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Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

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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Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

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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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!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

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 Sphere (1998) 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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Have you ever wondered why the original Wing Commander's cheat code is referred to as the "finger of death"? Sure, you use your fingers to activate it… but that's also how pretty much every cheat code that exists works. There's a little bit more to the story than you would expect: the term actually goes back to the game's original Quality Assurance team and it's based on a feature cut from the game!

Wait, what? That's right, at one point Wing Commander had a second animated hand in the cockpit. The design was that you would see your 'left' hand react to certain events in combat. If you scored a kill you would make a fist and when your wingman scored you would give them a thumbs up. Here's the original art assignment from the game's production schedule, assigning the task of digitizing the hand artwork to Daniel Bourbonnais.

What does that have to do with the cheat code? As a joke, the team replaced the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

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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AD has come upon a pretty fascinating vintage article that had not been in our community consciousness. It's a preview of Origin's product lineup from the April 1991 issue of The One, an Amiga-focused computer outlet. It includes a very early description of Wing Commander II and some rendered images of ships in progress… including one we've never seen before!

We asked Wing Commander II director Siobhan Beeman about the unknown ship and she was kind enough to think back so far to figure it out:

Vaguely. Early drafts of the story had more capital ship engagements, which is why torpedoes were introduced and why the Concordia is a strike carrier with a spinal-mount weapon. I believe this art is for a frigate or destroyer class that would have shown up with multiple names.

Awesome! You can certainly see how a frigate with this design would fit right alongside the Gilgamesh destroyer and Waterloo cruiser in

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The Wing Commander movie club has made it through RoboCop 3 which, while not a good film by any means, ended nicely. But after two weeks of objectively lower quality films, we asked everyone to vote from a selection of six Oscar winners. And the victor was psychological horror classic Rosemary's Baby (1968), which won Best Actress in a Supporting Role. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Why Rosemary's Baby? We previously talked about directors honored with references in the Wing Commander universe, specifically George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Akira Kurosawa and their associated star systems. We've since picked out two more for the movie pool: Michael Cimino (the TCS Cimino appears in the Prophecy simulator) and Roman Polanski, tuckerized as the Wing Commander movie's "Bishop" Polanski. As with the others, we've selected an additional classic to represent each. We'll be back in

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Brewer Corporation has labelled the withdrawal of its Trailblazer megaship fleet as a 'vote of confidence' in the self-sustainability of thousands of new colonies.
The Trailblazer vessels were originally deployed to provide logistical support and essential resources to independent colonisation initiatives at the edge of inhabited space and are now being refit for deployment for other purposes.
"The success of the Trailblazer fleet will leave its mark in the history books of human colonisation," Mark Rennik, Chief Operating Officer for Brewer Corporation commented.
"And now, once the crews have taken a well-deserved rest and the internals are refit, they will continue to serve the Brewer Corporation in other duties."
To reinforce the message, Rennik also announced the availability of the newly commissioned Dodec starports for colonisation efforts, which can be built at any available Tier 3 port

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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 Robocop 3 (1993) 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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The rarely seen 2006 film Visual Futurist: The Art and Life of Syd Mead is back! The group responsible for preserving Mead's legacy has remastered the film and made it available for sale and rent on streaming services:

• AppleTV
• Amazon
• Google Play
• YouTube

I watched Visual Futurist in advance of this update and found it very compelling! I went in knowing that Mead was both an incredible talent and someone loved by their peers... and the documentary quickly confirmed both of those things. The film doesn't cover his work on Wing Commander Prophecy's Nephilim but it does showcase a lot of incredible art from his storied career, with extended sections covering fan favorites like Blade Runner, TRON, 2010 (topical!) and Aliens. Learning about his thought process about industrial design was fascinating and there was plenty I'd never heard before. I had no idea that he had designed a luxury yacht for Donald Trump and

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Need a Wing Commander Academy-themed Twitch stream overlay? Who doesn't! Luckily, Reddit user Ford Crown Vic Koth has posted exactly that! Be sure and let us know if you're ever streaming Wing Commander; we're happy to spread the word!

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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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Here's a preview of Wing Commander SNES that we found on eBay, of all places! We snagged it from one of those 'cut up magazines and sell them as posters' accounts and as of this moment we don't know where it was from. The listing claimed it dates to 1992, which makes sense, but we haven't found the specific magazine it comes from. When we do, we'll track down a higher resolution version! But we thought it would be good to go ahead and get it in the archive because the article layout is just so pretty. Look at those cool alternating icons!

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I thought it would be fun to take a look at Wing Commander III's magnificent Warbirds 2669 poster with some 'behind the screens' notes where they came to me. Do you have fond memories of Warbirds, or anything else fun to note with the pages? Let us known on the forums!

• Warbirds is Wing Commander III's "feelie," the traditional 'extra' included with Origin games. Wing Commander games typically had paper feelies compared to the physical runes and coins and the like included with the Ultima series.
• The foldout was included with the original PC release of Wing Commander III as well as the Macintosh and 3DO ports. It was not included with the PlayStation or the Kilrathi Saga versions.
• The full color version seen here was included with the premiere edition of Wing Commander III. Most other releases include a greyscale version (with colored highlights for each faction in purple or orange).
• The European 3DO

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It seems like Bethesda's Starfield is one of those games that comes off as a little bland… until it gets into the hands of the right person. Case in point: a YouTuber named Cornelius has recreated the Wing Commander movie's CF-117b Rapier in the game… and they've made an hour long video about the process! The end result is pretty shocking and the video shows how carefully researched the whole thing was (down to images of the Confederation Handbook!). If you're interested in Starfield or just insanely cool fan work, this one's for you:

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It looks like No Man Sky's free capital ship designing expansion is a hit! Last month we shared some shots of corvettes created by Shaggy and now he has another shot that shows off the interior of his Venture:

Here's a shot of the galley to the bridge on the Venture as well as a shot of it parked above CNS Alexandria, my floating base on my home planet. I have a shot of the cargo bay but it's not that interesting. The Venture is also a very narrow ship, compared to the Kamrani, so there wasn't a lot of space to work with room wise.

Meanwhile, a BlueSky user named Redalgo has been recreating an entire fleet of ships! Starting with the Thunderbolt VII (skeet

Recently had some fun piecing together a corvette in homage to the Thunderbolt VII.

And now after some polishing and work on the nose...

Pakhtahn Phantom (skeet

Next up in No Man's Sky is an attempt at recreating the Kilrathi Paktahn, specifically the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The research for one of our recent posts required that we determine what starbases appeared in Wing Commander Prophecy's simulator. Just one problem: there's no guide to the simulator missions online! We decided to create our own and have added a super detailed page for all ten missions to the WCPedia:

• Level 0: Basic Flight Training
• Level 1: Basic Offensive Strategies
• Level 2: Defensive Strategies and Escorting
• Level 3: Heavy Weapons Training
• Level 4: Kilrathi Fighter Gauntlet
• Level 5: Timed Fighter Sweep
• Level 6: Capital Ship Sweep
• Level 7: Carrier Defense
• Level 8 Alien Fighter Gauntlet
• Level 9: Advanced Alien Fighter Gauntlet

We've done a lot of research into how Wing Commander Prophecy works to figure out things like how the gauntlet spawns work... and in the process we've learned some very interesting new things about these oft-ignored missions! Here are some of the high points:

• If you approach within 6,500

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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! This time around we've got a classic documentary about the Cold War AND the first arc of Exosquad, the 1993 animated series that brought together the creative team that would go on to make Wing Commander Academy. 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!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

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 Casablanca (1942) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!