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26
Dec
…Merry Christmas to all the WingNuts that celebrate… and equivalent wishes for happiness for everyone else, as well! In honor of the holiday, we've collected twelve different Christmas-related items (many from the ghosts of CIC updates past) for you to enjoy. We'd also love for you to share your Wing Commander-related holiday memories–whether you opened a Wing Commander III in your stocking in 1994 or you read all of False Colors while sitting shivering in a Christmas tree lot the day it came out (both me) we'd love to hear about it! We also know that not everyone has a family to spend the holiday… while it's only a small company, you are more than welcome to join our community Discord if you ever need company!
Day One: Xmas Marc's the Spot
One of my very favorite Wing Commander traditions was always the warm and hilarious Wing Commander Christmas renderings that Marc used to create and send for us to
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27
Dec
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Origin composer George Oldziey has one more update before the year comes to a close! His plans for next month remain on track to partner with expert audio engineer Bruce Botnick to mix the album. After that, the album should be pretty close!Greetings all. As we enter the holiday season I think very fondly of how blessed I am that you all supported me in the quest to create volume two of my music from Wing Commander. As I've mentioned before, all the orchestra and choir parts are recorded and awaiting mixing. As I write this I'm sending all the sessions to the legendary recording/mixing engineer Bruce Botnick so that he can gather the enormous amount of tracks involved and do his magic. I will be heading out to LA to mix the music with him during the second week of January. He will be mixing for stereo downloads, vinyl and Dolby Atmos. Once that is accomplished I will return home and begin the
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28
Dec
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is a big one: the first part of Das Boot, a movie that Chris Roberts… absolutely saw. You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST, but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
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28
Dec
…Greetings WingNuts,
It's safe to say that everyone in attendance loved Starship Troopers; we're probably all just about the right age for it. It holds up as both a giant fun action movie and a not-too-difficult to decode satire… you can't ask much more from a film! We talked about how the movie compares to other adaptations and mostly just had a great time.
As we discussed in the intro post, Starship Troopers was the 800 pound gorilla in the room when the Wing Commander movie was germinating. The fact that Sony greenlit a $100 million sci fi war blockbuster without any a-list stars created the financing environment that let Chris Roberts sell Wing Commander in the first place… and it meant that his more modest project would be compared to Verhnoeven's masterpiece every step of the way. And when Starship Troopers bombed at the box office, Wing Commander's investors got cold feet and the deal had to be
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29
Dec
Vinman caught a little mention over in a new PC Gamer article. The author spent 2024 deep diving the depths of retro game history and then came up with a list of the top ten winners that are most compelling today. Wing Commander comes up in the category of "First Person Thrills." Check out the full article here!
If skulking about under the stars doesn't sound appealing, how about looking out of a spaceship's cockpit while flying among them? Wing Commander somehow made combining epic action space battles with impressively sim-like flight control and damage modelling look easy. Then they added an incredibly reactive story that continues on whether I succeed or fail a mission. All this complexity, even though it was designed for hardware with barely double-digit CPU speeds and 1MB of RAM.
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31
Dec
Alan Baker has been working with the Tiger's Claw, and the results have been interesting! He's attempting to make the Claw fit in with the visual style of WC3/4. I love the colorful tones and textures of WC1/2, but this kind of works. I especially like those WC3/4 era turrets. He's also paired the carrier with Klavs' Scimitar and Hornet to make a nifty vertical phone wallpaper.
Playing around with a concept for the Tiger's Claw from the first Wing Commander game, aligning it closer to the aesthetic of WCIII/IV.
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31
Dec
…On Friday, the Wing Commander movie club watched the first two hours (exactly!) of Das Boot, taking us from occupied France right through a strikingly familiar depth charge scene. We noted a lot of elements Chris Roberts borrowed for Wing Commander (including the Captain) and we'll collect them all in a final after action report next week. But first, we need to finish the tour! You can join us on Discord on Friday for the screening and you're more than welcome to be part of the fun.
Das Boot is a 1981 film which follows the crew of a German U-boat fighting in the Atlantic in 1941. It is known for its realistic depiction of submarine life and for telling a story that isn't about heroes winning glory but ordinary men living through a terrible time. The film's success introduced director Wolfgang Petersen to the world; he would later go on to direct films like Outbreak and Air Force One.
Where can I find a
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01
Jan
It's been a hectic holiday for a lot of folks, so today we're re-upping two recent stories to make sure they hit your feed.
GOG's big annual winter sale end January 2. You've got just over a day or so to save 59% off the Wing Commander series. Each set is $2.45. Time to finish off the digital collection!
The CIC is also taking nominations for our annual Fan Project of the Year Awards. We're exploring two categories this year: a traditional 2024 contest and also accepting your "hall of fame" nominations for projects from the last 25+ years. Email nominations to news@wcnews.com! You can find past winners here.
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02
Jan
…Happy Wednesday, January 1st! How the heck did we know the date so accurately?! Well, it turns out that the days in 2025 match up to those in 1997 and 2673... which means that you can reuse the calendar included with The Kilrathi Saga this year! The Kilrathi Saga calendar is a wonderful manual produced by Origin as a 'feelie' for the game. It shows off concept art from across the trilogy and even includes lore dates from all over the timeline. A fair amount of Wing Commander continuity was introduced by this document, from the identity of the Rigakh cruiser to Colonel Blair's birthday! You can find January below and we've scanned the whole thing and you can download the entire calendar here (220 megabyte archival quality PDF. Compressed 9 meg PDF also available). Better enjoy now--you won't be able to do this again until 2031!
