Wing Commander

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We were originally planning to mix up the news a bit to start the week off, but George Oldziey’s campaign is off to such a roaring start that it’s become newsworthy again! In barely over a day since going live, the campaign to create a new live album of Wing Commander music has hit the 50% funding mark! This means more than $8000 of the $16,000 target has been achieved. When combined with Matt Hiltner’s previously mentioned large donation, we are very much well on the way to making this a reality! Things are going so well that George is already starting to firm up plans for some of the hypothetical stretch goals that have been on his mind. No one expected to be talking about that so soon, but it’s a wonderful situation to be in. All of this is made possible by the ongoing support from so many dedicated Wing Commander fans. This is just the beginning; so we’re very anxious to see where

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It's been another productive day for George Oldziey's campaign to make a new live recording of Wing Commander music. We're less than five days in, and the project has hit $13,500. That's 5/6th of the target amount! During the planning phase, it wasn't clear exactly how difficult it would be to reach $16,000, so stretch goals were a secondary consideration. With the continued productive nature of the campaign, however, some of those additional opportunities for the project are coming into focus and will be firmed up very soon.

Ahead of that, I thought it would be nice to walk through some of the different tiers and highlight what is available. I know this information is readily available inside of the Kickstarter interface, but I also know how Exhausted Millennial Brain works. Reposting the details here removes one layer of mental friction so you can more easily see if something appeals to you.

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This is a crazy story! Everyone's favorite officially licensed top-down Xbox 360 Wing Commander shooter was released back in July 2007. In the original

press release

announcing its launch, EA confirmed that Wing Commander

Arena

was coming out in all markets where Xbox Live Arcade existed - except Japan. Finally, it's now available for

¥ 1,188

or about $11.

In confirming this unusual turn of events, Music_Guru was able to find a

cached

copy of the page from several weeks ago that still shows just the theme packs for sale. Interestingly, the Confed and Kilrathi Xbox

dashboard themes

were released in Japan back in 2007, and websites even

reviewed them separately

at the time. Arena is also listed in various '

new

release

' listings with a January 24, 2019 debut called out. If you're in Japan and still have your 360 hooked up, we'd love to hear about your experience. Are there any localization tweaks made

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We've got good news to report today for Wing Commander Arena fans! Back in August, people started to notice that the Xbox achievement records for certain games were no longer showing properly. This was distressing to us, since Arena was one of the games that appeared to be suffering from this predicament. Players' total point score seemed unaffected, and the achievements still appeared to show up at third party websites that had access to the source data, so we were hoping that this was just some kind of technical glitch. Additionally, other classic Xbox Live Aracade games like EA's Boom Boom Rocket were still appearing normally. Fortunately, we noticed this week that the game was one again showing up properly in Xbox gamertag profiles. You can now see all 12 Wing Commander achievements on your console, the web or mobile app. Check out how your score stacks up here (may need to log in to an

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Video game artist

Mike Winterbauer

has shown off the first images of his latest project, a Wing Commander Art Portfolio! Mr. Winterbauer was the person commissioned in 1992 to hand paint the

box art for the SNES version

of Wing Commander, among many other cool contemporary pieces. These were showcased last year in a book launched via a

successful

Kickstarter campaign. Next month he plans to launch a followup that specifically focuses on the process of creating his well known WC design. Along the way, there will be opportunities to have your name included in the book as well as pick up a very slick metal reproduction. Stay tuned for more info as the campaign approaches!

Hello backers of Classic Game Covers! I hope you all are doing great.

Be sure to look for my up coming Kickstarter campaign call Wing Commander Art. It will feature a beautiful hard cover portfolio art book showcasing the art

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The somewhat amorphous length of a generation is, give or take, about twenty-five years. This means that as of today, the Wing Commander movie is a generation old… and, it follows, so are those of us that once eagerly anticipated its coming. I've written extensively about whether or not it was good (it was not) and what it means to me (I love it dearly) and I don't need to relitigate any of that today. In fact, the war movie cliches about old soldiers are more accurate than ever: the guns have stopped, we're the old men, all quiet on the western front and alike. The bickerings and debates and once-so-important battles of our youth have passed us by as gracefully as such things ever do. No one in 2024 could conceive, for instance, of caring about the Tiger Claw's missing possessive or what the Ralari /really/ looks like or even particularly to complain about Freddie Prinze Jr.'s casting.

