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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 Star Trek: The Motion Picture which inspired the music in the original Wing Commander. 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!
Aug
…Years ago, we scanned a copy of what has been referred to as the Wing Commander "series bible" (here, PDF) It's a massive document that records all sorts of information about the Wing Commander series up through Wing Commander III. The copy we preserved came from the actual physical document that the Maverick team maintained and updated over time and which was rescued after the team was disbanded.
The core of this document was what might be called the Wing Commander licensing bible, a hundred page document put together just after the release of Special Operations 1 for the express purpose of being a reference for the writers of the Wing Commander novel series. Dr. Forstchen, for instance, was sent a copy of this initial document and used it for reference during the writing of End Run, Fleet Action and so on. For anyone thinking about that material, it's valuable to have a copy of the original bible so
Aug
It's hard to believe, but today marks 27 years of the Wing Commander CIC! This is the anniversary of the first day we opened our doors at wcnews.com, and it's been a wild ride ever since! As we recently announced, we'll be holding a big event this coming Saturday to officially celebrate with everyone. Visit us on the CIC Discord and the accompanying live stream on August 16th at 7:00 pm EDT (4:00 pm PDT and 11:00 pm GMT). We're looking forward to spending a super fun evening with you!
Aug
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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
Jul
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There's probably no point in reviewing The Empire Strikes Back, but it's safe to report that we all loved it. This week, the Wing Commander movie club is going back to the 1950s to take a look at the beginning of our future. We'll be watching Forbidden Planet, a movie that spawned (among many other things) the original Star Trek! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
Wing Commander Academy's Lords of the Sky opens with Tolwyn briefing the cadets. He shows a map of the Dioscuri system which they'll be patrolling and if you look very carefully you can see the background painters have added a number of labels to surrounding stars. One of them is a nood to Star Trek (M1701) and one is a reference to Alien (LV442). And at the top left of the image you can find C57D… a reference to the hero starship in Forbidden Planet, the United Planets Cruiser C-57D!
Privateer 2 doesn't just name ships
Jul
…In 1994, Origin Systems recognized that they needed to cash in on the nascent first person shooter craze. For roughly a decade, Origin had been the star of the game development pantheon, known for pushing the limits of technology and making cutting edge games that had no comparison. The long running Ultima series had established the company's street cred and the surprising success of Wing Commander had made their mark legendary.
Now, that was changing. Young upstart Id Software's DooM had set the world on fire and everyone in the industry was racing to follow it up. Origin, now a corporate subsidiary of Electronic Arts, was starting to seem stodgy in comparison. DooM grew the PC gaming audience in leaps and bounds and at the same time conditioned them to expect a new kind of game. What specifically made DooM magic? The snappy gameplay, the clever level design, the aesthetic and its ultraviolence, the
Aug
…When it comes to science fiction, sandworms are everywhere. We largely owe that to the enduring popularity of Dune. Its desert planet is defined by impossibly huge worms which play a major role in the story.. and that has led to decades of sandworms in fiction, from Beetlejuice to a Star Citizen demo. And Wing Commander is technically no exception! We don't ever get a visual of sandworms in the Wing Commander universe but we do know of at least THREE planets that are home to such creatures! Let's take a quick tour of the universe…
Brimstone II: In the Wing Commander I & II Ultimate Strategy Guide, veteran Carl LaFong recounts his first days at the Terran Confederation Space Naval Academy. He includes a note given to him on arrival from the senior class as part of the hazing of new students. It mentions, among other things, that they are "lower than a sand worm in the Brimstone System." Here's the whole
Aug
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Seven Samurai and and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 6 PM PST/9 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time! Please note that the movie is starting one hour earlier than usual to accommodate its run time.
Aug
…The Video Game History Foundation recently announced that they had acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer magazine, a gaming periodical that ran from 1982 to 1990, and made it freely available online under the Creative Commons license. This is an invaluable resource for early gaming historians… but the magazine ended its run in July 1990, two months before the original Wing Commander was released. Nevertheless, Danthrax (amazing Wing Commander Armada reference!) discovered two pretty interesting articles that are relevant to our interests!
The first article is from Computer Entertainer's penultimate issue, June 1990. It's short but it covers a very important point in history: the initial announcement that Origin will show off a space sim named 'Squadron' at the upcoming summer CES trade show.
Origin has two new programs to show at CES
First in series of Ultima spin-offs plus space combat simulation
Jul
…I made a terrible discovery while looking through our archive: we have not updated on the incredible Privateer 2 artwork of Jayden Morris (ArtStation) in years and they have recreated at least two truly incredible ships in that time. We reported on their stunning remake of the Anhur landing cutscene and recreation of the Jincilla Veldor using Star Citizen assets... but not their modern-game-quality models of the Straith and the Heron. We'll collect all of it in this update for posterity!
Morris has created a wonderful set of renders and animations of both ships, presenting them similar to a Star Citizen concept sale with different liveries, animations showing how they work and even some associated lore!
Privateer 2 - Straith (ArtStation)
Remake of the Straith light fighter ship from Privateer 2 (1996).
Original: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Straith_Light_Fighter_PL01
Using weapon models from Star
Jul
…Greetings WingNuts,
We weren't going to do after action reports for movies that were just referenced by Wing Commander… but there's so much we noticed in The Empire Strikes Back that we decided to keep it going and at least post what was referenced each week. Plus, we have to have a place for the weekly Sully picture!
