Wing Commander

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It appears that the pending removal of Wing Commander Academy wan't a false alarm. The show is no longer listed for streaming on the Peacock service. With the removal of great shows from a number of platforms and new paywalling/gatekeeping happening all over, it feels like the hits just keep coming. Fortunately you can still pick up the DVD for about $11. And never fear, the Wing Commander CIC remains free and there's no limit the number of forum posts you can view in a day. You can also always join us in Discord #Wingnut!

A peek back at better days:

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AD, who is ever the finder of things, found an awesome Thai Wing Commander article today. We don't see many WC items in this language, so this is a nice treat! This issue is described as a "technique edition," and it includes strategy guide-style overviews of things like the game's guns. Very cool!

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Benjamin over at BigBoxCollection has made one of his biggest updates yet! Thanks to a generous donation from Dominus of Exult, they were able to 3D scan in a whole bunch of new Wing Commander titles! The new additions even include a little peek at some of the internal contents, which is a great touch. Check them out here.

And here's a look at the shipment when it arrived:

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Here's Mike Winterbauer's wonderful Wing Commander SNES painting as a pin-up in a French magazine called Super Power!

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The Confederation Handbook’s index doubles as a review of the different classification levels (circa 2654).

The Secret Missions boxes are both labeled TOP SECRET.

And the card game's secret orders are just SECRET.

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Let's start the week off by DARKENING the day! Thanks to AD, we've extracted all of the background plates for Privateer 2's gameflow screens. Let's take a tour of the Tri-System. Here's the starting planet HERMES and the SINNERS INN tavern (home of Joe the Bartender)!

CRIUS, the medical planet! It has a record-setting four plates: one for the landing area, one for the SURGEON'S BLUNDER BAR and then two related to the story (CRIUS HOSPITAL and SHERNIKOV MEDICAL EQUIPMENT).

ANHUR, the first planet in the system to be settled. We've got the spaceport and the SHADOW PLAY BAR plus INTERPLANETARY AID from the storyline.

BEX, the center of the system's beer-themed religion. These aren't cathedrals, it's a spaceport and the BLESSED BREW BAR!

Here's HEPHAESTUS with the RAMPANT ROBOT BAR *and* the GALACTIC GOURMET HOTEL/BAR. I bet one of these was originally intended for Janus IV!

Here are the three planets that

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It's time for the annual GOG Summer Sale, and this time 5400+ games are being discounted. Wing Commander wasn't included in the Spring Sale a few months back, so it's nice to see the omission was short lived and the markdowns are back. Each game is 75% off or $1.49 each. Less than $12 for the whole DOS/Windows Wing Commander experience!

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Rostov, huh? Guess they didn’t save the Ralari.

In a weird coincidence, the Wing Commander III novelization also names the TCS Victory’s bartender Rostov and makes him a shameless Space Russian in the grand tradition of Ensign Chekov.

There is a lot to talk about here. For one, isn't it odd that they just borrowed Shotglass' setup from Wing Commander I? Is every bartender in the fleet a wounded veteran?

I'll let folks with actual culture decide if "Dmitry Rostov" is a terrible made up Russian name but it certainly is an odd coincidence (?) that it's the same name as a system from WC1... which I can confirm was all over the series bible provided to Forstchen and Keith.

On the other hand, the TCS Leningrad reference is a very deep cut. It's from a brief mention in Freedom Flight where Hobbes reminisces about the time he destroyed it.

But just the implication that a ship named after a Russian city would

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If you haven’t filmed an exhaustive retrospective of the Wing Commander series on a hillside while sitting on a giant boulder, are you even a Wing Commander fine? Yes, if you’re reading this, you definitely are, but this is still one of the most unique takes on the WC series rundown video I’ve seen in a while. Where will the next Wing Commander fan vid take place?

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The UK-based Centre for Computing History recently tweeted about this really cool collectible phone card made as a promotion for Wing Commander 2. I realized I actually have a couple of these laying around, but somehow we've never shared them in the news before! You can find their profile page on this item here. I really like their website and mission!

Just added to the collection: A promotional Wing Commander II Mercury telephone kiosk card!

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Card for use in a Mercury telephone kiosk, with Wing Commander II design.

Mercury Communications was a national UK telephone company formed in the early 1980s, and was an early competitor of BT. Mercury's payphone kiosks were in use in the UK from 1986-1995.

The card states on the back that Mercurycards are available in £2, £4, and £10 values, however the card itself is a £1 value, so was likely given away as a promotion.

A

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Today dczanik shared a very slick interpretation of young Angel. The design started as a 3D model, but he finally turned it into a more artsy graphic. Let him know what you think at the CIC Forums!

