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Video game artist

Mike Winterbauer

has shown off the first images of his latest project, a Wing Commander Art Portfolio! Mr. Winterbauer was the person commissioned in 1992 to hand paint the

box art for the SNES version

of Wing Commander, among many other cool contemporary pieces. These were showcased last year in a book launched via a

successful

Kickstarter campaign. Next month he plans to launch a followup that specifically focuses on the process of creating his well known WC design. Along the way, there will be opportunities to have your name included in the book as well as pick up a very slick metal reproduction. Stay tuned for more info as the campaign approaches!

Hello backers of Classic Game Covers! I hope you all are doing great.

Be sure to look for my up coming Kickstarter campaign call Wing Commander Art. It will feature a beautiful hard cover portfolio art book showcasing the art

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The somewhat amorphous length of a generation is, give or take, about twenty-five years. This means that as of today, the Wing Commander movie is a generation old… and, it follows, so are those of us that once eagerly anticipated its coming. I've written extensively about whether or not it was good (it was not) and what it means to me (I love it dearly) and I don't need to relitigate any of that today. In fact, the war movie cliches about old soldiers are more accurate than ever: the guns have stopped, we're the old men, all quiet on the western front and alike. The bickerings and debates and once-so-important battles of our youth have passed us by as gracefully as such things ever do. No one in 2024 could conceive, for instance, of caring about the Tiger Claw's missing possessive or what the Ralari /really/ looks like or even particularly to complain about Freddie Prinze Jr.'s casting.

If anything,

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As the Through the Moongate, Part 2 Kickstarter continues to truck along, Andrea Contato has shared the first preview of the exclusive Wing Commander Bookmark that will be given to certain tier backers for the project. This design is being put together by Denis Loubet, the senior Origin artist responsible for art direction on the first few Wing Commanders. Initial elements highlight some of the arrowhead iconography from the WC1 logo as well as a dual Confed/Kilrathi headshots and perhaps even a Dralthi, which would be pretty awesome. The overall campaign is up to around €36,500. The bookmark giveaway will be rather limited, so hopefully everyone who wants one can get their pledge in within the next 10 days!

We are working non-stop to prepare the conclusion of this great project we started two years ago and pieces are already starting to come together. To that end, Denis Loubet has sent us a

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Bathrooms are treated really weird in sci-fi. Plenty of shows, movies and games just pretend they don't exist at all. Sometimes you might get a sink and mirror aboard a space ship, but almost never a toilet. AD recently noticed that Wing Commander once again broke new ground by including one aboard the Tiger's Claw. Some viewers may have been distracted from the background, since it's in the middle of the Rosie/Maniac romance scene, but there it is! There's even a toilet paper holder with a Confed logo on it, which is amazing. Wouldn't that have made for an amazing collectible/merchandising?

Since everyone loves toilets in space, here's one from the Wing Commander movie. In shot 2 you can spot a TP holder behind Holder's head. Shot 3 shows some junk in Maniac's medicine cabinet. The last is the original opening to Maniac and Rosie's bed scene...

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This has been a really good year for space toilets. AD managed to screen cap some really good shots of the toilets in the Wing Commander Movie a couple months back, and now LOAF has discovered the Wing Commander Academy equivalent. Or rather, since this is Damon Karnes' holding cell from the episode The Last One Left, these are borderline space holes-in-the-ground. He recently got ahold of a concept art piece which shows a pair of basins at the foot of their cell beds. From this angle, their purpose seems fairly obvious. They're actually pictured in the episode itself, but with all the other action going on, nobody has ever called these out as far as we can tell. Now you know!

