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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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Greetings WingNuts,

It's no secret that most of us love Star Trek and we generally felt that The Motion Picture is a film that becomes more and more compelling the older it gets. What was once decried as slow and moody now feels impressive and relevant. And it's really the only of the Star Trek movies that directly follows the characters as they were in the original TV show.

The Wing Commander connection this time around was that Chris Roberts asked Wing Commander composer George "The Fatman" Sanger to pattern the original game's music after Jerry Goldsmith's spectacular Star Trek The Motion Picture score. I have a tin ear, but others in our party did claim they could hear the inspiration! Here are the main themes for both if you'd like to compare them yourself.

Another connection between ST:TMP and Wing Commander is that the film was Syd Mead's first project as a concept artist for film. He was

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Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club is pretty universal in this one: Aliens is as close to a perfect movie as you can make! We greatly enjoyed revisiting it last week and it's such a good film that we could probably do it again soon.

In the treatment for the Wing Commander movie, Chris Roberts described it as being like Alien in that the character drama emerges from the fact that everyone is totally cut off from reasonable rescue or help. And he was right, both movies certainly do chase that goal… although the isolation you feel in Aliens is much more effectively delivered. Of course, Aliens' greater legacy to Wing Commander and across most science fiction was the colonial marines. James Cameron's mixing of future space warfare with Vietnam-styled American soldiers feels like a lightning bolt… they would be aped endlessly including in Wing Commander III, IV and Prophecy.

Here are the two

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Game over, man! Aliens remains a nearly perfect movie, the Wing Commander movie club had a great time revisiting it. This week we're going in a slightly different direction but one with plenty of action: we will be watching Die Hard 2 (1990)! You know, the Die Hard everyone forgets about. Die Hard 2 was the first sequel to the 1988 classic. It takes Bruce Willis' John McClane to the east coast where he battles terrorists at a Baltimore airport. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The Wing Commander connection here is slight but pretty interesting: the original art list for Wing Commander Privateer references Die Hard 2 as the inspiration for Commodore Reismann, the officer Admiral Terrell puts in charge of ambushing the Steltek drone. Here's his original, surprisingly lengthy character description (note that Tolnidan became Gemini):

Commodore Hans Reismann: Commodore Reismann has

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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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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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We'll keep this week of video posts going with a new retro review from SideQuest, who has returned to the Wing Commander series with Wing Commander 4. They covered WC3 earlier in the year, and while they could appreciate the earlier game, they came away as big fans of the sequel. I didn't catch exactly what version this was, but I suspect they were playing the GOG edition with DVD quality videos based on comments about the picture quality. The reviewer appreciated the variety of missions, improvements in storytelling and just overall polish and refinement. As for the extra wingmen, those are just tuckerized Origin developers. A handful of larger sequences need more wingmen, and pilots like George "Blade" Oldziey and Anthony "Yaeger" Sommers are there to answer the call!

Returning to the Wing Commander series now. While I appreciated Wing Commander III Heart of the Tiger a lot, I had heard Wing

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The votes are in, and another round of project winners has been decided! The Prophecy & Secret Ops Model Upgrade Pack has come out on top as the 2019 Fan Project of the Year! Congratulations! Fans were clearly compelled by the steady stream of status updates that culminated in another impressive beta release. This also marks the first time that a project has placed somewhere in the winner or runner up categories for five consecutive years. It's been a really good run!

Once again we've got two strong runners up that both ranked very closely in the tally. Both projects are relatively young in their development life cycle, but they each represent some tremendous potential. Our first runner up is the WC4 Fan Remake! The project has released a variety of promising teasers that Wingnuts are eager to try out!

The second runner up is Wing Leader! Howard's updated take on the original Wing Commander

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If you will indulge me for just a moment I have some great personal news to share. This past October, my mom had a stroke during surgery and she has been in one hospital or another ever since… until now! She has made an amazing, tough fought recovery and has finally returned home from rehab. I'm so happy about this and in honor of the past six months of hospitals I thought it might be therapeutic to take a closer look at a fictional one: the famous Crius hospital from Privateer 2: The Darkening!

Treatment Background

A cryopod containing Vell Ricaud II, a male humanoid, was found in the wreckage of the Canera in Mendra City. His two decade-old custom-built Shernikov Medical Equipment Cryo Nine Series pod saved his life and limited his physical injuries, leaving him the only survivor of the crash. The damage to the pod started the thaw cycle from his deep cryonic sleep. Rescuers brought Ricaud to Astravin

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We've got a new poll, and it's a perfect one for 2025! The wonderful calendar included with The Kilrathi Saga was designed to sync up with 1997 and 2673, then the upcoming new year as well as the year the just-released WC4 takes place. It also works for 2025! LOAF recently rescanned the calendar as a very high quality PDF, which you can get here: 220 archival quality PDF or 9 meg compressed PDF. Each month gets a special piece of concept art. The new poll asks which one you like best, and they're all represented on the back cover for quick reference!

