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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 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!
Nov
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Despite the fact that it was longer than a Redstone missile, The Right Stuff stood the test of time! And if you can believe it, it was our 52nd film and it marked the end to the first YEAR of the Wing Commander movie club. To kick off year two, we're going back to 1942 for a genuine classic: Casablanca. It's one of those movies people in my generation maybe only they assume they've seen… it'll be interesting to see how it goes! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
Our connection to Wing Commander comes from Wing Commander II Special Operations 2 in which Minx references the movie's famous closing line, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship", while she is evil flirting with Jazz in the third 'second chance' mission.
JAZZ: You've done well, Minx. And now that my plan has succeeded--- ---and you've brought the Morningstar prototype to the Mandarins--- ---I'm
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
Jul
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
Nov
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This is the first in a series of irregular updates covering the musical artists of the 27th and 28th centuries. Wing Commander has surprisingly detailed backstories for several different groups despite the fact that we never actually got to hear any of their music! In each update we'll first offer the in-universe capsule biography and then share all the sources behind it.
tHE lOVE aNIMALS (sometimes stylzed as tHE lOVEaNIMALS and The LoveAnimals) are a retro-folk technotronic female trio that became popular in the late 2650s. The group was formed by guitarist Uil Yth, an enigmatic figure whose philosophy opposed violence in any form and referred to their output their "musical vision". Their music was said to have a "smooth, synthetic sound". The performers played modern instruments but dressed in distinct retro clothing.
In 2669, tHE lOVE aNIMALS released "let sleeping breezes lie," a record that would
Jul
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!
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
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.
Oct
…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
Aug
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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
Jul
Display MoreStarfleetDesign 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
May
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!
Nov
It's already been a big month for sales, and Wing Commander discounts are back with GOG's Black Friday Sale. The WC series is once again a familiar 50% off to help ring in the holiday season. Make your gift-buying experience easier with Wing Commander for everyone!
Additionally, Wing Commander Academy is the latest addition to GOG's preservation program of classic games. Here's the update:
What improvements we made to this game:1.01 GOG v2 changelog (25 November 2025)
- Optimized the DOSBox configuration for better performance.
- Enabled Cloud Saves support.
- Fixed a crash that occurred when starting a non-gauntlet game.
- Stability validated.
- Fully compatible with Windows 10 and 11.
Oct
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!
Aug
…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
Jul
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.
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
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!
Oct
Display MoreBitterman 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
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...
