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Do you remember Wing Commander Armada's Gauntlet mode? We do! It was essentially a 'Wing Commander lite' included with Armada that let you (and optionally a second player) battle through one of two fifteen mission campaigns. Instead of cutscenes or dialogue, the story is presented as text-based mission briefings aboard the TCS Lexington or the KIS Shiraak… but it's still packed with lore and there are some pretty interesting engagements that most players never had a chance to explore! Here are two favorites: a Kilrathi mission where you fight a renegade Admiral and a Confederation mission where you escort home a pair of new bombers in an Arrow:

… but it remains mostly unknown because it's very, very hard. The big Armada patch added a password system so players could jump to any mission but it takes dedicated and extreme patience to beat the Gauntlet itself. So we've made things easier by creating

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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 inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Monte Carlo or Bust! (1969) which, according to Chris Roberts, inspired the climactic battle at the end of the Wing Commander movie. 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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After Action Report: Battlestar Galactica

Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club has returned from the Twelve Colonies and we're here to report that Battlestar Galactica remains fairly impressive! It can't hold up to Star Wars in terms of narrative or world building but boy do those special effects come close. It's obvious that it's a TV pilot turned into a movie but everything is still pretty satisfying… although we probably spend a little bit too much time on the casino planet.

And Battlestar Galactica's reputation as a major source of inspiration for the early Wing Commander games is well deserved. From Ferrets and Dralthi to Hunter and the Tiger's Claw, it's all in there to some degree or another. We'll start with the takeoff scene that Denis Loubet has noted as an inspiration for the one in the original Wing Commander. We've got both the red-tinted 'closing the cockpit' scene and a launch

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The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is one of the darkest current events in a time that offers no shortage of such things. Escaping into fiction, however, we will find that Wing Commander's lore offers us some good news: the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv still exists in the 27th Century… at least until 2668! Today we're taking a quick look at the surprising numbers of times Wing Commander references the city. Kyiv was founded over 1,500 years ago and today is one of the largest cities in Europe. Since 1991 it has been the capital of an independent Ukraine. Note that the modern spelling of the city name, Kyiv, has only become standard in English in the past five years. When Wing Commander was being developed, the Soviet-era "Kiev" was still the common spelling. Our editorial standard is to use the current spelling for anything newly written and to retain the old one only for quotations.

Kyiv was first mentioned

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Game Bytes was one of the very first electronic gaming magazines. It was created by Ross Erickson and distributed as an executable through FTP sites, bulletin boards and services like Compuserv. Looking back, it's a particularly raw time capsule of the game industry at the time, an era before professional public relations had quite taken over. And lucky for us, Mr. Erickson conducted a thorough interview with a very young Chris Roberts in 1992. This one is well worth the time for anyone interested in the history of making Wing Commander. It brings you right back to a more romantic era of game making and it's full of fascinating details about the early Wing Commanders... from the origin of the Kilrathi to the nuts and bolts of how the games were programmed to a wild (but still recognizable) plan for Wing Commander III!

An interview with Chris Roberts (6/16/92), Author of the Wing Commander series of PC

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The Wing Commander movie club hit the finish line with Monte Carlo or Bust!, although the Wing Commander connection remains pretty broad! More on that Friday when we'll be watching a completely different sort of movie: Highlander (1986). Highlander is a fantasy adventure film that has attained cult classic status and spawned a long-running IP with sequels, TV shows and other media. It tells the story of nigh immortal Scottish warriors battling across the ages–so you can expect plenty of swords and brogues! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

What's the Wing Commander connection? In Starlog's Wing Commander movie magazine, Chris Roberts talks about how Sean Connery's character in Highlander was the inspiration for Paladin's character in the original game. Which should give us a great chance to do the one thing everyone secretly desires: talk about Paladin.

When I was originally doing

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Last night, AD picked up an old magazine and put down an unseen Wing Commander ship design! What he found was a 1999 advertisement for a company called BOXX Technologies which produces high spec computers for the film industry. The premise of the ad is that their computers are the biggest leap for visual effects since they started in 1903 with Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune. And their modern example is about how Chris Roberts used their RenderBOXX rendering systems for Wing Commander:

Here's proof: Digital Anvil credits RenderBOXX with saving $2 million on Wing Commander production costs, helping the film land on time and under budget!

That would be an interesting factoid in its own right, but the visuals used to represent this are even more interesting! They show a collection of high tech starfighters blasting out of film frames displaying frames from Le Voyage dans la Lune: literally

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Here's a closer look at Super Wing Commander's awesome cross-series Easter egg. If you leave the game idle in the Tiger's Claw's lounge for enough time it will occasionally trigger an animated figure of Ultima's Avatar who flies by outside the ship. Here's a shot of the game and the sprite sheet used for the Avatar.

The Avatar's 3D animation is from the ending cutscene to Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle. There we see them flying through space to restore the balance between Order and Chaos. Then he is grabbed by an enorous red hand. This is the setup for the next game in the series which begins with the hand flinging him to the world of Pagan.

