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What's in a name? One of the great, small innovations in Wing Commander II is that any ship can be assigned a custom name. The game's mission designers took great advantage of this, naming all sorts of background spacecraft… including 23 different human transports across the three campaigns! WC2 did an excellent job of coming up with 'unusual' names for its ships; while many future settings simply put classic warships into space, WC2 found more unique choices… especially for the Clydesdales and Free Traders.

I recently made a surprise discovery while playing Special Operations 2: a Clydesdale which we had always listed as the "Coatmain" was actually the "Cootmain". Which obviously got me thinking: what the heck is a Cootmain? I wasn't able to find the term anywhere, not on Google, not in old Usenet posts and not even in the sum total of human knowledge stored at the Internet Archive! From there I

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The official Wing Commander movie club is BACK!... and for the record, we did find Showgirls pretty fascinating. But now we're back to movies that have been credited with inspiring Wing Commander and this week's film is a big one, at least visually: it's Firefox (1982). The legendary Clint Eastwood directs and stars in a high tech thriller from the height of the cold war. It's Eastwood vs. the Soviet Union in a race to capture a high tech airplane that should look pretty familiar to veterans of the Vega Campaign. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Firefox's influence on Wing Commander isn't a mystery… it's right there in the name! Firefox's titular MiG-31 Firefox super-jet is the very clear inspiration for Wing Commander's own F-44 Rapier II design. The Rapier becomes 'less' Firefox in each iteration but you can still see the inspiration all the way through some of the early

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Six months have passed since the Battle for Sol culminated in the destruction of Titan Cocijo. With the alien threat repelled, communities across the core systems are beginning to rebuild economies, infrastructure - and hope.
Stations which suffered caustic devastation have long since restored full services. Local economies have bounced back and, in some cases, flourished thanks to the recent wave of new colonisation efforts.
Across the bubble both small ceremonies and large public events have taken place. Memorials for the dead, celebrations of brave pilots who engaged the alien threat, and spiritual guidance in the aftermath are common occasions. A memorial beacon deployed near the remains of the Titan wreckage in Sol draws visitors from across the bubble, the site representing both a crucial victory and a tragic loss of life.
Sociologists note a wave of emigration from systems heavily

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Earlier this year, Xeen Music published an incredible Wing Commander II and Academy archival soundtrack. Now they're back with a similar release for the wonderful-but-oft-forgotten Words of Ultima: Martian Dreams. Like Wing Commander, Martian Dreams used the OriginFX graphics engine and was produced by the great Warren Spector (who also appears as a character!). Martian Dreams' composers include Wing Commander veterans George "The Fatman" Sanger and Dana Glover. The album is a comprehensive 57-track collection which is available for purchase on Bandcamp or through the Xeen Music patreon. Like the Wing Commander album, this release is fully licensed from Electronic Arts and picking it up is a great way to show there's interest in Origin's classics!

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It's time for GOG's annual summer sale! The Wing Commander series has been marked down 60% across the board so that each package is just $2.39. Complete your collection below!

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We are sad today to report the passing of a man whose connection to Wing Commander we didn't know until it appeared in his obituary. Steve Sanders was a Austin-based voice actor who appeared in numerous Origin games starting with 1995's BioForge who died earlier this month. You can read his obituary here in the Port Aransas South Jetty; it's particularly well written and gets across that he was a good person.

Mr. Sanders is credited with three 'name' roles in Origin games. He played the main villains in both BioForge (1995) and Cybermage: Darklight Awakening (1996), the Mengele-esque Doctor Mastaba and the cyberpunk supervillain NeCrom respectively. He did double duty in BioForge as Dane, a cyborg at the emotional heart of the game. He was also credited with performing additional voices in Ultima IX, the credit given to most of the game's cast.

What we did not know is that he also acted in Wing

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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 Firefox which was the origin of the original design for Wing Commander's Rapier fighter. 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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One activity I love to do to wind down after a long day is to search the Internet Archive for historical articles about Wing Commander. Preservationists around the world have scanned thousands upon thousands of old magazines and they're full of gems that tell the story of our favorite series (and just about anything else you can imagine). Here's the result of a recent night's search!