Here's the "we found them" line that's quoted in Wing Commander Prophecy:
Hoth itself gets a nod on Wing Commander Academy. Mark Hamill again faces a snow cave in The Price of Victory:
And then there's the appearance of the Super Star Destroyer echoed in Prince Thrakhath's enormous dreadnought. Like the 22km Wing Commander ship, fans have spent decades bickering about the length of the SSD (it's 19 km).
Darth Vader famously executes an officer during the attack on Hoth. Dr. Forstchen first has Prince Thrakhath do the same in End Run…
“Now tell me this, Jamuka,” Thrakhath said quietly,
Jul
…
The Wing Commander movie club survived our trek to Altair IV! Forbidden Planet was a pretty fascinating movie, a prototype for the modern 'serious' science fiction film… and a huge part of the DNA of Star Trek, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and more. This week, we're headed back to Earth… the Earth of the near future! This week's movie is Demolition Man, an extremely fun action movie from 1993. So plan to order some Taco Bell and form on our wings for a modern… masterpiece, I guess. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
The Wing Commander connection here is that music from Demolition Man was used during the production of the Wing Commander movie as a 'temp track'. Temp tracking is a process by which a film is given temporary music before it has its own score in order to show everyone a sense of what is being worked towards. In the case of Demolition Man, a Elliot Goldenthal track
Aug
Greetings WingNuts,
Last week, we watched the 1993 action classic Demolition Man. The only major connection to Wing Commander was that Chris Roberts used a track from the movie when temp tracking Wing Commander. Here's the scene in question as it appears in the movie… the music is pretty hidden under the gunfight! Can you imagine the scramble scene in Wing Commander sounding like this?
Sully is a certified fan of both Taco Bell and Pizza Hut; dono't make him choose!
Aug
…Alias|Wavefront (now a subsidiary of AutoDesk) is a company with a long history of developing industry-focused 3D rendering tools. Origin's FMV Wing Commander games used their PowerAnimator suite for their CG work and the team at Digital Anvil used Maya for working on the Wing Commander film. Every year Alias|Wavefront produced a VHS 'showreel' that was part advertisement and part thank you for their loyal customers. It would include dozens of clips of projects from the previous year and then some longer segments describing how some of the work was accomplished.
DMJC was recently browsing their 1996 demo tape and found a fun surprise: a clip from Wing Commander IV! It turns out that Chris Roberts was eager to have his team's work shown alongside film production groups like ILM and encouraged his artists to submit their best efforts… and guess what, they compare pretty favorably with the ones being
Mar
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 The Last Starfighter (1984) which inspired the Raptor fighter in the original Wing Commander. 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!
Jul
…In our recent update archiving articles from Aint it Cool News there was a story which mentioned Wing Commander movie storyboards in the January 1998 issue of Ultimate PC, a UK-based magazine. I decided to look up the article and it is... something! It's an extensive and interesting piece on the merging of Hollywood and game development which includes both a focus on Wing Commander Prophecy and a fascinating sidebar interview with Chris Roberts (then in pre-production on the movie). It also features an extremely 1990s layout and what may be the least flattering photograph of Chris Roberts ever published! Most interesting of all, the media is clearly all sourced from the Wing Commander Prophecy EPK... which accidentally included the 'test' storyboards Origin developed for the movie while Chris was still putting it together there. So the AICN report is actually accidentally correcting that error and
Apr
…The team at GOG recently announced that Wing Commander I & II and Privateer 2 would be joining their GOG Preservation Program. Now they've issued updated versions of both releases which gives us a look at what this actually means!
The answer seems to be 'not a lot, but not nothing'. The patch notes are reprinted below. All of the "verified" and "validated" items just mean they checked to see if the game still loads, so those aren't particularly interesting (or even accurate in the case of Privateer 2, which suffers fro crippling slowdown issues in space). But there are a couple of gems in here, including the addition of the French version of Privateer 2 the re-enabling of Wing Commander I's transfer utilities and Wing Commander II's installer options.
Privateer 2: The Darkening:
Added French localization.
Validated stability.
Verified compatibility with Windows 10 and 11.
Verified Cloud Saves support.Wing
May
…Here's a neat discovery courtesy of a brief memory someone mentioned on BlueSky. A documentary where Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven played Wing Commander? It sounded too specific not to be real and sure enough, a quick search revealed that the pair appeared in the second episode ("To The Brink of Eternity") of a 1992 British documentary called Pandora's Box.
The documentary itself is about much heavier things than Wing Commander and Pournelle and Niven are appearing not as science fiction authors but because of their involvement in proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars") to the Reagan administration. But as part of their interview, the film crew captured Pournelle very eagerly playing Wing Commander to use as coverage. Here's that clip:
It's worth noting that based on the ship flown (Rapier), the skybox objects (red nebula, blue planet) and the progression of enemy ships (a Gratha
Jul
Here's a little treasure: a Swedish magazine article about flight tactics in the original Wing Commander that has had a series of original maneuvering diagrams commissioned for it! They feature original 3D models of the Hornet, Dralthi and Dorkir (!) that seem to have been created for this purpose and not seen again. Even if you can't read Swedish, this one is worth a look! The article originally appeared in a 1993 issue of Datormagazin (Number 12, July 15 to August 11).
Aug
To the Wing Commander Combat Information Center's 27th birthday celebration! TONIGHT at 7:00 PM Eastern US (4:00 PM Pacific and 11:00 PM GMT). Share a wonderful evening with us all in #Wingnut on Discord!
- A Super Stream!
- An Awesome Archive!
- Return of the Mac!
- Ships and Scripts!
- Fan Fellowship!
- Cake? ...and more!
So join us in Discord, channel #WingNut! See you there!
