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The results are in: seven is exactly the right number of samurai for a movie to have. This week, we're moving a few centuries forward in history… to the 1970s! Friday's Wing Commander-connected film will be the classic supernatural horror film The Exorcist. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The connection to The Exorcist is a funny one. The concept artists on the Privateer team would label their work with the names of movies and albums as a running joke… so we've added those movies to the movie club pool (that's right, Ishtar is coming)! In this case, The Exorcist was presumably chosen because of the name selected for this room, "refectory". It's a word usually used to refer to meeting rooms in churches. Here, however, it's been chosen for an options screen on Perry Naval Base which was first imagined as a cafeteria rather than another bar. Privateer's original art list

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The Wing Commander movie club has run both silent and deep through Das Boot! We were certainly impressed… with the film and with just how much of the film Chris Roberts managed to work into Wing Commander. Next up we're going to watch something a little more fun: as suggested by Vera, Friday's movie will be The Fifth Element! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The Fifth Element is a 1997 science fiction film from French director Luc Besson. It tells the story of a futuristic taxi driver who inadvertently becomes the key to stopping an incredible weapon capable of destroying the Earth. That plot description is reductive, though: the film is celebrated for both its slick storytelling and its stunningly visualized world (with visuals inspired by the likes of Moebius and Mézières) that seemed like nothing we'd ever seen before at the time. Do you think it will hold up now that some

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The Wing Commander movie club has returned from that horrible Planet of the Apes with a shocking revelation. But we won't spoil that, so instead we'll just prepare for next week's fantastic space outing: we'll be watching The Last Starfighter (1984). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The Last Starfighter is a movie that Wing Commander fans are likely to know because it tells a favorite fantasy: a man becomes especially good at a space arcade game which turns out to have been a recruiting device for real space war! That storyline has been referenced ad nauseam in pop culture in the decades since so much so that you probably know the story even if you've never seen the movie itself… a bit like Citizen Kane for nerds. And there's lots to appreciate even if the final film doesn't quite come together like Planet of the Apes, from one of the earliest uses of CG for VFX to a very

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The Wing Commander movie club has met the law and... the law won. Judge Dredd wasn't as fun as we'd hoped so we're turning to a certified classic with an interesting Wing Commander connection: Titanic! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along. PLEASE NOTE that because Titanic is a long movie we will be starting one hour early at 9 PM EST (6 PM PST.)

Titanic is James Cameron's famous love story set against an ultra-detailed telling of the final hours of the doomed Titanic passenger liner. Initially derided for its enormous budged, Titanic proved naysers wrong when it shattered box office records on release in December 1997. If you're of the same vintage as Wing Commander, it's a sure bet you remember Titanic!

Titanic's big connection to Wing Commander is a pretty famous one: Titanic's famed production designer Peter Lamont followed that film by taking the same role on Wing Commander...

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I'm happy to report that our second Wing Commander movie night was a success! We had a great group of fans who enjoyed seeing–and lightly roasting–The Dam Busters together this past Friday night. You can find the complete after action report later this week. So next we're going to be watching a movie that's a little more modern… with some more obvious connections to both the original Wing Commander game and the 1999 film. That's right, on Friday you are welcome to join us for a group watch of Top Gun (1986).

Top Gun is a 1986 action film based on the United States Navy's elite program that teaches top fighter pilots skills that they in turn pass on to their compatriots. It helped usher in lead Tom Cruise's ongoing superstardom and is one of the prototypes of the modern blockbuster. My generation loved it for mixing pulse-pounding air combat with engaging characters we couldn't help but root for… but

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You have to work pretty hard not to love Return of the Jedi… and frankly, we're not willing to do that much work; it was great! This week, we're back to World War II with Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). Tora! Tora! Tora! is a spectacular retelling of the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II. The movie's production is as much an epilogue to the story as it is a telling of it: the film is a massive international co-production divided between American and Japanese teams with directors from both countries filming their parts of the story. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Chris Roberts discussed Tora! Tora! Tora! as an inspiration for the Wing Commander movie frequently during interviews. He repeatedly described Wing Commander as an attempt to update Tora! Tora! Tora! for a science fiction setting.