First up, we've got a short article from an English magazine called Raze (December 1990). It's a preview of the original Wing Commander that correctly identifies it as "a candidate for game of the year". It's always interesting to see what early players of the game thought would be the most important aspects…

German magazine Power Play (May 1991) offers us up a fascinating early interview with Chris Roberts! This was conducted white Wing Commander II was still early in development so there's some fascinating information

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While researching the uniquely named Clydesdale and Free Trader-class transports in Wing Commander II, I happened to make another set of discoveries that I thought I should preserve with an update: no less than thirteen unique ships that are mentioned in Wing Commander II missions but which do not appear in the final game! The majority of these are likely ships that were at one time intended for missions but which, for whatever reason, ended up being cut… though several of them may have been the victim of a bug in Special Operations 1!

Every Wing Commander II mission has a 'cast' which defines which ships can be used in that scenario. Often, mission designers would remove ships from the mission itself but not drop them from the cast. This leaves behind a trace that can tell us the name of the cut ship, who was intended to pilot it and where it was originally to have been used! As with the transports,

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The Wing Commander Movie club is back from our secret mission to find the Firefox and it was… surprisingly dull! More on that in the after action report Friday. This week, however, will be different as we're screening a true classic: the original Blade Runner (1982). It's Harrison Ford versus replicants in a perfectly realized dystopian vision of near future Los Angeles. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Blade Runner should be best known to Wing Commander fans because the Privateer team borrowed its future (well, now past) Los Angeles for the design of industrial planet New Detroit. Here's the original concept from a March 1992 art list (then called New Chicago):

New Chicago is the industrial center for the Tolnidian [Gemini] sector. The planet itself is almost permanently cloaked in clouds and rain produced by the heavy industry located here. The cities are very reminiscent of

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Want some Wing Commander music for your commute? We've set up several playlists on popular streaming services so you can effortlessly queue up some of the Wing Commander tracks scattered across the music universe. Each service has a slightly different selection so the lists may vary... and be sure to let us know if there's a different service you use so we can create these lists there.

Wing Commander Playlist

This is the 'master' playlist for each service that includes all of the Wing Commander music we've been able to find. Let us know if you come across anything that should be added!

• Apple Music
• Spotify
• Amazon
• Deezer
• iHeart

Wing Commander Movie Soundtrack

This is the Wing Commander movie soundtrack plus the diagetic music and alternate recordings of the overture.

• Apple Music
• Spotify
• Amazon
• Deezer
• iHeart

Wing Commander Prophecy Soundtrack

This is our attempt to recreate the Edel Wing Commander Prophecy OST CD. The

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Here's a strange treasure! AD was looking through back issues of Hungarian gaming magazine 576 Kbyte when he found that they once held a contest to write a Wing Commander story! Celebrating the then-imminent release of Wing Commander IV, 576 Kbyte offered readers a variety of prizes supplied by Electronic Arts in exchange for Wing Commander-related stories or artwork…

... and then they published the winning story across three issues! Google's translate feature seems to suggest it's a sequel to Wing Commander III that involves multiple Behemoths and some kind of Kilrathi outlaw. We aren't totally sure what the contest refers to as a 'handbook'; did they mean an article printed in their periodical, a Hungarian-language hint book or was this also printed in the localized manual for the game? We'd love to know more!

And for good measure, here's the March 1996 Wing Commander IV cover story that was printed

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The conflict between Imperial forces and Archon Delaine in the Beta-3 Tucani system has concluded, with analysts confirming a clear victory for the Empire.
The system became a flashpoint after Imperial Intelligence launched an operation aimed at weakening Delaine's influence and driving the Mictlan megaship from the region. Both sides called upon independent pilots to support their efforts, resulting in widespread clashes across the system.
Supporters of the Empire successfully repelled Delaine's forces and dealt a severe blow to pirate operations in the system. Imperial Intelligence claimed success in its objective to force the Mictlan into retreat, though Delaine appears to have survived the assault.
A spokesperson for Emperor Arissa Lavigny-Duvall praised the outcome:
"Every Commander who fought under an Imperial banner has helped deliver a sharp message to any would-be aggressor against

