Wing Commander

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The greatest Maniac of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time! Director Quentin Tarantino has come for... Matthew Lillard? While promoting his new Kill Bill-based Fortnight expansion, Tarantino made several outrageous statements calling out specific actors... including, for some reason, Wing Commander's Matthew Lillard. Lillard, himself promoting the new Five Nights at Freddy's movie at a convention, reacted soulfully:

Quentin Tarantino this week said he didn't like me as an actor. Listen, listen, listen. The point is is that it hurts your feelings. It sucks. And he wouldn't say that to Tom Cruise. Quentin wouldn't say he doesn't like Tom Cruise cuz he likes Tom Cruise. He wouldn't say that to somebody who's a topline actor in Hollywood. I'm very popular in this room. I am not very popular in Hollywood. Two totally different microcosms, right? And so, you know, it's it's humbling

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The Digital Antiquarian is back with another article about the history of Chris Roberts' career, this time ostensibly covering the founding of Digital Anvil and the making of the Wing Commander movie.

We've reported on these articles in the past with little commentary. This time, though, I want to stress that these articles are incredibly misleading. They are poorly researched blog entries built around an incredibly inappropriate bias. Their entire gimmick is that they attempt to mimic the form and tone of academic writing without any of the necessary rigor. Anyone familiar with the subjects being discussed (this is not limited to the Wing Commander pieces) pretty quickly recognizes how they work: they cap a generally uninteresting personal review with a lengthy rewrite of someone else's article that takes every opportunity to intentionally twist meanings towards whatever personal narrative the author

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Perhaps the less said about last week's screening of Crash the better! No, it was a pretty fascinating movie and absolutely one that made you think. Just… not one you'd tell your parents you were watching! This week, the Wing Commander movie club is going to go with something much, much safer: all time crowd favorite Back to the Future (1985). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The big connection between Wing Commander is, once again, the flying car! We've already talked about how The Last Starfighter's Starcar and Blade Runner's police car influenced the flying cars seen on New Detroit. But we need to give some credit to Back to the Future's evolution of the idea and specifically how (at the end of the movie) the Delorean's wheels turn in and stay that way for the flight (the Starcar also does this, but they're then sealed closed). Both "car" and "jacko" (the silver one) fly this

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There's a small but satisfying discovery for fans of tragically lost games: we've found a screenshot from the cancelled Wing Commander II port for the Sega Genesis! This screenshot showing a Broadsword targetting a Sartha (or a Drakhri?) and viewing a Grikath appears in a March 1993 Electronic Gaming Monthly supplement called the "1994 Video Game Preview Guide" which collects previews of games shown at that year's Las Vegas CES. And it was sponsored by Electronic Arts' EA Sports division! If you compare this Broadsword cockpit to the game you'll see it isn't a stock PC shot, it has been modified for the console version.

WING COMMANDER II
The popular PC classic is now on the Genesis. Using the revolutionary ASICS chip, the action is smooth and incredibly fast. Battle against the Kilrathi Empire for control over space.
BY ELECTRONIC ARTS

Wing Commander II for the Genesis was being developed for Electronic

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Here's a couple of slick screenshots from Cmdr Exorcist's Tarsus built for Space Engineers. It's a little blocky due to the nature of the game, but the overall layout looks pretty good!

"Sorry boys, I'm just a tourist with a fried nav console."

The legendary TARSUS from Wing Commander Privateer is the latest addition to my shipyard workshop. I hope you'll enjoy flying this beast!

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The Wing Commander movie club is back from our vacation to Westworld and, well, there are still a few bugs to be worked out. The movie holds up very well, it's still tremendously fun. Objectively, you recognize that it isn't much of a story as over half the run time is devoted to setting up the world and explaining how the theme park works… but subjectively, that's the fun part and Michael Crichton made exactly the right choice focusing on what's actually most interesting here. And after so many somber British war movies, its breezy sub-90-minute run time was certainly a nice feature!

We already talked about Michael Crichton's star system in the intro post so there's not a lot more to say about Westworld's connection to Wing Commander! We did manage to find one almost-reference: hidden in Privateer 2's data is a list of ships for an earlier version of the booth database which is totally different from

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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 Crash (1996) 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!