“For me, it's sort of like a classic, nautical World War

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It's like the say, everyone loves the theatrical cut of Dune 1984! We had a great time discussing everything Dune last week and this time we're going back to Earth for a pretty fun one: the 1994 action comedy True Lies. It's a movie that's going to make us feel like it's 1994 again… coincidentially when Wing Commander III came out. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Once again, this is a case where Chris Roberts used tracks from True Lies score as temp cues during the editing of the Wing Commander film. True Lies' music is by the legendary Shirley Walker who many will know for her work on another heavily Wing Commander-inspired project: FOX's Space Above and Beyond. Two of Walker's tracks were used, the first being Harry Rides Again. It was used for the 'depth charge' scene where a Ralari destroyer is dropping space bombs on asteroid craters in the hopes of finding the Tiger Claw

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The Wing Commander movie featured some of the earliest instances of what would later be dubbed "bullet time" in feature films after it was popularized by 'The Matrix'. Several sequences were shot for the film's jump travel sequences, but not all of them made it into the final film. This clip includes some of that extra footage from an early edit of the movie spliced into where it would have appeared originally. The footage was likely trimmed for pacing, but it's still pretty cool!

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We just finished a space-themed reading nook for the kiddos, and that gave us a great opportunity to display a piece of Wing Commander art. Mike Winterbauer's slick

metal print

of the WC1 SNES box art fits right in! It's a cozy place to curl up with a Wing Commander

ebook

. What do you think?

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AD made a pretty neat discovery the other day: a Spanish language radio program called "Space Wars" aired an hour-long look at the music of Wing Commander on September 3 on radio station Querétaro 100.3 FM. The broadcast include samples of lots of music and even one of Jazz's piano pieces played on a real piano! AD recorded a copy which you can listen to below.

We continue with our special Space Wars programs, where we take a brief look at the music of some Space Simulation video games. This time, we're focusing on a classic, Wing Commander, a video game developed by Chris Roberts that was a turning point in this video game genre in many ways, but primarily in its music. Listen to the adaptations of this video game's soundtrack to various formats that we've made, and hear the musical evolution that, as always, goes from the BIT to the Orchestra!

We would also like to thank uu from Discord for

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pahandav

has created a MEGA Overview of the Wing Commander series. He covers each of the main games, which is all of the PC games except the expansions, Secret Ops or Arena. Of course it would be nice if those were included too, but it's still pretty impressive how exhaustive the video is as it takes nearly a full hour to cover the landscape. Lots of streamers hit WC1 or WC3/4, so it's a nice change to hear someone detailing out Academy nav points, Armada shipyards and the nuances of Privateer 2 videos. I suppose we'll just have to wait for the GIGA Overview for more!

In this video, I provide an overview of the 9 main games of the Wing Commander series released between 1990 and 1997.

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Wing Commander has once again appeared live in concert! This time the WC1 music was performed by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra at the February 9

Joystick 11.0

convention (

translated

). Did anyone happen to make it there in person? We haven't found a first hand account yet, but it could have sounded like the video below from the graduation ceremonies of the

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

in Stockholm. Crazy enough, these two instances weren't the only

Swedish orchestra

to play Wing Commander in the last few years. Sweden's apparently the place to be if you want to hear live classical WC tunes!

Welcome to the eleventh edition of Joystick, Malmö Symphony Orchestra's annual music music concert!

Experience a magical evening filled with powerful, imaginative music from the world of computer and video games. Today, the genre is well-established and is found in many orchestras repertoires worldwide.

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In February 1999, FOX put out a set of Wing Commander postcards to promote the upcoming film. Each features one of the movie's main characters with some pretty flashy graphics and a strange focus on retina scans. These were distributed at conventions, theater lobbies and elsewhere alongside a sweatshirt featuring the nose art and the movie logo down the arm. Origin even had a digital version at the now-defunct wingcommander.com which you could send as an ecard! So be sure and send someone you love a big honking Wing Commander picture today. We've scanned three of the original cards in high resolution and have made them available below. You can also access a 1200 dpi version of the scans here.

The flavor text for Blair and Maniac is taken right from the Confederation Handbook... but it's not at all clear what Angel's facts and figures refer to!