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

A rumor recently circulated that mostly-dormant and totally disgraced movie news site Ain't It Cool News was set to shut down and delete forever their two plus decade archive of movie reporting and reviews. For those too young to remember the 90s, Ain't It Cool News was a massively popular movie news site that proliferated during the early days of the web. They defined a sort of quasi-gonzo entertainment reporting whose long tail still defines how movies are reported on today. They were proudly unprofessional enfants terrible, printing rumor, fact and outrageous opinion as if all were one and the same. In the process, they became the darlings of the new digital Hollywood and by the late 90s had direct and personal access to filmmakers that skipped the traditional boundaries of PR. The result was a crude mess of a website with a lot of screaming... but one which tied itself to the history of the

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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 Blade Runner and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here (in a word, New Detroit!). 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 has screened Firefox and what we found was a big surprise: a very, very dour and serious movie about a man charged with stealing a mind controlled airplane. Firefox seems to be a conservative reaction to James Bond's late 1970s outing, offering in its first half an alternative version that completely lacks any sort of levity (or women!). It's clearly deliberate and deserves some credit for that but it's quite a slow walk to the Firefox factory. The second half of the movie, which stretches an expertly-constructed airplane chase to forty plus minutes, is better but never quite reaches the promise of the concept. Firefox's plot also reminded us a great deal of Strike Commander, which climaxes with a behind the lines operation to steal a pair of prototype jets which must then battle it out in an epic finale.

Firefox's major inspiration for Wing Commander

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Here's a blast from the past: a preview of Wing Commander Prophecy from the October 1997 issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus. This one really brought back memories for me; there's something very special about the dedication you can see behind the Wing Commander Prophecy team... and it's pretty neat that this article was willing to spend so much time introducing so many of the developers involved. This preview was conducted while multiplayer was still planned for the game and it's full of interesting, half-forgotten facts... like the mention that the Vision Engine was rescued from a cancelled game! There are also some stunning rendered screenshots that should all be familiar to anyone that drooled over every piece of promotional material released during Prophecy's press junket...

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We've got a fascinating piece of Wing Commander archaeology today: the script for Wing Commander III's "wild lines". What's a wild line? Have you ever noticed distant talking in the background during cutscenes and gameflow aboard the Victory? These not-quite-audible-on-their-own PA announcements play to add a sense of texture to the world, making the carrier feel like it's a living, breathing place. And Origin's audio group too the challenge of recording them very seriously... they aren't nonsense lines but a set of 63 intentionally scripted possibilities.

Actually getting to read these lines gets you an interesting sense of life aboard the TCS Victory, with passengers and cargo coming and going and all sorts of shipboard events. Some of them are even specific to missions in the game, like one announcing Hobbes' escape. Most of the names are in jokes, referencing members of the development team like

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What can we say about Blade Runner? No matter how they end it, it's a great movie and it gets the Wing Commander movie club seal of approval (which is technically a sea lion). Now we've got an unusual one this week, the 1992 comedy Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy seemed like a fun-but-light treat at the time but in the ensuing decades it has developed into quite a popular franchise with multiple tv shows (and a reboot in the works now). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

But how does a comedy movie about fighting vampires from 1992 impact Wing Commander? Wing Commander does have (F-109) Vampires… but that's not it. This is a convoluted one. Manual readers may recall that Wing Commander Privateer has a very elaborate backstory published as a short prose story, "The Frontiersman: Interview with a Privateer". It details the man character's past including a battle with the Retros and

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Origin composer George Oldziey is back with a new status update on the latest vinyl album of Wing Commander music. While CD production was completed earlier this year, the larger vinyl records have been trickier to produce. George is still pushing the producer hard to deliver in a timely manner, but forces outside his control have pushed the timetable of complex modern manufacturing out a bit. In the mean time, see below for a very cool behind-the-scenes look at how Mr. Oldziey worked with the live orchestra in Budapest to craft his latest musical delight!

Greetings all. Just to let you know I'm not "slacking off" here. I'm in contact with the company making the vinyl deliverables. Vinyl is a very hot format these days. Here is the latest reply from the company making your vinyl discs...

Hi George,

I'm so sorry I did not get back your voicemail yesterday, I was unexpectedly out of the office.

I