If anything,

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As the Through the Moongate, Part 2 Kickstarter continues to truck along, Andrea Contato has shared the first preview of the exclusive Wing Commander Bookmark that will be given to certain tier backers for the project. This design is being put together by Denis Loubet, the senior Origin artist responsible for art direction on the first few Wing Commanders. Initial elements highlight some of the arrowhead iconography from the WC1 logo as well as a dual Confed/Kilrathi headshots and perhaps even a Dralthi, which would be pretty awesome. The overall campaign is up to around €36,500. The bookmark giveaway will be rather limited, so hopefully everyone who wants one can get their pledge in within the next 10 days!

We are working non-stop to prepare the conclusion of this great project we started two years ago and pieces are already starting to come together. To that end, Denis Loubet has sent us a

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Bathrooms are treated really weird in sci-fi. Plenty of shows, movies and games just pretend they don't exist at all. Sometimes you might get a sink and mirror aboard a space ship, but almost never a toilet. AD recently noticed that Wing Commander once again broke new ground by including one aboard the Tiger's Claw. Some viewers may have been distracted from the background, since it's in the middle of the Rosie/Maniac romance scene, but there it is! There's even a toilet paper holder with a Confed logo on it, which is amazing. Wouldn't that have made for an amazing collectible/merchandising?

Since everyone loves toilets in space, here's one from the Wing Commander movie. In shot 2 you can spot a TP holder behind Holder's head. Shot 3 shows some junk in Maniac's medicine cabinet. The last is the original opening to Maniac and Rosie's bed scene...

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This has been a really good year for space toilets. AD managed to screen cap some really good shots of the toilets in the Wing Commander Movie a couple months back, and now LOAF has discovered the Wing Commander Academy equivalent. Or rather, since this is Damon Karnes' holding cell from the episode The Last One Left, these are borderline space holes-in-the-ground. He recently got ahold of a concept art piece which shows a pair of basins at the foot of their cell beds. From this angle, their purpose seems fairly obvious. They're actually pictured in the episode itself, but with all the other action going on, nobody has ever called these out as far as we can tell. Now you know!

This is a Wing Commander Academy concept painting. These were done in the US as reference for animators in Japan and Korea painting the production backgrounds. It's from The Last One Left and reveals the pirate prison has

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ZOmegaZ continues to make expeditious progress on his Wing Commander challenge coin Kickstarter campaign. The funding phase closed just over a month ago, and he's already gotten the manufacturer to fabricate his designs. So far, it seems like this is moving along just like clockwork - and the coins look cool too! Contributors to the project could start seeing packages arrive soon!

I think they all look fabulous. Now the shipping begins! Again, some of you don't seem to have received a survey link. I can't resend it for some reason, but don't stress, we'll get it worked out.

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The Templin Institute is a YouTube presentation with a neat gimmick: they offer documentaries about different fictional realities! This week they've premiered a new show called 'Audio Log' that presents the history of a fictional institution with a dramatic audio recording. And for the pilot episode they've chosen to talk about Wing Commander's Terran Confederation! It's a neat ten-minute look at Wing Commander's fictional history which you can find here.

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A few months back, LOAF took a look at the development timeframes for the Wing Commander games. It's really interesting comparison! Someone asked how these durations correlated with the size of the development teams, which is also a very neat set of data, so LOAF compiled a new table!

This question fascinated me so I decided to put together some rough numbers with the previous chart. I divided credits by modern disciplines... you can see the size of the development teams basically quadruiples in eight years! (Does not include film shoot crews.)

With regards to the expansion packs, they were all very tight 3-4 month productions. A small team of rising juniors would usually develop them while the rest of the group moved to the next big game. They kept it up as long as the concept was profitable!

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Good Old Games is running a variety of new sales, and there latest discount is marking down the Wing Commander series by 75%! The theme revolves around games that are 10+ years old. This is an especially welcome event because GOG skipped the WC games in their big Spring Sale last month. Cheap Wing Commander is always a big hit, so we're glad folks get another chance to grab the franchise on the cheap. You can fill out your digital collection via the links below. Grab them before the end of the weekend!