This is a Wing Commander Academy concept painting. These were done in the US as reference for animators in Japan and Korea painting the production backgrounds. It's from The Last One Left and reveals the pirate prison has

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Last month, we held a special Saturday morning cartoon watch party in #WingNut where we watched the entire 'Warrior King' crossover saga that included Wing Commander Academy. Well, we had so much fun that we've decided to do it again! It's not possible to find anything quite as epic as the Warrior King saga so instead we've pulled together a collection of other Saturday morning shows that reference Wing Commander in some way! Here's the lineup:

Doug - Doug's Lost Weekend (1992, s2e25): This early episode of Doug (pre-Disney's Doug) will be extremely relatable to any Wing Commander fan: Doug becomes addicted to a space sim that is full of nods to the original Wing Commander!

Gridman the Hyper Agent - A Lonely Hacker (1993, s1e17): Gridman is a Japanese "tokusatsu" superhero show similar to the ones used as the basis for shows like Power Rangers in the United States. Watch carefully for the slightest of

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Earlier in the year, we held a pair of Saturday morning marathons that celebrated Wing Commander-connected media that didn't quite fit with the Friday movie club. And now we're bringing them back! This Saturday, October 18, we'll be bringing you another themed morning of '90s media and great Wing Commander conversation. This time, we're taking a look at a series that was pretty influential during the making of Wing Commander III: Mystery Science Theater 3000. We'll be watching two episodes that are referenced in WC3 and talking all about what life was like on the internet way back in 1994!

"Manos": The Hands of Fate (1993, s4e24): MST3k brought Manos to the world, introducing future generations to what may be the single worst movie ever made. But it made for a pretty funny episode! And one that was clearly appreciated by Wing Commander III's development team, which named the crucial Torgo system after

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November 16, 1996: eager young wingnuts turned on the USA Network to watch the latest episode of Wing Commander Academy, typically the third of four action shows aired in a block. But on this particular Saturday what we found was... Mortal Kombat? Had Wing Commander Academy been cancelled, pulled early? No, it turned out the episode was airing a half hour later. But it was a pretty crazy one, with Michael Dorn playing a... space viking?

Thus we were introduced to the Warrior King saga, an entirely insane (and unpromoted) cartoon crossover between four licensed IPs: Street Fighter, Savage Dragon, Mortal Kombat and Wing Commander Academy. The four shows went together to tell the story of the Warrior King, the aforementioned space viking, as he sought a magic orb that would restore his destroyed homeworld. Each show followed the rules of its universe, and the familiar characters and settings never

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ZOmegaZ continues to make expeditious progress on his Wing Commander challenge coin Kickstarter campaign. The funding phase closed just over a month ago, and he's already gotten the manufacturer to fabricate his designs. So far, it seems like this is moving along just like clockwork - and the coins look cool too! Contributors to the project could start seeing packages arrive soon!

I think they all look fabulous. Now the shipping begins! Again, some of you don't seem to have received a survey link. I can't resend it for some reason, but don't stress, we'll get it worked out.

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The Templin Institute is a YouTube presentation with a neat gimmick: they offer documentaries about different fictional realities! This week they've premiered a new show called 'Audio Log' that presents the history of a fictional institution with a dramatic audio recording. And for the pilot episode they've chosen to talk about Wing Commander's Terran Confederation! It's a neat ten-minute look at Wing Commander's fictional history which you can find here.

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Here's a little treasure: six pieces of rarely-seen Wing Commander cover artwork without the trade dress! These stunning paintings were created by sci-fi and fantasy artist Jan Patrik Krásný for the Czech language translations of six Wing Commander novels. The books were published between 2001 and 2005 by Poutnik Knihy. Most interestingly, they were published not for the Wing Commander IP but because Dr. William Forstchen is particularly popular in the Czech Republic! The resulting cover art is a kind of what-if scenario where the novels are imagined on their own without the associated games!

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A few months back, LOAF took a look at the development timeframes for the Wing Commander games. It's really interesting comparison! Someone asked how these durations correlated with the size of the development teams, which is also a very neat set of data, so LOAF compiled a new table!

This question fascinated me so I decided to put together some rough numbers with the previous chart. I divided credits by modern disciplines... you can see the size of the development teams basically quadruiples in eight years! (Does not include film shoot crews.)

