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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
Find a Dralthi, pick it up -- all the day you'll have good luck. Don't you love coming across new takes on Wing Commander ships where you don't expect them? Case in point: David Müller posted this neat interpretation of Wing Commander III's Dralthi IV medium fighter that just feels so much like a modernized version of something you'd discover in a random Usenet binaries group back in the day. A well thought out and emotive take on a classic space fighter... I'd love to see more!
Wing Commander Fun Art (ArtStation)
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
Aug
Display MoreThis month's analysis of the influence held by key figures in the core systems has arrived, courtesy of Conrad Sterling of Vox Galactica.
His latest survey of system populations suggests the following five powers enjoy the largest sphere of influence:
Rank 1: Aisling Duval – 1,936 systems
Rank 2: Edmund Mahon - 1,674 systems
Rank 3: Arissa Lavigny-Duval – 1,616 systems
Rank 4: Yuri Grom – 1,201 systems
Rank 5: Li Yong-Rui – 1,183 systems
The largest increase in system influence belonged to Aisling Duval who can claim an additional 275 systems as supporters.
Vox Galactica will provide another update on the state of the powers next month.
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
…PETSCII is a character set that was introduced for the Commodore PET in 1977 and which was used for Commodore's other PCs prior to the Amiga. And where there's a character set there are users turned artists who can do incredible things with it! In 2025, Commodore fans still compete to push the limits of PETSCII art. Case in point: a new piece named Deep Space Anomaly by Sande of Hokuto Force which placed fifth at Pågadata 2025, a Swedish retro computing art event. It features a Wing Commander-style cockpit view hunting down a Dralthi, a Death Star and the Enterprise. That's fun on its own and the amount of talent required to render that with a Commodore PET's built in font is extra impressive. You can learn more and download the 'native' version at the C-64 Scene Database (download backup). Thank you to elend for finding this; we are always thrilled to find a little Wing Commander in an unlikely
Aug
Display MoreIn their original print form, the original seven Baen Wing Commander novels each open with an excerpt in their front matter. It's typically an action scene from later in the book intended to sell the book to readers not familiar with the franchise. And each one of these previews had a unique "tagline". Because this front matter isn't included in the ebook versions of the novels, these risk being lost to history… until now! Here they are, for posterity:
Freedom Flight - LEARNING BY DOING…
End Run - "Form up, you know your targets."
Fleet Action - THE LAST BEST HOPE OF MAN
Heart of the Tiger - TORA! TORA! TORA!
The Price of Freedom - LAST CONTACT
Action Stations - SCREAM-AND-LEAP! (THE KILRATHI HAVE A WORD FOR IT)
False Colors - NOW IT'S YOUR TURN...
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 The Exorcist and you can find details on why we're watching it 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
…The Wing Commander movie club made it through Seven Samurai! Wing Commander never had a 'team up' style story like Seven Samurai... but it ALMOST did! The sequel to Wing Commander Secret Ops was intended to involve a team of seven (six plus the player) elite mercenaries who operate outside the military chain of command. The project went by a number of names and was briefly formally announced as Wing Commander Strike Team... but it's best known as Shadow Force. You can read the original pitch document here. But I thought I'd pull out the character bios for the mercenaries so everyone could get to know them and think about what could have been! The character art was by a young Feng Zhu, who went on to an extraordinary career. (I do have to call out Sliver's "as sleek and lithe as panther, she uses her sexuality as a weapon" as especially goofy; how would this impact space combat? I guess it was the
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!
Aug
Thank you for joining us for the Wing Commander CIC's 27th Birthday celebration! It was a hard year in many ways, but we appreciate the Wing Commander community's constant support; they've been the best of us even when times are rough. We hope you enjoy some of the material below and are having fun with us live on the stream. We also also looking forward to the future. In this year ahead we have a new project coming to collect disk images. More info will be forthcoming, but we'll need the entire community's help to make sure we get everything. Our weekly movie club has been a blast, and that will certainly continue with everything from Heaven's Gate to 2001: A Space Odyssey on the schedule. And we'll have a big focus on Super Wing Commander this year to make sure people get to appreciate a forgotten game. A sample of that is lower down below!
