News categories list
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25
Dec
We're a little late in calling for nominations, but there's still time before 2024 gets away from us! We're quickly approaching our annual Fan Project of the Year contest, and this year we're adding a twist. We always ask about the community highlights from the prior twelve months, but this time we're adding a Hall of Fame vote where you can separately select from some of your favorite projects from years past. So think back to some of your favorites and let us know what you think! Email nominations to news@wcnews.com and look for the full vote in the near future. Here's some of the past winners to get you thinking:
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03
Dec
PC Winter Event: Q has returned to begin this year’s Winter Event! Compete and participate in Winter Events to earn Winter Prize vouchers that can be used to redeem the all new Fek’ihri Fe’rang Dreadnought Carrier [T6]! This year’s festivities will be integrated into our recently released Event Interface, as part of your Mission Journal. Beginning this year, Daily Progress toward earning your new starship can be obtained by participating in any of the following activities: Fastest Game on Ice Klingon Ice Fishing Tides of Ice The Fast and the Flurrious Cones of Conduct The Kramp’Ihri Go to the Winter Vendor and check out this year’s new items! Black Nanopulse Weaponry. 3 brand new Cold-Themed Bridge Officer Training Manuals. 3 brand new Winter Sweater designs. Winter Wonderland Weaponry, including an all new hand-thrown impaling device and candy-licious
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27
Jun
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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24
Jun
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
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17
May
Greetings WingNuts,
Going into the original King Kong, we weren't sure what to think. Some of the older films in our series have been pretty stodgy by today's standards (looking at you, Dam Busters)... and being from 1933, King Kong was the oldest of them all. But we were pleasantly surprised: once King Kong got into the action it was effervescent and as much fun as a modern blockbuster.
The direct Wing Commander connection comes to us from a USA Network commercial in which Wing Commander Academy's background artists share that the island on Pisces in Word of Honor was based on the one from King Kong. Here's a comparison!
We suspect the entire movement through the second act of the episode was based on King Kong, though. Our heroes must transit a dense jungle... beset by sea monsters... and then escape to a climactic scene on the ledge of the mountain.
And for good measure, here's the shot that Chris
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06
Mar
Exciting news for one of our sister communities: Electronic Arts has released a mountain of Command and Conquer material for fans to explore including source code, modding access and never-before-seen footage of games while they were in development! You can read all of the details in their announcement.
Source code has been posted to Github for the original game, Red Alert, Renegade and Generals Zero Hour! They've also enabled mod support for several games via Steam Workshop and put out this fascinating video:
Once upon a time, Wing Commander and Command & Conquer, both beloved by fans, were effectively friendly rivals with Electronic Arts pitting Origin and Westwood against each other to develop a space MMO. That battle ended tragically for both studios! But it's nice to see a dedication to putting some of that history right… maybe we could see some archival Wing Commander material someday!
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28
Jun
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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03
Jun
There's great news coming out of the Wing Commander movie club's watch of Star Trek: The Motion Picture: it turns out the human adventure is only beginning! This week, we're going back to World War II for another sort of human adventure: Hell in the Pacific (1968) is less of another epic war story and more of a psychological duel. It has only two characters and very little dialogue; more Enemy Mine than Return of the Jedi! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
Hell in the Pacific is included in our series because of a quote from the Wing Commander movie's visual effects supervisor Chris Brown which was included in an August 1998 preview of the film in SFX magazine. Wing Commander certainly has gun-with-engine Rapiers and tracer bullets in space… but it's not totally clear from what I've read that those are specific to Hell in the Pacific. I guess we'll find out!
The classic war movie
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04
Nov
The image of an unreleased Wing Commander CCG box set has intrigued us for more than two decades, but we've got a slightly better idea of what happened now. Thunder Castle Games was a company that bought CCG developer Mag Force 7 shortly after the WC game was produced, and this boxed set of the series was proposed but never produced. AD reached out to the original artist, Brad Kelly, and he added this background:
I mocked up a number of gift set box designs for TCG including this one for Wing Commander. To my knowledge it never got published. TCG mostly imploded in 1996, hemorrhaging employees, including myself.
I don't recall details of any plans, beyond the obvious expectation of releasing a two-player gift box. I knew at the time that relations soured between TCG and MF7, but didn't know details. TCG had/has a reputation for burning bridges, so it was not unexpected.