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Our annual new year's poll concluded with pretty positive results! We've already seen some fantastic new releases so far this year, including both Team Fat and George Oldziey audio albums. And there is surely more in store as the year unfolds!

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Greetings WingNuts,

We loved Titanic! The film hods up extremely well. It was very easy to write it off as a fad in 1997 but rewatching it today there's no question that its success was well deserved. It's an amazing combination of rewarding character drama set against so much hard work to create a world that even Richard Garriott could learn something. And it certainly didn't seem like it was three hours long! James Cameron's position as king of the Hollywood universe is deservedly still secure today. (A note relevant only to this group is that Titanic opened one week before one of our previous films, An American Werewolf in Paris. And it was much, much more successful!)

The big Wing Commander connection was production designer Peter Lamont who deservedly won an Oscar for recreating the Titanic for the film. One of the reasons the movie works so well is that Cameron goes so very deep with his Titanic

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Happy birthday to Wing Commander I, which was released 33 years ago today! It marked an epochal shift in how computer games were played, made and sold... and I guess you could say it has been pretty big in my life, too!

It is often hard to assign a single date for when a game was released in the early 90s; it could be days to weeks to go from sign off to duplication to actually arriving in stores. There was no concept of a set ‘street date’ - but Origin celebrated “ship day” internally and that’s what we cite as a birthday when it’s known. Here’s an account of that day from Mike Harrison’s excellent contemporary making of piece:

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The TCS Victory has so many amazing locations. The jump to SVGA 'photorealistic' backgrounds is still seared in my mind. It's so hard to pick a favorite, but the bridge might be it. I love the bar, I love gunnery control, and the briefing room is freakin cool, but all of the little consoles and expansive window with your escort out front really take the cake. Scribbler has created one more ASMR/ambiance video so you can enjoy it for a solid hour in the background.

Today we return to the TCS Victory. She can already look back on a long service. As long as some work shifts in space. No missions and no attacks? It can also be quiet in space but be careful, everything can change quickly. So stay alert and keep an eye on your monitors. The bridge is the heart of every ship

For ASMR, radio plays or to relax

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Street Fighter: The Animated Series is coming to BluRay! This is of interest to Wing Commander fans because the set will include the first part of the USA Network 'Warrior King' crossover. The episode, unsurprisingly titled "The Warrior King", includes the short prelude sequence that shows the beginning of the story that stretches across the four shows (the others being Savage Dragon, Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm and Wing Commander Academy).

The new release will include a variety of extras including artwork, storyboards and commentary tracks from fighting game experts. The set is being put out by Diskotek, a boutique physical media publishing company that has been making a name for itself lately with high quality, feature-laden releases of esoteric properties. Maybe they could put out Wing Commander Academy someday! The set is due May 27th for an MSRP of $39.95.

Street Fighter: The Animated

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It's a good week for Rapier I art. We posted an uncommon 3D render of a fan model a few days ago, and now we've got a top down line art sketch of the CF-117. The rotary neutron gun is a bit long, but the ship portions are pretty good overall. This type of drawing was really big in the late '90s, so I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this over the years. bagera3005 is certainly a fan of this art style with thousands of Star Trek ships and other similar designs in his gallery. He's also made a Kilrathi-inspired ship, pictured below. It's kind of a funky cross between a Goran and a Sorthak by my eye.

My version of Wing Commander Rapier from the movie

If you'd like to see more cool WC line art, be sure to check out our prior updates.

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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 Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here (it's a weird one!). 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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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 Top Gun, which has been inspiring the series since the very 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!

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We've got a new poll up today that asks about your favorite communications options to send while in flight. There's a few tried and true ones that have been around since WC1, and some of the later games introduce a couple more that are less well known. The Comm VDU isn't generally considered a central element of Wing Commander, but I would argue it's a critical aspect to the immersion that we all feel in the game. So now we're giving you a chance to think about what comm selection you rely on or enjoy the most - vote below!

Our annual new year's poll has been running neck-and-neck over the past week, so we decided to call it today with a tie. Overall, the optimistic responses got more votes than the pessimistic ones, and the results were generally typical for the last few years' results. Although there's a fair number of fans who have doubts about what 2020 holds, there's some tremendous potential

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Typos! Don't you hate them? Well, I don't… because they've added at least two Kilrathi fighters to the Wing Commander canon! It may come as a surprise to many but the people involved in writing a Wing Commander tie-in weren't always players of the games they were adapting. Writers and editors often relied on the series bible produced by Origin's creative services group to get the nuts and bolts of the universe correct. As a result, it was easy for small errors to make it to press… especially when they involved words that weren't "real" like Kilrathi ship types. Here are two times when letting the wrong name go to print added a little bit of mystery to our world… and one where it didn't!

Our first example is the Grakhi, a ship type mentioned one time in End Run. From the text, reprinted below, it's pretty clear that Dr. Forstchen had intended to use 'Grikath' for the ship – they're described as heavy