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Against all odds, we enjoyed Tora! Tora! Tora! Which makes the score Wing Commander movie club one, war movies fifty. This week we've voted to travel back to the future with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). ST:tMP is a sometimes-misunderstood masterpiece that we've found has improved greatly with age… and we're eager to see if that remains the case today! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is full of spectacular effects and incredible spaceships… but the connection to Wing Commander is the music. Back when Chris Roberts was developing the original Wing Commander he told composer George Sanger (The Fatman) that he wanted the game to have an epic score similar to Jerry Goldsmith's work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Here it is mentioned in a recent recent interview with The Fatman!

We had the creative brief that was that we should do something

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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 Return of the Jedi which... you know Return of the Jedi, I don't need to explain this! 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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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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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut event happening on Discord this morning! Join us at noon EST/9 AM PST for a fun filled morning of television... that all connect to Wing Commander somehow! We'll enjoy two episodes of MST3k that have deep connections to Wing Commander III, specifically. You can find details on the shows included as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. Be sure to download the episodes so they're ready to play with the group!

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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… except this week in which the movie did not inspire Wing Commander in any way. Tonight's film is Showgirls and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. 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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The physical copies of Origin composer George Oldziey's new Wing Commander album are now being mass produced, so Mr. Oldziey has shared a few samples of what to expect. He's posted the finalized graphics files for both the CD and vinyl album art. There's also sample audio copies of the vinyl album so you can get a taste of what it will sound like in long form! Backers can log in to the project's Kickstarter updates for the links.

Greetings all, and thank you for your amazing patience. Both the CD and vinyl products are (finally) in production as we speak. In the meantime I want to share all the cover art as well as the vinyl audio files for you to check out. The vinyl audio is obviously divided into two long audio files which will give you the opportunity to listen to the tracks in sequence without having to click on individual files. One note about the side A file; it starts with a 60 second

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Independent pilots have helped eradicate large numbers of pirates in the Dhan system.
Following an unusually high increase in piracy across the system's many planetary rings, local security fleets and skilled freelancers worked to eliminate pirates and show criminals that it would be better for them to relocate.
"Pirates are too foolish to give up a life on the wrong side of the law," said Dhan Empire League head of security Harald Gomes. "It's all they know, and all they're good for. But while we can't stamp out crime forever, we can at least send the message that Dhan isn't an easy target. Attack our mining craft at your peril, ya lugheads!"
Gutamaya, thought to have deployed observers to monitor use of its recently released Corsair craft during the conflict, is said to have been 'very impressed' by its craft's performance and the anti-piracy response force in general.
Participants that

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Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club found the Search for Spock worth the effort! It sometimes feels like Star Trek III gets a bad rap just to fit together the 'even good, odd bad' Star Trek movie joke. The reality is that it only ever falters at the very end with a final ten minutes of dull Vulcan resurrection that loses more and more meaning the further we travel from the tastes of 1980s fandom. But everything else, what a movie! And not only that, Star Trek III takes the world of Star Trek II and twists it into what it will become for the next thirty years. The 'tone' of Star Trek TNG and its spinoffs is born in Search for Spock's first act… as are a huge number of the models, sets and ideas (including the modern Klingon) that will go on to fuel an enormous franchise. And a rousing story, to boot.

The big connection to Wing Commander is that Star Trek III was the origin of the

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Thirty years ago this month, Electronic Gaming Monthly pulished this short but interesting preview of the upcoming Wing Commander III 3DO. Wing Commander III 3DO had a playable build ready fairly early in development... but a lot of aspects changed before release, including a complete redo of the video player. If you look closely at the gameplay screenshots in this preview you will notice they're a lot darker and some aspects of the interface are closer to the original PC release. And check out that destroyed labeled Exeter, another indication of how WC3 3DO retains some Super Wing Commander DNA!

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Here's a little treat for anyone that likes looking at rare faces: we've done a set of much higher resolution scans of the Claw Marks wingman and Kilrathi ace heads that were redrawn in the Super Famicom port of Wing Commander I's manual. The original versions appeared in Claw Marks but they actually started life as the concept art upon which the Wing Commander I characters were based! For the Japanese SFC release, ASCII hired a local artist to redraw and colorize them!

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Verman has been experimenting with some technology to bring some of Feng Zhu's unused Privateer Online concept ships to life! They write:

It's been a long time since I contributed anything to the news, I still visit the site often and have quite a few projects for Wing Commander going on at the moment (along with a million other projects too). Well I decided to do some tinkering with 2D image to 3D Modelling AI, using a site called Meshy. I always loved one of the ship concepts for Wing Commander Online so I thought I would test out how good the AI was just using that concept art to produce a 3D model and also the textures from the artwork. I attached some screenshots.

I also made it freely available on Sketchfab so people can download it and make it better or use it in any projects or just study it...

I have also done a couple of the other models but I haven't had time to get them uploaded to

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We are sad today to report the passing of a man whose connection to Wing Commander we didn't know until it appeared in his obituary. Steve Sanders was a Austin-based voice actor who appeared in numerous Origin games starting with 1995's BioForge who died earlier this month. You can read his obituary here in the Port Aransas South Jetty; it's particularly well written and gets across that he was a good person.