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Last month, we published an article cataloging the wings worn by Wing Commander's various fighter pilots. We failed to include one pretty important reference: Jazz's wings from Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi! You may remember that these wings played an important role in Wing Commander II's treason mystery and as a result got their own closeup shot! When Jazz shoots Specialist McGuffin for discovering his communications with the Kilrathi, McGuffin grabs his wings as he dies. Jazz then steals Stingray's wings and he is blamed for the murder (until Sparks provides an alibi). Of course, as we pointed out in the initial article there's not a clear place on the Wing Commander II duty uniforms where wings are worn! But the scene provides a great look at them:

In case you aren't familiar with the joke about this scene, Specialist McGuffin is named after the idea of a "MacGuffin" which is a word

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A BlueSky user named revenant was recently noodling around with the SNES port of Wing Commander and made a pretty exciting discovery and a cool tool for taking a closer look at the game's assets! Revenant turned ROMs of the two surviving SNES ports into in flight object viewers that let you explore the in-game background layers, essentially letting you scroll through the different ships and objects stored in the game! Their first thread starts here.

completely pointless activity of the week: hacking a Mode 7 object viewer into the janky SNES port of wing commander

(d-pad cycles objects/frames, start button exits)

right now this only shows the 'up close' frames for ingame objects (which are background layers rather than the sprites used for distant objects)

also the displayed names of objects come from the list of text strings which doesn't always match the actual object - i.e. unused Venture graphics are

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Hopefully you were able to secure some great deals over the weekend, but if you're still looking to check things off the list for the Wing Commander fan in your life, here's a rundown of WC items for sale!

Print Art

End Run Cover by David Mattingly $20-$100 (search for "Wing Commander") Malcolm McDowell Autographed WC3 PSX Print $65 (15% off through December 31)

PC Games ($2.99 each through 12/2)
Wing Commander 1&2 Wing Commander 3 Wing Commander 4 DVD Wing Commander Prophecy & Secret Ops	Wing Commander Privateer Wing Commander Privateer 2 Wing Commander Academy Wing Commander Armada

Movies & TV

Academy DVD: Amazon $10.96 | Walmart $12.86 | Deep Discount $8.16 Movie Digital: Amazon $9.99 | Fandango $9.99 | Google/YouTube $9.99

Novels ($6.99)
Freedom FlightBaen EbookAmazon KindleApple BooksB&N NookKoboGoogle Play	End RunBaen EbookAmazon KindleApple BooksB&N NookKoboGoogle Play	Fleet ActionBaen EbookAmazon KindleApple

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The Wing Commander movie club had a good time with Westworld; it's a movie that spends most of its time just explaining its setup... but that's just fine because that setup is delightful. For this week we asked members to select a type of thriller (as defined by the Wikipedia) from our queue and the surprise winner was the 1996 erotic thriller Crash. It's a David Cronenberg movie about people that are sexually attracted to car crashes, so this should be an interesting one! (You know, Star Trek Discovery star David Cronenberg.) You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along. Please note and plan appropriately: Crash is rated NC-17 for "explicit sex scenes" (but not car crashes?).

Crash is another movie that was used to temp track the 1999 Wing Commander movie. A track from Howard Shore's score, Triton, was chosen to play from Blair's fight with Hunter through to his conversation with Angel in

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Here's a great story from Privateer 2: The Darkening screenwriter Diane Duane. She posted the entry below as a reply on her Tumblr back in 2013 in response to a social media post about a man being obnoxious about women that play video games. If you aren't familiar with Diane Duane's incredible body of work, she's written for properties ranging from Star Trek (extensively!) to Marvel, Doctor Who, My Little Pony, Gargoyles, X-COM, seaQuest DSV and many others... all in addition to her own original properties like the ongoing Young Wizards. There's a good bet you have something she worked on in your collection right now! Her story has a timeless message and it manages to share some interesting behind-the-screens trivia about our favorite Privateer sequel:

I had to do this once with Privateer II: The Darkening. It gained a bit when he said "I bet you didn't play it through, I bet somebody just told you

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Cpt. Streets is back to kick off another cool Wing Commander 3D print project... and this time it's everyone's favorite heavy gun slug, the CF-105 Scimitar! The model is 11.5cm (4.52") long and Streets promises to share more as painting and detailing happens. We're looking forward to it! You can also see their impressive Hornet here.

