to ship:

Happy Holidays Cool Wing Commander Fans! Let us know how you like your rewards!

Thank you for bringing this awesome project to life! I am enjoying packing and shipping the beautiful rewards. Most rewards are shipped. I have some international books and metal prints left to ship and I plan on finishing shipping before Christmas.

Thank you again for your wonderful support.

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Earlier in the summer, we reported on a WC1 retrospective review that was especially comprehensive. At the time, we noted that it was well researched, covered a vast range of topics and was surprisingly entertaining for a lengthy two hour episode. My favorite thing was how earnest the author was about helping new audiences discover Wing Commander. And many people agreed! It's since gone out to rack up 115,000 views. It's been so successful that others have taken notice. In this new clip, vidIQ dissects what made it so popular, which is an interesting meta analysis. I think both creators underestimate how many Wing Commander fans are out there eager for more content! I've relinked the original vid below as well if you missed it in June.

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We now know why the Wing Commander series was left out of GOG's big annual winter sale... because it was being saved for the Classic Winter Sale! A whole host of games from a similar era are now on sale, especially from Origin and EA. You can complete your digital collection for less than $12 as the series is now 75% off.

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Dardael

has created another YouTube video, and this one is highlights a number of similarities between Wing Commander and the classic Battlestar Galactica. This isn't necessarily to say that WC copied BSG - rather, WC plays on a lot of classic themes from Star Wars, anime, famous sci-fi novels and more. A few noteworthy ones here include the look of the initial intro logo, the fighter launch sequence and even Dralthi/Cylon Raider similarity. It's a fun comparison to see them side by side like this!

Comparative video between the famous 1978 series and the Origin Systems Space Game from 1990

In 2007, Auran Games and Sierra published a

Battlestar Galactica game

for Xbox Live Arcade, and numerous

reviews

noted how close it was to Wing Commander Arena.