- FLIGHT RECORD -

SQUADRONS LED - / 175 [113]
SHIPS DOWN - /

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GOG.com has kicked off their summer sale and the Wing Commander series is on the list. The entire franchise is now 70-72% off, which ties the best deals we've seen in the past year. Each individual title is down to $1.79 and the whole package of all DOS & Windows games is just $13.42. Boxed games might be nice for the collection, but digital copies are really quick and easy to download and play. These also make great gifts!

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As our birthday present to the community, we took a risk on something pretty exciting and a little different from usual: below you will find a never before seen alpha copy of Wing Commander Privateer that you can load in DOSBox and play today! This is Alpha 1.15, compiled on August 9, 1993 (about six weeks before the final build. We've done some preliminary studying and it already looks pretty interesting: many of the game's resource files are larger, structured and structured differently. Just starting the game you'll get a sense that things are a little different (and of course it's even more crash prone than the released version which was not too stable). We've also discovered at least one extra cutscene in the files, labeled 'Discovery' it seems like it will play when you first find the Steltek derelict. A silver florin to the first Privateer who gets that far (saves from the final game do not

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With WC3 and WC4 both receiving fantastic updates, ODVS couldn't leave Prophecy out! It's received the same definitive updates as WC4 and looks just as gorgeous. Players will have to first upgrade their copy of Prophecy to the DVD edition with this patch. Then the clips can be dropped right in! The only issue is figuring out which game to replay first!

• Wing Commander Prophecy: version 4.0, English (3.0 gig zip)
• Wing Commander Prophecy: version 4.0, German (3.0 gig zip)

To celebrate Wing Commander CIC's birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of the Wing Commander franchise, I'm proud to release Wing Commander Prophecy HD Video Pack V4.0!

As well as containing the highest quality remaster I've yet managed to produce, V4.0 contains the following improvements that make it the Definitive Edition:

• All FMV footage remastered to 1080p Full HD using Machine Learning AI
• Frame rate standardised in filmed sequences

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Our archivists have been hard at work! Earlier this year we acquired Wing Commander Prophecy producer Billy Caine's archive of production documents; this consisted of seven folders containing hundreds of pages of internal documentation covering Wing Commander Prophecy's development from March 1996 to November 1997.

These documents, divided into the seven topics below, include correspondence, internal documents and reference material that Billy felt it was important to preserve physically at the time. All aspects of the game's development are touched on, but one document that will be particularly exciting to fans finally explains the intent behind the Aligned People and how it would have played out in future games! There are several early pitches and a long term product plan that includes never-before-seen summaries of canceled projects like Wing Commander 6, 7, Maniac Missions and the first person

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There's a pretty good joke hidden in the 'tips' section of the Wing Commander IV manual. Check out the very last one:

"You can fight the Seether" is maybe not a helpful tip for playing Wing Commander IV… but it does tie the game's genetically enhanced villain to the 1994 Veruca Salt song that provided his name! Here's the music video:

Another fun little popular music reference in a Wing Commander game is Arena's Broadsword Warpig, which was named after the Black Sabbath song War Pigs. RIP Ozzy!

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Here's an interesting video by ShivanSPS. It features the mod Wing Commander Saga running on a Raspberry Pi 4. I don't really know much about Raspberry Pies (Pis?), aside from how they're tiny little $35 microcomputers. Freespace 2 and WC Saga aren't new or especially demanding pieces of software by today's standards, but it still seems impressive that they run so well on such a cheap tiny machine. It sounds like these were made to run via FS2_Open and WXlauncher in a 64 bit Ubuntu environment, and instructions on how to get those things going on the Pi can be found here! Let us know if you get it to working on yours.

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We've got a treat for fans of the Wing Commander movie today! We've done high resolution scans of a collection of 48 set photographs saved from the film. These images are stunniing and they give us a new look at some of the incredible sets and props created for the movie... as well as a window into what life was like for Chris Roberts and the crew working on the film at the time!

Tiger Claw - Bridge

Tiger Claw - Flight Deck

Tiger Claw - Torpedo Room

Tiger Claw - Missile Room

Concordia - Bridge

Diligent - Bridge

Spacecraft

Time Slice

Film Crew

Chris Roberts

Sound Stages

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