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Zulu was a more interesting film than we expected; certainly closer to Lawrence of Arabia than The Dambusters. The production values are spectacular, the story isn't a familiar one to Americans in 2025 and the acting is great. It's a big, bold movie that suffers less because it's a boring war movie and more because it's about the sort of war we no longer find familiar. Wing Commander movie club member bob was the person that found the Zulu reference in Action Stations in the first place and he noted that it's one of his favorite movies. We asked him if he wanted to say a few words about the film... and here they are!:

It's fitting that the line "because we're here" was the impetus to watch Zulu: it sums up the entirety of the film. William Forstchen may have reused it but the contexts could not have been more different. The pilots in Action Stations are fighting for not only their own lives but those

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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 Westworld (1973) 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!

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Today is Thanksgiving in the United States and so the Wing Commander CIC team would like to wish everyone a happy holiday. Thanksgiving is a time to stop and remember what we're grateful for and in these trying times, that is more and more the love and support of the Wing Commander community. Whether you're posting to the forums or watching movies with us on Discord or chatting back and forth on social media, our old group is still a bright light in my life. Thank you all!

Of course, a big part of Thanksgiving is... Pilgrims! With that in mind, we're reprinting the Confederation Handbook's history of the Pilgrim War, complete with the original illustrations. Did you know that the Pilgrims (or should we say McDanielites?) had this much backstory?

| query "pilgrim war, history" media=encyc, level=UNCLASSIFIED sort=bestmatch | return=1

(Excerpts from The Student's Encyclopedia, 123rd Edition, HarperCollins,

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CountvonSchnaps is back with even more thrilling takes on classic Wing Commander ships! This time they've updated the A-14 Raptor from Wing Commander I and the F-107 Lance (aka Dragon) from Wing Commander IV in their distinctive, wonderful style. Check 'em out!

Wing Commander I - A14 Raptor (DeviantArt)

As a request made for Shoguneagle depicting a lesser known Wing Commander fighter the A14 Raptor heavy fighter.

Armed with 2x Neutron Cannons, 2x Mass Driver guns and up to 6 hardpoints the Raptor was the mainstay for Confederation Space Forces during the early to middle part of the Terran-Kilrathi War.

After the war many of the fighters were sold to Landreich and even to the civilian market.

A fun design, which I rarely have seen so tried to stay close to the main layout and feel of the designs but making it a bit more in line of previous designs.

Wing Commander IV: F107 Lance (DeviantArt)

Another Wing

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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.

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The Wing Commander movie club reports that Zulu was a pretty interesting movie. It seemed like a fair treatment of history that most of us weren't particularly familiar with and it was certainly a lush production. More Lawrence of Arabia than Dam Busters, in our final analysis! For this week's movie we asked members to pick from a list of possible robots and they unexpectedly chose Yul Brynner. Which means that this week's movie is Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973), a famous science fiction scenario that also served as a kind of prototype for Jurassic Park. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

We're watching Westworld over a bit of a technicality! As we've mentioned before, the Wing Commander Universe map included in Wing Commander Prophecy filled out the Enigma Sector of space with star systems named after formative science fiction & fantasy writers. There are also a couple of

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We thought it would be fun to catalog where uniform wings appear in the Wing Commander games. In the real military, wings, which are formally called aircrew badges, are not awarded only to pilots. Instead, they are worn by many different positions that operate aircraft. Astronaut wings are awarded to anyone that has flown in space. United States Army and United States Air Force aircrew badges are silver while the Navy equivalent is famously gold. In Wing Commander it's not totally clear… as we'll see below! In the original Wing Commander, pilots have wings on their service uniforms above the ribbons. The wings are silver and seem to feature a heart. Only active pilots are seen wearing them although Colonel Halcyon wears a similar pair of wings on his cap.

Wing Commander II is not 100% clear. The dress uniforms worn by Blair and Jazz have wings in the same place as the original game's service uniforms