Mr. Sanders is credited with three 'name' roles in Origin games. He played the main villains in both BioForge (1995) and Cybermage: Darklight Awakening (1996), the Mengele-esque Doctor Mastaba and the cyberpunk supervillain NeCrom respectively. He did double duty in BioForge as Dane, a cyborg at the emotional heart of the game. He was also credited with performing additional voices in Ultima IX, the credit given to most of the game's cast.

What we did not know is that he also acted in Wing

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Greetings WingNuts,

Maybe I'm biased because I love Planet of the Apes but we loved Planet of the Apes! It's a fantastic film: the script (by the great Rod Serling!) is a vast improvement on the original novel, adding cutting then (and sadly now)-current social commentary that at no time feels like a weight. The cast is amazing, the cinematography is still stunning and the ape costumes that the entire thing hinges on are pulled off perfectly.

To compare to Wing Commander III we thought we'd put together a quick rogue gallery showing all the Kilrathi costumes from the game as clearly as possible that you can compare to the ape costumes. You can find some great behind the scenes photos of the workshop that built the Kilrathi here.

There are three basic types of apes in Planet of the Apes: chimpanzees, orangutangs and gorillas. This lets the costumes start to distinguish between different characters pretty

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We have terrible news to share today: veteran actor Tchéky Karyo passed away on Friday from cancer at age 72. Karyo was an extremely talented veteran Turkish and French actor who was known for crossing between roles in French cinema and Hollywood. Americans will know him in La Femme Nikita, Goldeneye and The Patriot to name only a few, and space fans in particular will remember his appearance as Georges Méliès in the grand finale of From the Earth to the Moon. Our own Wing Commander movie club recently spotted him in 1492: Conquest of Paradise and immediately declared him to be the only bright spot of the film! I myself knew him for The Bear and Eric Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris well before he ever graced our franchise with his talents. We want to send our strongest condolences to his family, friends, fans and everyone else that loved him. You can read a more complete account of his passing and career

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There's a great new YouTube video making the rounds this week! Space Cadet Rewind is a channel dedicated to a careful study of classic space sims like Wing Commander and X-Wing and they've now tackled the original Wing Commander Privateer! The review (such as it is!) is very thoughtful and fair and it's very interesting to see how this classic game plays to someone with the benefit of knowing the next few decades of design evolution! The full thing is three hours but it sure doesn't feel that way.

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FekLeyrTarg has a beautiful remaster to share with fellow Wingnuts today. He's gone through the Wing Commander Academy game soundtrack and overhauled it with an SC-55 sound font. This is described as giving the game the "Kilrathi Saga treatment" based on the digital audio enhancements that those games received. He's matched up the new tracks with the appropriate in-game clips in a wonderful YouTube vid below. You can also separately download the new album in MP3 (18 meg zip) or WAV (131 meg zip).

Happy 25th Birthday Wing Commander CIC!

What if the PC game "Wing Commander Academy" (not to be confused with the animated TV-series) received a Windows port like the "Kilrathi Saga" version of "Wing Commander I" and "Wing Commander II - Vengeance of the Kilrathi" and George Oldziey re-orchestrated the music again? Find out in this video.

To render each music track with Patch93's Roland SC-55 soundfont in

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There's a contemporary claim that Ishtar is a movie that didn't deserve its reputation as one of the worst films of all time; that separated from time and temperament, it holds up as an entertaining film. Well: we have determined that this is not true. Ishtar is a bad movie and it's one whose existence remains mystifying. Sometimes a million strange, well intended pieces can come together just right to make something special. That did not happen here.

… but it did happen in Privateer 2: The Darkening! Which is why we were very interested to learn that the two productions actually share a casting director. The Zimmerman of the agency listed in the Ishtar credits, Davis-Zimmerman, is none other than Jeremy Zimmerman who would go on to not only cast but also APPEAR in Privateer 2! He appears as the half-masked Blessed Brew Bidder #1 during the Uncle Kashumai 'auction' mission.

But he's not the only Ishtar

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I'm always excited to discover a new piece of Wing Commander-related advertising... and we've got a big one today! Baen ran these unique magazine advertisements for Wing Commanders End Run and Fleet Action in Science Fiction Chronicle in December 1993 and January 1994, respectively. There's some pretty unique copy in here: "soil words from a soft Kilrathi mouth." (?!) It's crazy to think that there was a time when the two biggest Wing Commander novels came out just months apart; the Wing Commander universe certainly grew by leaps and bounds in 1994!

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Origin composer George Oldziey is back with a new status update on the latest vinyl album of Wing Commander music. While CD production was completed earlier this year, the larger vinyl records have been trickier to produce. George is still pushing the producer hard to deliver in a timely manner, but forces outside his control have pushed the timetable of complex modern manufacturing out a bit. In the mean time, see below for a very cool behind-the-scenes look at how Mr. Oldziey worked with the live orchestra in Budapest to craft his latest musical delight!

Greetings all. Just to let you know I'm not "slacking off" here. I'm in contact with the company making the vinyl deliverables. Vinyl is a very hot format these days. Here is the latest reply from the company making your vinyl discs...

Hi George,

I'm so sorry I did not get back your voicemail yesterday, I was unexpectedly out of the office.

I

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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 Highlander (1986) which, according to Chris Roberts, inspired the the original character of Paladin in Wing Commander I. 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!