Wing Commander

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The recent Heritage Auction of material from Planet Hollywood included several Wing Commander costumes! Which means there are some great high resolution photos to share. Here's Mark Hamill's flight suit from Wing Commander IV:

And here is Malcolm McDowell's Black Lance uniform from the same game! (Note that the rank insignia on the cuff is there incorrectly.)

Here are some photos of the event where these costumes were donated to the restaurant in 1996 just a few days before the game was released. They got some good press out of it!

On the other hand, I didn't even know Mark Hamill's Wing Commander Prophecy flight suit had been in Planet Hollywood's collection. Guess the same trick doesn't work twice! (Or three times, Planet Hollywood got a movie Rapier at one point too...)

There was also a great photo by of some loose rank insignias up close. Can you identify them?

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Mac has posted a new teaser for his next Wing Commander project. This one picks up on the Concordia theme from last week and now has the famous dreadnought anchoring an absolutely massive battle fleet. It's flanked by some of Klavs' most popular models, including Bengal class carriers and Waterloo cruisers. There are also scores of smaller destroyers, corvettes and fighters filling the space throughout. What an epic scene!

IT DIDNT CRASH THE COMPUTER ON RENDER!
WOOOOO#wingcommander pic.twitter.com/gG7aYVGwq6

— Mac's Lore (@MacsLore) October 5, 2023

  

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There's sad news for the Wing Commander family of performers tonight: veteran actor David McCallum passed away earlier today. McCallum, 90, started his career as a leading man on television shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and went on to serve as a jack-of-all-trades who could pop up anywhere and everywhere. His nearly endless resume included a variety of guest appearances on cult genre shows including The Outer Limits, seaQuest DSV and Babylon 5. He joined the Wing Commander universe in 1996 in a short but memorable appearance in Privateer 2: The Darkening. You can find an obituary with a more complete retrospective of his career at Variety.

McCallum appeared in Privateer 2's opening scene as the captain of the doomed freighter Canera. He commands Don Warrington's Helmsman, Nichola Cordey's Second Officer and stuntman Riky Ash's Communications Officer through the game's opening that ends in all of

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Happy birthday to Wing Commander I, which was released 33 years ago today! It marked an epochal shift in how computer games were played, made and sold... and I guess you could say it has been pretty big in my life, too!

It is often hard to assign a single date for when a game was released in the early 90s; it could be days to weeks to go from sign off to duplication to actually arriving in stores. There was no concept of a set ‘street date’ - but Origin celebrated “ship day” internally and that’s what we cite as a birthday when it’s known. Here’s an account of that day from Mike Harrison’s excellent contemporary making of piece:

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A real surprise today: Dennis Mull sent me an envelope of Smudo autographs! Smudo is a German hip hop artist who loved Wing Commander and so got to have a cameo in Prophecy! You can learn more about that here.

These images were part of a photo series that we've also cataloged here.

Now we are learning about the music of Smudo.

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It's time for our annual poll where we gauge how long fans have been visiting the CIC. Although this is our 25th anniversary at wcnews.com, we also have an option for people who've been following the team's Wing Commander news exploits for even longer than that! How long have you been visiting?

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The old poll asked about the best Kilrathi ship recreation in the Wing Commander Academy television show. The Dralthi was the hands down winner, which is no surprise, but there were plenty of very well done craft in the show!

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Here, have a YouTube short of Happy Gaming House settling down to a nice game of Wing Commander 3 on the 3DO! It's a vertical vid, so you might want to go full screen for the complete effect!

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The CIC staff is frantically making preparations for tomorrow night's big birthday party, and now we've got a perfect set of ASMR music to help us focus! Scribbler has just released a pair of ambiance videos that skip ahead to Wing Commander 3. You can hear the hum, beeps and chirps of the TCS Victory's flight ops or gunnery control centers. Or find a complete list of his WC tracks here!

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The fun just keeps on going with the latest installment of LOAF's close read of the Wing Commander Confederation Handbook. Watch the latest installment to learn all about the details behind each page. You can also engage interactively in Discord #Wingnut!

Mark your calendars, part three of the Confederation Handbook stream is tomorrow at 7 PM Eastern on my YouTube channel! I even Freeformed up a clickbait graphic for it.

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I couldn't find a legible scan of the Origin FX box online, so here's a quick one:

Beautiful Kamekh render, though!

Does Origin FX even have a Kamekh in it? Technically yes, since it includes a copy of Wing Commander II's post-credits cutscene and that is indeed a closeup of a Kamekh's hull:

Learn all about the Origin FX screensaver/theater at our newly expanded and upgraded wiki page here!

Origin FX is a 1993 screensaver package developed by Origin Systems and published by Electronic Arts. Origin FX comes with 26 different 'movies', the term it uses for screensavers. Several of the movies include elements from the Wing Commander Universe including an air show which has jets and spaceships zoom around your desktop and an asteroid field that soars through familiar Wing Commander space debris. The movies are all customizeable. Origin FX also includes an slideshow option which plays bitmap files; two

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Welcome to the CIC's 23rd Birthday Party! When we opened our doors here at WCNews.com in August 1998, we never imagined we'd still be here now. The pandemic still looms and did directly affect a few items we had planned. This has not been the year of recovery that we'd envisioned, but I'm happy that we managed to still pull together a few fun things to share. Like you all, we're still making the best of it and having a blast hanging out (digitally, per social distancing guidelines) with friends. If you're not already there, stop by Wingnut and join the party!

