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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

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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!

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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

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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!

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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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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 Forbidden Planet 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!

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Movie news aggregator ScreenRant recently interviewed Freddie Prinze Jr. on a red carpet and asked him if there were any roles he'd like to revisit... and you won't believe his answer! "If Wing Commander would have made money then maybe that would be fun to do another one. But nobody saw it, so it'll never happen." Hey, you never know! Exactly the right amount of time has passed between the 1998 Wing Commander shoot so that Prinze is now the right age to play Commodore Blair in Wing Commander Prophecy. Let's make it happen!

Archived: Download

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If you missed out on the original GOG summer sale, fear not, because they've now kicked off sequel summer classics promo. The Wing Commander series qualifies and each title is marked down 50% to $2.99 per package. Improve your summer with just a few clicks!

Relive those late summer nights spent with friends, battling through the games that defined your childhood. Reconnect with the classics you loved and the memories they carry - it’s time to play like you used to.

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Demolition Man gets our seal of approval; it's not anything brilliant but it's endlessly fun and it really compares favorably to Judge Dredd. Our next movie will be Seven Samurai (1954) by Akira Kurosawa. Seven Samurai is regarded as a timeless classic and a film that has had endless influence on films since… so it will be pretty fun to see that and decide how it might connect back to Wing Commander! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along. Please note that the movie will begin one hour early (at 9 PM Eastern/6 PM Pacific) to accommodate the run time.

The Wing Commander universe has a sea of over a dozen stars named after the sci-fi authors that inspired the series, from Clarke to Niven. But there are only three named after directors: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (both in the Enigma Sector)... and Akira Kurosawa in the Vega Sector. The system, sometimes spelled Kurasawa, first

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StarfleetDesign is a prolific and talented illustrator known for recreating obscure Star Trek-related graphics... and sometimes imagining new ones! That's exactly what happened here, with a Wing Commander-styled take on the Star Trek logo.

Star Trek / Wing Commander Mashup Logo (ArtStation)

A custom Star Trek logo in the style of the Wing Commander logo from the original game box art. This is entirely vector art created with Affinity Designer, but wit texturing and other adjustments made using Affinity Photo.

Star Trek in the style of the Wing Commander logo. Vector art created with Affinity Designer

A horizontal version, created mainly for anyone that wants to use it as a header image on social media

I actually don't know much about Wing Commander, but I am a fan of the STOP typeface created by Aldo Novarese (1971)

Detail of texture effects

Detail of raw vector art

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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

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In 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...

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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 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!

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Before Wing Commander was ever an 'interactive movie' it already had a lead actress: Saranya Carr (2629-2688). Though she is barely ever seen, the story of Carr and her daughter Morgana is a constant in the background of Wing Commander's lore. Let's take a closer look…

Saranya Carr was created by Aaron Allston for the original Wing Commander's Claw Marks manual in 1990. She is a young actress who is the lead in what is implied to be a show-within-a-show series of film serials called Luna Jones, Jumpscout. Carr was introduced in the magazine's Comm Relay news section in a story about how the Terran Confederation Service Organization is sending her to the Tiger's Claw as part of a morale-building tour. We suspect her name, an Indian given name and a British surname, is intended to hint at a more blended human culture in the 27th century.

TCSO Show Scheduled

(Tiger's Claw, TCAFCN) - There’s good news for

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I think every member of the Wing Commander movie club can agree that 1492: Conquest of Paradise was not the most thrilling film in the world. It's not that it wasn't well made but it just… sort of sat there with lavish production values that never seemed to quite live up to the story it was telling with characters that just weren't engaging enough for you to put your full head into them. But my philosophy is that mediocrity should be met with a little extra work to make things better… so we're going to use our viewing of 1492 as an excuse to really look at part of the Wing Commander movie!

We watched 1492 for a very important reason: its opening titles were a major influence on the ones Chris Roberts created for the 1999 Wing Commander movie (alongside Sphere and The Fan, which we will be viewing in the future). So technically our Wing Commander interest was over in the first four minutes but it was

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GOG.com is turning 17 years old! The Wing Commander series is discounted by 50% to celebrate the milestone. We first reported about them back in 2008 when the company was announced, and their first WC title was Privateer in June of 2011. It's pretty wild how long they've been serving up classic Wing Commander!

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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

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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!).

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Bitterman stopped by the CIC Discord the other night with a cool present for the community: scans of four Wing Commander cover stories from French magazine Joystick. The Wing Commander Prophecy preview is especially interesting... look carefully at the right VDU images in the screenshots and you'll see that some--but not all!--are from the E3 demo.

Joystick 62 - August 1995 - Wing Commander IV preview

Joystick 68 - February 1996 - Wing Commander IV review

Joystick 77 - December 1996 - Privateer 2 review

Joystick 89 - January 1998 - Wing Commander Prophecy review

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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!