Aug
LeHah has provided us a kingly gift this year: a Cameo video from Hugh Quarshie, who played Lt. Cmdr. Obutu in the Wing Commander movie! He was nice enough to spend a few minutes talking about a job he probably didn't want to remember (I mean, he was in Star Wars that same year!).
Aug
…You may have seen Super Wing Commander's unusual introduction before... but have you seen the various midgames? They're pretty fascinating! The original game had a series of midgames that would play after every other system to give you the state of the war (based on how you played): Kilrathi fighting scientists on McAuliffe, sabotage on Brimstone and so on. Super Wing Commander replaced this in the main campaign with two 'vehicle focused' cutscenes... though Prince Thrakhath makes a surprise appearance in the first one! After that, there are custom intros for Secret Missions and Campaign 2 ("Secret Missions 1.5") and an endgame that varies depending on which of your wingmen have died in the campaign! We've included them all below.
Midgame 1 - Winning
Midgame 1 - Losing
Midgame 2 - Winning
Midgame 2 - Losing
Secret Missions Intro
Campaign 2 Intro
Endgame - All Wingmen Survive
Endgame - All Wingmen Die
All Jump
Aug
I've been slowly working through the Wing Commander footage to work out what a version of the movie that represents the shooting script and the vision Chris Roberts had in his head when setting out to make the WC movie might have looked like. While this clip isn't polished in the way a theatrical release would be you get a sense of the overall ambition of the project. I think it represents well the overall scope of changes you can expect in nearly every scene once we release a full cut of the movie for everyone to enjoy. Everything in the film is recontextualized and worked to better highlight the various character arcs. I hope you enjoy it.
Aug
Would it really be a year in Wing Commander if I didn't have a new spreadsheet for you? This one is intended to help everyone debating on the forums and editing the WCPedia: a complete collection of all the dialogue from all of the Origin FX 'talking head' games. Whether you want the in flight comms from Privateer or the option of comparing the original script across multiple platforms it's all available right here.
Aug
FekLeyrTarg once again crafted a fun little scene to help ring in another year of the Wing Commander CIC! The Kilrathi assault is certainly bold, but I think the Paradigm has the definite advantage here. Thank you for all the support over these many years!
This year has been quite intense so unfortunately I didn't have the time for something more ambitious. So I decided to revisit a render I worked on many years ago. It's two Dralthi VIIs ambushing a Paradigm in orbit of a moon. Once again I used the models from the Privateer 3D Archive. The render itself was done in Blender 4.5 with some editing in Adobe Photoshop.
Aug
It's time for a new CIC Birthday Poll! Each year we ask how long folks have been visiting. It's wild that some of us have been reporting the Wing Commander news for almost thirty years now!
The old poll asked about the fabulous sketches in the Kilrathi Saga calendar, which works again for calendar year 2025! December's Strakha art was the clear winner, which is odd, since July's Rigakh is obviously the best!
Aug
Thank you once again for all of the support all year long! There are some amazing things coming in the months ahead, and we'll be here to enjoy them with all of you. Stay tuned for breaking news!
Aug
…We have some sad news to pass along today: the exOrigin Facebook group reports that veteran Wing Commander artist Craig Halverson has passed away. If Mr. Halverson's name sounds familiar it's because his excellent work graced over a dozen Origin games. We've said before but the 'Origin mystique' made it feel like familiar names like that were part of how you experienced the games. Our condolences go out to his friends and family, we will do our best to preserve his work. If you would like to share any memories we would be happy to publish them in this space.
Craig Halverson joined Origin Systems during its heyday in 1991 and quickly made a name for himself in the burgeoning art group where he worked alongside the likes of Chris Douglas, Beverly Garland, Alan Perez and Paul Steed to create some of Origin's most unique and immersive worlds. Mr. Halverson got his start in the crucible of Chris Roberts'