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EmuMusicFan has made more progress with his graphical novel project. There's a new update to the mockup website to show the story in action. It now includes an appearance by The Emperor! Otherwise, Emu's up through about chapter 4 in his march through Action Stations. You can follow all the latest updates at the CIC Forums.

A new portrait. Baron Qazkar. "And how will the carriers managed to achieve victory?" Qazkar appeared in Action Stations, Chapter 4.

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Twelve years ago, HCl rolled out a major update to his Prophecy multiplayer patch. When users entered their credentials for Crius.net (then the home of our vBulletin-powered discussion boards) into the the launcher, the game would report back typical game statistics like kills/deaths, ejections and time played to the CIC server where they would show up in our

Multiplayer Scoreboards

section. As time moved on, the forums were relocated to our primary domain at wcnews.com and the software powering them was changed as well (look

here

if you are interested in Chat Zone history leading up to the 2011 Xenforo upgrade). If you signed up for our Forums after this transition, there was no way for you to have your results included in our scoreboards. There's a fix for this issue now and it takes just a few easy steps:

• Sign in on the Chat Zone, or sign up for an account if you don't already have one.
• Visit the

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So, what is the biggest and baddest Wing Commander poster ever? While we've seen a lot of them, nothing compares to this beauty. Joe Garrity shows us that it's not the size of your Wing Commander III poster, it's how you display it! Mounted on a brushed plate steel disply board, this monolithic Wing Commander III advertising print is a whopping 8 feet long by 2 feet high and weighs in at over 40 pounds! Originally on display at Origin Systems in the mid-1990s, it was gifted to the Origin Museum by EA/Mythic when they closed in 2014. It was previously

displayed in the Mythic Lobby

along with other Origin/Wing Commander memorabilia. Joe's also provided a nice high res version of this photo

here

.

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When Maniac and Blair first arrive on the Tiger Claw they're wearing CSS Concordia patches on their peacoats. It's not really clear why unless the only other option was a Tiger Claw one.

He changes sweaters between acts, too! Or I guess maybe he just hot glues a different patch onto the same sweater.

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Alright, I can't think of a good reason for this, but here's the Wing Commander knife post. To start, WC always loved using knives to show a character was troubled. The one Cobra is sharpening in WC III is a Marto-Brewer Explora, a Spanish survival knife from the 1980s.

Hawk’s thematically similar knife in Wing Commander Prophecy is called a hunting knife in stage directions but the actual prop is a United Cutlery Bushmaster survival knife. These are still made!

Seether’s knife in Wing Commander IV is a Hibben Double Shadow, a design often used in sci fi productions including Star Trek and Babylon 5. The script calls it a “laser-blade” which it describes as “a curved handle with a lethal thread of light that pulses from one end of the handle to the other”. As a result, the novelization refers to Seether’s blade as a “laser knife” and says they are “plunging weapons that could also

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Today we've got a wonderful pile of old reviews from Maxi de Sokar. First up is a WC2 from the Spanish OKPC magazine. They give it a solid 85% and comes with lots of gorgeous screenshots. There's also a Special Operations preview, and although it's short, it packs in tons of great little references that really date game development to the era (1991-1992). Then we shift gears into a PC Review review of WC Academy. The game only gets 5 (out of 10, I suppose), but they had enough to talk about to fill a two page article. We often point out that there was genuine demand for something like this and it filled a niche that was pretty unique back in the day. With all that being said, the same author returns to review Wing Commander Privateer... and he also gave it a 5/10! So maybe that says something more about him than the game. In the end, I guess I'm not mad about Academy being rated on the same

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Did you know that Privateer 2 has two very different sets of manuals? The game had an internally tempestuous release and one side effect of that was that Origin's creative services group completely reworked all of the packaging for the US release.

I thought it would be fun to look at the changes in the introductory letter. And right off the bat you can see it's a lot more than removing the "u"s from the "colours". They even change the name of the writer... flirty Jessica Montpellier becomes straight-laced Ian Esperanto!

Anyway I did a quick diff on the text and here are the results. And my question for readers is: did any of these changes make things better? It sure feels like a lot of change for the sake of change!

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If you missed the big news earlier this week, be sure to check out the new WC4 Fan Remake demo! There are numerous fixes and updates, better joystick support and new in-flight comms. You can download it here (886 meg exe) and get right to playing! The WC Respace team has posted a full article with instructions and FAQs if you have any questions or issues. If you're not quite ready to jump in yourself, here's a video of The Eradicator checking the demo out. It's actually the original release, so the latest version is even better!

It looks like a team of modders are trying to remaster Wing Commander IV. In this video, we will check their work out.

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Today I'm going to pop around on a thread that starts with author Diane Duane. She's a very well known sci-fi author who's written lots of Star Trek novels, various video game books as well as her own series. Of particular interest to WC fans: she also wrote the screenplay to the cinematic story of Privateer 2! And just yesterday, she had this to say on the topic:

I was a busy girl on this one. It remains the single longest screenplay (at 300+ pages) I've ever done. And had the BEST cast. Brian Blessed, Clive Owen, David Warner, so many more...

Now to jump franchises, we're also still gushing about the fantastic final season of Star Trek Picard. The show's production designer, Dave Blass, also recently shared that one of the many ships featured in the show is the USS Inaieu, which is 'a nod to the Defender class ship from Diane Duane's [1984 Star Trek novel] "My Enemy, My Ally"'. Dave also posted