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Back in August of last year, Wing Commander composer George Oldziey graciously live streamed the orchestral recording sessions for his spectacular new Wing Commander album. If you missed out on the chance to see them, we've added screen recordings of both to YouTube. They aren't a substitute for the real thing but hopefully they'll be useful for reference in the future!
Session One
Session Two
Jul
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Spock has been found – and guess what, he regenerated and lived his whole life and happened to end up exactly as old as he was the first time. What luck! In all seriousness, we loved Star Trek III and talked a lot about how important it was in setting up the next twenty years of Star Trek storytelling.
This week, things are changing just a little bit: we're moving from the previous collection of films, which were exclusively ones which inspired Wing Commander, to add a new set of movies that are referenced in Wing Commander stories (either in front of or behind the screens). If we come across another reference to a movie that inspired Wing Commander, we'll prioritize that in future weeks. Until then, enjoy a new batch of films with a little more variety… and some interesting Wing Commander connections that we'll explore in these intro posts.
With that in mind, we're kicking things off with the Star Wars
Aug
Today's your last chance to get those summer classics at half price! I couldn't put it any better than GOG themselves:
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.
May
…Did you know that Cobalt 60's Prophecy album wasn't Wing Commander's first flirtation with electro-industrial music? The band Velvet Acid Christ actually composed a track in 1994 called "Furless Freak" for an album called Dimension 8 that heavily sampled Super Wing Commander. When we say heavily we mean it: you're going to hear the first briefing and what seems to be a playthrough of the following mission. It's weird and cool! Is it worth your time? Yes, this is objectively the greatest song ever recorded.
Download MP3
Dimension 8 was not released commercially at the time but it was included as a hidden bonus in mp3 format on VAC's 2000 album Twisted Thought Generator. It was later made available for free at the band's website and in 2020 it was remastered for a digital release which you can purchase today! Here's the official description:
Dimension 8 by Velvet Acid Christ follows their previous
Jul
…We recently put together an article covering the names of the different transports in Wing Commander II. A few weeks later I was surprised to discover I had received a pretty fascinating anonymous message about it:
I was just reading the Wing Commander II transports article, and noticing the breakdown with the comm portraits I remembered: have you guys ever written about how those portraits are originally from Ultima VI (Gwenno and Nomaan)? I can't be the only one who noticed that, right?We had not written such an article because we had never noticed the connection! But sure enough, it's 100% true: both of the VDU images for the male and female freighter pilots in Wing Commander II are reused from NPC portraits in Ultima VI! To the best of my knowledge (and despite the huge amount of crossover between Wing Commander and Ultima players, myself included) I've never seen anyone else point this out.
May
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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
May
…Greetings WingNuts,
Epic war movies haven't fared great with the Wing Commander movie club so far; a lot of classic air combat movies have come off as either extremely slow (The Dambusters, Battle of Britain) or kind of silly (Midway). Surprisingly, Tora! Tora! Tora! didn't share that fate. It's an incredibly literal telling of Pearl Harbor that abandons any pretense of character drama but it still reads as an impressive spectacle and a story that feels worth telling. The fact that it was so significantly a Japanese and American co-production also makes the film itself an interesting part of the event itself!
The Wing Commander movie references Tora! Tora! Tora! Immediately as it starts, basing the Pegasus attack on the Pearl Harbor bombing. Here's how some of the angles of the attack compare. The movie was actually intended to reference Pearl Harbor even more by opening with a 'fake out' that would've
Jun
…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
Apr
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.
May
…There have been exciting developments with Mash's enhancement patch! For starters, refinement continues with the original program. There's a new joystick setup utility, improved visual elements and a variety of bugfixes which have been implemented. Even bigger news is there is also a WC4 enhancement patch! Similar to the WC3 version, the game can now be played in high resolution and the cutscenes can be upgraded to high quality. There is also support for playing in a window and similar quality of life improvements. Give it a try and let Mash know what you think at the CIC Forums!
The main new feature is a controller setup utility which you can access in-game by pressing Alt+J on the Victory, via the Main Terminal under controls\joystick calibration or during space flight using the Alt+O menu\calibrate. This is the visual part of a general controller overhaul replacing the old Multimedia Joystick
Jun
…What's in a name? One of the great, small innovations in Wing Commander II is that any ship can be assigned a custom name. The game's mission designers took great advantage of this, naming all sorts of background spacecraft… including 23 different human transports across the three campaigns! WC2 did an excellent job of coming up with 'unusual' names for its ships; while many future settings simply put classic warships into space, WC2 found more unique choices… especially for the Clydesdales and Free Traders.