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Dowlphin

spotted a couple of nifty easter eggs in a recent World of Warcraft quest. Wing Commander Black and a blue-haired Kilrath make appearances as a couple of Orcs in a story mission. These aren't random gaming references either - WoW executive producer

J Allen Brack

is a major Wing Commander vet. He got his start in the industry as a QA tester on Wing Commander 3 and went on to work on P2, WC4, Kilrathi Saga, Prophecy and Secret Ops. There are likely numerous such gems hidden in the game. Another player spotted

Wing Commander Mulverick

a while back too.

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Pix

recently came across a pretty neat article in the UK magazine

PC Zone

. I really like it's graphical layout with the Dralthis overflying the slick text. The author is a big fan of the WC series and uses it as an example for awesome '90s games that were outside the realm of his usual fare. I do wonder about the Hobbes blurb a bit, and I think the suggestion in the gray box is just that GOG exists. It's a little odd to not come out and just say that, but this is still a great quote:

Just give me a lantern-jawed, blue-haired hero fighting some big cats in space, and I'm as happy as a porcine covered in excrement.

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We reported earlier this week on the untimely passing of Wing Commander superfan Adam "Klavs" Burch. It can be hard to find the words to appropriately express people's thoughts at a time like this, so some fellow fans have turned to more visual attempts. Both tributes below features Klavs' famous Rapier models in a classic 'missing man formation'.

The first is a beautiful scene by Mac:

In remembrance of Adam "Klavs" Burch.

Thank You Adam, for everything.

Kevin Caccamo also featured this honor to Klavs in today's Spacey Saturday stream.

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The master of the VHS strikes back!

Jim Leonard

has restored a copy of the Wing Commander III ESRB submission tape to give us some of the clearest Wing Commander III footage ever preserved. Mr. Leonard has

previously restored

the Wing Commander III 'Behind the Screens' documentary from a copy of the commercially released VHS. This time around, Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum was kind enough to provide him with an original copy of the ESRB submission tape that Origin produced for Wing Commander III.

The ESRB tape includes roughly one hour of Wing Commander III's FMV footage which was cut together so that the game could be content rated. The footage covers most of the game but does not include every branching path or optional decision. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is a voluntary video game content rating organization widely recognized by consumers in the United States. The ESRB was

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Now THAT was an exciting three days of Wing Commander in real time! We got a lot of great feedback, and that's given us lots of ideas on how to take the experience further in the future. It was wonderful to see LOAF's idea for this finally pulled off, and AD/Kris did some impressive last minute video prep so everything was ready in time. Thanks for coming along with us in this crazy Wing Commander adventure!

Day 3 - 1000 Zulu - The Tiger Claw has suffered significant damage in the depth charge attack. Another enemy destroyed has been spotted and Commodore Taggart has a new plan! MORE

Day 3 - 1030 Zulu - The Diligent and a pair of escort fighters have launched to intercept the Kilrathi. Aboard are a company of marines who wil attempt to board the enemy ship to salvage his fuel stores. MORE

Day 3 - 1100 Zulu - The situation aboard is hazy but Confederation marines have boarded the Kilrathi ConCom!

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Surprise! Most diehard Wingnuts know the movie takes place from March 15 to 17, but the novelization has an epilogue that happens the next day. It's a dark scene that takes place on Mylon III. This sets the stage for the events that unfold in Wing Commander Pilgrim Stars and are concluded in Pilgrim Truth. There's some wild stuff in those novels!

Day 4 - 1900 Mylon Time - BREAKING NEWS: The supercruiser TCS Olympus has fired on Confederation forces in the Mylon System?! MORE

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AD, the CIC's resident finder of things and doer of stuff, came across this video to help you start your Wing Commander week. It's a nifty animation by Kyle Bumpus that recreates the initial intro to Wing Commander 1. I'm actually surprised there aren't a lot more takes on this iconic scene. Check it out below!

Modeling/Animation by Kyle Bumpus
"Wing Commander 1 Intro Theme Orchestra" by Blake Robinson (Synthetic Orchestra)