Why 2673? For one thing, it does correctly match up to 1997 (and 2025) so
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03
Jan
It's that time again! As the calendars flip over to another new year, our annual New Year's Poll asks what your outlook is. We have two major music albums on the near horizon, plenty of promising fan projects forthcoming, and are sure to have some big surprises along the way. It seems like 2025 is shaping up to be one of the biggest years in quite a while, but what do you think?
Our old poll ran in the wake of the CIC's 26th Birthday. As usual, it shows a very sizable portion of our audience dates back to the turn of the millennium, yet there's a pretty good size group that's just found us recently too!
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04
Jan
…This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is the continuation of last week: the second half of Das Boot! You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. We'll be starting at the two hour mark. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST, but feel free to drop by and hang any time! Anyone is welcome, even if you didn't catch last week's first part of the film.
The Story So Far...
The movie begins with Jürgen Prochnow's captain driving Warner, a war correspondent, to meet the submarine's crew who are celebrating the night before their next cruise in a French bordello. The sailors are drunk and chaos ensues after another U-boat captain gives a speech insulting Hitler. Rowdy men harass the French singer and fire
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06
Jan
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In early 1993, Origin Systems signed a brand deal with a major technology player, Intel Corporation. At the time, Intel's processors were the industry standard and they were particularly interested in expanding their marketing to appeal to the new furor for multimedia entertainment. The initial deal allowed Intel to use Wing Commander II and Strike Commander to promote their i486 chips. The February 12, 1993 issue of Point of Origin (Vol. 3, No. 32) summarizes the original agreement:
ORIGIN and Intel
Intel Corporation will showcase their 486 chips at the Software Publishing Association (SPA) conference in March and the Comdex trade show in May by running Strike Commander. Strike will be the only entertainment product used by Intel to show off the speed of their chips. ORIGIN has also granted permission for Intel to use some of the game play sequences and screen shots from Wing Commander II and Strike -
06
Jan
…Wing Commander II famously opens with now-Captain Blair being reassigned to an InSystem Security squadron at a base called Caernarvon Station. Caernarvon is an impressive space station but it's clear that Blair is now just a two-bit cop in a backwater system unlikely ever to encounter the Kilrathi. The story quickly expands beyond Caernarvon Station but its familiarity led a number of later stories to attempt to reference the location again… every time with some kind of error! In fact, it has been referred to by as many as four different names. We're going to look at the origins of the station and then each of these references to try and figure out exactly what's going on. It's a thrilling quasi-typographical space station adventure, today on the Combat Information Center!
Namesakes
The space station in Wing Commander II is named after Caernarfon Castle, the eventual form of a fortification established
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07
Jan
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The Wing Commander movie club has run both silent and deep through Das Boot! We were certainly impressed… with the film and with just how much of the film Chris Roberts managed to work into Wing Commander. Next up we're going to watch something a little more fun: as suggested by Vera, Friday's movie will be The Fifth Element! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
The Fifth Element is a 1997 science fiction film from French director Luc Besson. It tells the story of a futuristic taxi driver who inadvertently becomes the key to stopping an incredible weapon capable of destroying the Earth. That plot description is reductive, though: the film is celebrated for both its slick storytelling and its stunningly visualized world (with visuals inspired by the likes of Moebius and Mézières) that seemed like nothing we'd ever seen before at the time. Do you think it will hold up now that some
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08
Jan
We recently posted a scan of the 1997/2673 Kilrathi Saga calendar, a classic Wing Commander document that hasn't been available online. But wasn't there another Wing Commander calendar? There was! The fancy Premiere Edition of Wing Commander III came with a trilingual calendar that shows off high resolution stills from the game's FMV. It's not quite as cool as the Kilrathi Saga calendar because it doesn't have any original lore... but it sure is pretty! But we've scanned the whole thing anyway and you can get either the high resolution version here (298 megs) or a smaller reading copy here (12 megs). You can take your time, though: you can't use this one again until 2034!
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09
Jan
…Late last year we posted a guide to the weapons of Wing Commander Academy. One of the topics was the slight differences between the 'generic' Kilrathi capital ship design created for the show. Star*Soldier divided these similar ships into different sizes: the Kamar-class blockade-runner, the Dorkar-class transport, the Ralar-class destroyer and the Naukar-class carrier.
We decided it would be interesting to go through the season and see how many of the capital ships we could identify in-continuity. We learned that the model appears on the show a total of 18 times, although six of these are briefing holograms and one, a carrier, is a TrainSim opponent. The remaining 11 are one Kamar, two Ralar, two Dorkar, three Naukars… and two cruisers and a corvette?! That's right, in the process of trying to identify each ship's class (first from dialogue and failing that by looking at outlines, scripts and
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09
Jan
…Imperial agents have been charged with attempting to seize political influence deep in Federal territory following the Battle of Sol.
With the aftermath of the Thargoid Invasion still causing upheaval across populated space, there has been a marked effort by many factions to establish themselves in systems impacted by Titan Cocijo's assault in December.
Sofia Trevino wrote a summary for the Federal Times:
"In recent weeks there has been turmoil in Sol, as political, corporate and military interests come to terms with the impact of Titan Cocijo's arrival – not to mention the civilian cost, with billions of refugees still displaced in surrounding systems."
"But an unexpected element has emerged, with ports and outposts reporting a significant increase in positive Imperial sentiment. This has been tied to Princess Aisling Duval in particular, currently enjoying a good reputation among