With regards to the expansion packs, they were all very tight 3-4 month productions. A small team of rising juniors would usually develop them while the rest of the group moved to the next big game. They kept it up as long as the concept was profitable!

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Good Old Games is running a variety of new sales, and there latest discount is marking down the Wing Commander series by 75%! The theme revolves around games that are 10+ years old. This is an especially welcome event because GOG skipped the WC games in their big Spring Sale last month. Cheap Wing Commander is always a big hit, so we're glad folks get another chance to grab the franchise on the cheap. You can fill out your digital collection via the links below. Grab them before the end of the weekend!

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GOG.com is turning 17 years old! The Wing Commander series is discounted by 50% to celebrate the milestone. We first reported about them back in 2008 when the company was announced, and their first WC title was Privateer in June of 2011. It's pretty wild how long they've been serving up classic Wing Commander!

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Dowlphin

spotted a couple of nifty easter eggs in a recent World of Warcraft quest. Wing Commander Black and a blue-haired Kilrath make appearances as a couple of Orcs in a story mission. These aren't random gaming references either - WoW executive producer

J Allen Brack

is a major Wing Commander vet. He got his start in the industry as a QA tester on Wing Commander 3 and went on to work on P2, WC4, Kilrathi Saga, Prophecy and Secret Ops. There are likely numerous such gems hidden in the game. Another player spotted

Wing Commander Mulverick

a while back too.

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Pix

recently came across a pretty neat article in the UK magazine

PC Zone

. I really like it's graphical layout with the Dralthis overflying the slick text. The author is a big fan of the WC series and uses it as an example for awesome '90s games that were outside the realm of his usual fare. I do wonder about the Hobbes blurb a bit, and I think the suggestion in the gray box is just that GOG exists. It's a little odd to not come out and just say that, but this is still a great quote:

Just give me a lantern-jawed, blue-haired hero fighting some big cats in space, and I'm as happy as a porcine covered in excrement.

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We reported earlier this week on the untimely passing of Wing Commander superfan Adam "Klavs" Burch. It can be hard to find the words to appropriately express people's thoughts at a time like this, so some fellow fans have turned to more visual attempts. Both tributes below features Klavs' famous Rapier models in a classic 'missing man formation'.

The first is a beautiful scene by Mac:

In remembrance of Adam "Klavs" Burch.

Thank You Adam, for everything.

Kevin Caccamo also featured this honor to Klavs in today's Spacey Saturday stream.

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Here's a little treat from the universe: YouTube has the 1999 Wing Commander movie available to watch for free (in the United States, at least)! YouTube's rules prevent commercial movies from being embedded but you can follow this link to watch the movie. As a bonus, making the movie available on YouTube means that lots of people are seeing it for the first time... and if their social media comments are any indication, they aren't hating it! Weird what a couple decades an do to a film.

This is a legitimate licensed stream rather than somebody pitching up the sound and playing it under a filter... it's the real Wing Commander experience! We don't know how long Wing Commander will be available but past availability suggests that you should have at least all of February to catch it. A big thank you to Sebastian for letting us know!

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More people should do silly little Wing Commander jokes like this one from Squishy Games. The more obscure, the better. Have a great weekend, everyone!

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There's a scene in Pilgrim Stars, the first Wing Commander movie tie-in novel, where we see a news broadcast from a hastily-assembled Pilgrim concentration camp. The news chyron identifies the location of the camp as the University of Central Florida. Note that this includes a wonderful example of the 'sci-fi list' trope where one or two future events are included in a list of familiar ones:

Bellegarde now studied the image of a university campus. Ancient brick buildings with signs identifying them as Library, Administration, Biological Sciences, Offworld Sciences, and Humanities and Fine Arts girdled an oval reflection pond about thirty meters across. The caption read: DESIGNATED PILGRIM SAFE ZONE: UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA , EARTH. A half dozen rifle-toting young men sprinted along the pond’s perimeter, with an equal number of Marines in pursuit. The men took up flanking positions near the