I spoke to Margaret Weis
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04
Oct
This one isn't strictly WC-related, but longtime Wingnut and CIC visitor Vidmaster has released a free tabletop game that looks pretty neat. It's a work in progress that's ready for prospective players to print and play at home. He describes it as a "near future space exploration board game." The universe is built via a grid of tiles that you assemble, and there are plenty of detailed cards and interface pieces to get acquainted with. Everything you need to go get going is available here. Vidmaster is looking for feedback from Wing Commander fans who might be into this, so you can help follow up at the CIC Forums. It makes me wonder what possibilities are out there for fans who want to take something like this in a WC direction!
I made a super-niche board game again. It is free. This time, it is a solo-experience, that is a board game played by one person only (something I considered ridicolus
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19
Jun
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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12
Jun
We've updated the Cockpit Reference to include the redrawn versions of the four original Wing Commander ships as they appeared in the Super NIntendo (SNES) port of the game! If you've only played one or the other, you might be surprised by how different the other looks beyond having distinct aspect ratios… the Scimitar's layout in particular is totally rearranged! We've put together a 'normal' and 'alarms active' version for each of the ships.
I also made some new notes about differences between the two platforms:
- The SNES version does not have damage states; your cockpit never sparks or scars, there are no exposed wire or scorched panel graphics.
- The hit indicators and the fuel warning lights are either non functional or removed entirely in the SNES version.
- The 'sides' of the Hornet cockpit aren't actually clear; you can't see the skybox through them.
- The afterburner speeds are significantly
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24
May
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 Tora! Tora! Tora! which informed Chris Roberts' vision for the Wing Commander movie… and which was essentially the first draft of Action Stations! 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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13
Feb
Last year, we reported on some wonderful 3D renderings of the TCS Victory created by AEdwardBaker. Today we're following up and sharing a number of other Wing Commander pieces he's created! These three pieces are, respectively, Angry Hornets, Homecoming and Sisters. Very cool to see the Victory and the Tiger's Claw together!
They also have two new renders of the Victory, seen both fore and aft.
... and those renders are actually from a pretty cool fan film that they've created featuring the Victory!
Lastly, there's even a phone wallpaper!
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21
Aug
AllTinker has been hard at work making progress on his Confederation project to enhance the WC1 engine. He's put together this new status update with a handful of tantalizing new screenshots to share for the birthday. Enjoy!
Hi all, I was hoping to have a playable test ready for the CIC birthday, but a few too many things have gotten in the way sadly... I've made a lot of progress on my format-reading library; I have a fairly short list of things I want to wrap up before I put it (and the viewer) up on github - it may be after the first Confederation test release, I'm not sure.
Art-wise one silly thing I realised was that my old widescreen redraws hadn't taken into account the non-square pixels in WC1/2 (being 320x200), so I've also been redrawing those to be even wider, to match my original 21:9 widescreen goal - at the proper original aspect ratio this time. Here's a selection of those
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01
Apr
The procession of physical Wing Commander models continues! Today we've got a magnificent Border Worlds Avenger torpedo bomber made in Lego by John Nelson. While the ships featured over the last few days have been amazing, the creativity and talent on display here shines through in a unique way. It's quite a constraint to be forced to build within the limits of the physical Lego bricks at your disposal, which makes color-matching to a fighter's particular paint scheme like this super impressive. He's got the silhouette there - and if anything, this version is slightly sleeker than what we saw in Wing Commander 4. The turret is also an especially nice touch! We'd love to see him build more!
Hello. I finally got around to a project I’ve wanted to tackle and that’s making Wing Commander fighters from Legos.
My first go was the Border Worlds Avenger. The colors aren’t perfect and the proportions
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01
Jul
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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01
May
I'm always fascinated to find brief glimpses of Wing Commander that aired on TV and I thought of another vector for them: 3DO advertisements! So I spent some time digging through material archived by 3DO fans to find a few glimpses of Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander III that aired on national TV.
First is a 1994 advertisement called "Stop Playing with Toys" which includes a brief clip of Super Wing Commander! Watch carefully to see part of the Scimitar takeoff sequence. Fun fact: both of the 'toys' thrown away at the start, an SNES and a Genesis with Sega CD attached, also have excellent Wing Commander ports.
Then we have a 1995 advertisement called "Welcome to the REAL World" which incudes a brief clip of gameplay from Wing Commander III. The available copy is pretty low resolution but it's clearly the player flying a Hellcat and destroying a Dralthi.
Super Wing Commander also appears in this
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24
Apr
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