Here's a recording of the entire endgame:

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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 inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Highlander (1986) which, according to Chris Roberts, inspired the the original character of Paladin in Wing Commander I. 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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Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club made it to Monte Carlo! And what a strange movie we saw. Monte Carlo or Bust! (aka Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies) is lush and elaborate, carefully plotted and edited… but to our modern audience, the humor was completely inscrutable. It was clear many things were supposed to be jokes (like how action scenes might speed up suddenly) but it all came off as alien. Such is likely the fate of all comedy, which adheres closely to its times… but it was a little funny (pun not intended) to see how absolutely that was the case here.

And this is an extremely short report because there's not much to say about the Wing Commander connection! Chris Roberts said in his original pitch that the Wing Commander movie's climax was "literally Monte Carlo or Bust!" and it seems that all that really means is that there's an elaborate, multi-tiered race moving

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There's a great new YouTube video making the rounds this week! Space Cadet Rewind is a channel dedicated to a careful study of classic space sims like Wing Commander and X-Wing and they've now tackled the original Wing Commander Privateer! The review (such as it is!) is very thoughtful and fair and it's very interesting to see how this classic game plays to someone with the benefit of knowing the next few decades of design evolution! The full thing is three hours but it sure doesn't feel that way.

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GOG is having a Classic Promo this week to promote the classics! The Wing Commander series is marked down 60%, so each game package is only $2.39. Pick them up below!

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Be sure to check everywhere for eggs today!

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If there's one thing we learned from Highlander it's that there can be only one. No, we actually learned the origin of Paladin's ship's name! More on that in the after action report. But next week's movie is even more of a crowd pleaser: Aliens (1986). So get ready to join the space marines and learn what Wing Commander took away from James Cameron's all time classic. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

We were first inspired to look at Aliens because of another quote from Chris Roberts' original treatment for the Wing Commander movie. Here he compares his goal to Aliens in a way that frankly makes a lot of sense: they're both movies where the characters are stuck on their own in a terrible situation and drama arises out of how they respond differently to that situation.

"The idea behind this project is to create a film that has the feeling of a tight character-driven rollercoaster

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Here's a little treat for anyone that likes looking at rare faces: we've done a set of much higher resolution scans of the Claw Marks wingman and Kilrathi ace heads that were redrawn in the Super Famicom port of Wing Commander I's manual. The original versions appeared in Claw Marks but they actually started life as the concept art upon which the Wing Commander I characters were based! For the Japanese SFC release, ASCII hired a local artist to redraw and colorize them!

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YouTube channel Tech Talk with Daniel Albu has conducted a pretty cool (and exhaustive!) interview with original Wing Commander composer George "The Fatman" Sanger! He goes through his entire long and storied career and spends some time talking about how he got the job working on Wing Commander and how he was involved in its innovative interactive music feature. You can find the full video embedded below or accessible directly here; the Wing Commander portion is around the 1h43m mark.

The Fatman: But my assignment for the Tchaikovsky thing for Loom was to make Loom sound good on the MT-32. Which was something that I already had proficiency on, that instrument. You know I kind of knew my way around it from having done karaoke versions of things. So that was kind of how I fell into it. So it was always in my mind it was always meant to be MT-32 and then they were somehow pushing the MT-32 as a sound

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Faulcon DeLacy has confirmed that its Cobra Mk V has entered full production, with deliveries commencing to shipyards across the core systems.
Previously offered via limited release, the Cobra Mk V is the latest evolution of the iconic Cobra line, long favoured by pilots seeking versatility in a compact frame. With improved handling, modularity, and a focus on enhanced compatibility with SCO enabled frame shift drives, the Mk V builds on the reputation of its predecessors with an eye toward modern multipurpose performance.
Faulcon DeLacy's Chief Financial Officer, Taron Raines, offered the following remarks:
"This vessel represents a perfect balance of capability and affordability. The engineering team has created something truly special that honours the legacy of one of the most popular ship designs in history."
"With a nimble profile and excellent performance relative to its size and cost,

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Independent pilots have helped eradicate large numbers of pirates in the Dhan system.
Following an unusually high increase in piracy across the system's many planetary rings, local security fleets and skilled freelancers worked to eliminate pirates and show criminals that it would be better for them to relocate.
"Pirates are too foolish to give up a life on the wrong side of the law," said Dhan Empire League head of security Harald Gomes. "It's all they know, and all they're good for. But while we can't stamp out crime forever, we can at least send the message that Dhan isn't an easy target. Attack our mining craft at your peril, ya lugheads!"
Gutamaya, thought to have deployed observers to monitor use of its recently released Corsair craft during the conflict, is said to have been 'very impressed' by its craft's performance and the anti-piracy response force in general.
Participants that

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

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 Aliens (1986) which was a favorite of series creator Chris Roberts when he was working on the first game. 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!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Greetings WingNuts,

What did the Wing Commander movie club take away from Highlander (1986)? Well, if there was just one lesson it pretty much has to be that there can be only one. But we actually found out something pretty interesting with this screening… more on that below! To our modern eyes, Highlander holds up pretty well; it's a very distinct 1980s experience that feels right at home next to films like the original Terminator. It was an era of movies that created their own sets of rules in order to build a universe you could immediately take part in… and here's an example of that formula working very well.

As for the Wing Commander connection, there's no bones about it: Sean Connery's Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez is a lot like how Paladin was originally presented, from his Scottish brogue to his role as a selfless-but-grumpy mentor for your character. I'd even say there's a pretty clear