I recently made a surprise discovery while playing Special Operations 2: a Clydesdale which we had always listed as the "Coatmain" was actually the "Cootmain". Which obviously got me thinking: what the heck is a Cootmain? I wasn't able to find the term anywhere, not on Google, not in old Usenet posts and not even in the sum total of human knowledge stored at the Internet Archive! From there I
Jul
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!
Jun
…What's the buzz? More Hornets! An artist named ulimann644 has built a new CG model of the Hornet and posted some wondeful compositions on DeviantArt. You can find a wonderful gallery of their other work here... and we can't wait to see what the next Wing Commander ship will be!
F-36 Hornet (DeviantArt)
This is my first WING COMMANDER mesh - a few others will follow this year.
I've started with the F-36 HORNET from the first WC-PC-Game. I made some modifications in the hope that the fighter will look better than in the templates.
Hope you like it.
Software:
- Lightwave 2024
- PhotoshopCombat Space Patrol (DeviantArt)
This is my first WING COMMANDER Wallpaper with my F-36 HORNET mesh.
KILLER BEE 701, flown from Lieutenant-Colonel Deion "COOL TOUCH" Grafton, and KILLER BEE 707, flown from 2nd-Lieutenant Carrie "SILVER" Langdon, are on patrol.
Hope you like it.
Software:
- Lightwave 2024
- Photoshop
- ImageFX
Mar
…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
Apr
Display MoreHere'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!
Sep
An eBay listing fo a Wing Commander Prophecy flight suit recently ended. We thought we'd add the quality photos to the archive. It seems to have belonged to a prop house, probably one that purchased it surplus after Electronic Arts sold off their stored props. No label is visible, so it's likely that this belonged to an extra. Maybe Smudo?!
Jun
Here's an interesting little eBay pickup: a free pass to see a preview of the Wing Commander movie! The screening took place on a Tuesday, March 9th 1999, in Fresno California. This was just a couple days before the movie released which means it was for a press screening where various outlets were allowed to preview the movie to prepare their reviews for the following Friday. These passes would've been distributed to the public to allow people to fill out the rest of the theater… and hopefully those people would pass along good word of mouth to their friends. Here's a nice high quality scan of the ticket:
Jun
…Greetings WingNuts,
The Wing Commander movie club is back from Hell in the Pacific and we were surprised by how interesting this movie we had never heard of before was! Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune are the only actors in the film, enemies unable to communicate abandoned on an island in the pacific during World War II. They must go from deadly foes to reluctant friends in a compelling anti-war story with great acting and very meaningful cinematography. The end result is more like an overly-lush stage play than any of the epic war films we've seen in previous weeks… totally unexpected, to say the least!
While Hell in the Pacific was absolutely the prototype for Enemy Mine and at least three Star Trek episodes we could not find the Wing Commander connection. We're going to make the extremely rare claim that there isn't an apparent one. Chris Brown, VFX director on the Wing Commander movie, cited Hell in
Jun
…Greetings WingNuts,
The Wing Commander movie club has screened Firefox and what we found was a big surprise: a very, very dour and serious movie about a man charged with stealing a mind controlled airplane. Firefox seems to be a conservative reaction to James Bond's late 1970s outing, offering in its first half an alternative version that completely lacks any sort of levity (or women!). It's clearly deliberate and deserves some credit for that but it's quite a slow walk to the Firefox factory. The second half of the movie, which stretches an expertly-constructed airplane chase to forty plus minutes, is better but never quite reaches the promise of the concept. Firefox's plot also reminded us a great deal of Strike Commander, which climaxes with a behind the lines operation to steal a pair of prototype jets which must then battle it out in an epic finale.
Firefox's major inspiration for Wing Commander
Apr
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If there's one thing we learned from Highlander it's that there can be only one. No, we actually learned the origin of Paladin's ship's name! More on that in the after action report. But next week's movie is even more of a crowd pleaser: Aliens (1986). So get ready to join the space marines and learn what Wing Commander took away from James Cameron's all time classic. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
We were first inspired to look at Aliens because of another quote from Chris Roberts' original treatment for the Wing Commander movie. Here he compares his goal to Aliens in a way that frankly makes a lot of sense: they're both movies where the characters are stuck on their own in a terrible situation and drama arises out of how they respond differently to that situation.
"The idea behind this project is to create a film that has the feeling of a tight character-driven rollercoaster