Hey guys! I did a paint over a 3D model I sculpted years ago. It's of a young Angel. Originally I was going to make a 3D model of her WC1 character, but liked the look of a younger Angel. I thought you would enjoy it. Hope you like it! Here's the original model:

It was used for Howard Day's Wing Leader characters. But I really wanted to finish it in the way I wanted it to look so I finally got around to finishing it. And I made a 16 bit look for those that prefer the old pixel graphics:

Here's a few original shots to compare: WC1, Claw Marks, Super Famicon Claw Marks and WC2.

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I just noticed the Wing Commander IV PlayStation disc change screens all have different ship reflections. Cool as hell!

The first disc image with the Hellcats is also used as a splash screen for the DVD version of WC4.

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Another wonderful Origin ad layout from 1993! What are the odds? I wonder if there's anything interesting in here...

Academy's stunning key art is by Chris Douglas (again!) and Jake Rodgers, another one of Origin's talented early 3D artists. It has two Return of the Jedi explosions, too! The oddest part is the ships which... aren't in the game at all, no "Dralthi MK VII" in Academy.

These ads started running late summer 1993 and continued through the end of the year. There was a pretty significant running change towards the end of the campaign that's worth comparing to the scan above:

The first one: "holodeck console" becomes "holographic simulator". I've worked in game marketing long enough to know EXACTLY how that conversation with legal went.

The other one is that "The Wave" becomes "The Gauntlet"... that's clearly a development change and it is a much better name!

The screenshots are fascinating.

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Bandcamp is once again having Juneteenth fundraiser. This means that their share of the proceeds from each sale go towards advocacy for racial justice. They are the prime retailer for the MT-32 Archival Edition of Wing One, the album of original Wing Commander music, so this is one of the rare opportunities for your WC purchases to go towards a charitable cause. If you don't own a copy, this is a wonderful audio experience to fill out your WC collection with! Grab it here for $10 (and do it on Monday for the Juneteenth benefit!).

On Monday, June 19th, from midnight to midnight Pacific Time, we’ll hold our fourth annual Juneteenth fundraiser, where we donate 100% of our share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a racial justice organization with a long history of effectively enacting change through litigation, advocacy, and public education.

There is also a publisher-authorized free streaming

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... how did it take me 26 years to realize that John Hurt's character in Privateer 2 was named after his Alien role?! Turns out I am not actually the world's second greatest Wing Commander detective. He's just "JOE THE BARTENDER" in the shooting script, so it's possible this was just quietly slipped into the in-game database.

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Privateer 2 is great and you can't tell me it's not. I love the weird aesthetic and the novels worth of bizarre world building in all the booth and mission text.

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I think you could use a little Prophecy Advance today. Talking heads might seem like a step back, but it's amazing what Raylight did to compress the story down to fit on a GBA cart. And that 240x160 mobile 3D spaceflight engine is impressive to this day! Unfortunately, I missed the game's twentieth anniversary (on May 28!) a couple weeks back, but you can read my big post celebrating the game's first decade here!

Raylight Games is a leading European videogames development studio based in Benevento and in the sunny Napoli, south of Italy.Funded in 2000. Raylight Games has developed dozen of games ranging from Handheld Consoles. Home Consoles. Mobiles and PC. In 2001 we started the development of BlueRoses, our own multiplatform framework on which our core team develops games.Originally developed for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance, BlueRoses has been used to develop Wing Commander: Prophecy. which has

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We remember it taking FOREVER for each new Wing Commander game to come out... but how long did it actually take to develop them? It's pretty crazy compared to how long it takes to make a AAA game today!

This is production to release only, though, so it's not the full story. For instance, Chris Roberts spent several months developing the technology behind the original Wing Commander on his own before it became a budgeted Origin project. Similarly, Wing Commander Arena signed off months before it was released and it sat in a crowded XBox Live Arcade release queue. For further comparison, Strike Commander's famously endless delays meant that it spent... 18 months in production! That's nothing today.

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Today we have a couple of neat animation tests by AllTinker. He's exploring the potential use of voxel creations to help update some of the old school designs into 3D models. They take some work to do, but the results are fairly decent for an initial test. This would just be one potential aspect of what Tinker's Confederation project is attempting to do. You can read up on the effort here.

I mentioned a few posts back that I was looking at voxel conversion as a potential option for adding full 3D rotation to the original 2D sprites. My early tests are pretty positive; here's an early (pretty rough) test of the WC1 Dralthi, converted (manually) to voxels from the original sprites. Each one seems like it will take a fair chunk of work, but it seems far from a prohibitive amount... Some will certainly be more difficult than others though.

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Van Burnham has posted an update on the next phase of the campaign to produce a Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score. While the initial Indiegogo effort didn’t hit the funding goals necessary to kick off production, Van is working the numbers and determining what it will take to move forward from here. The album was initially projected for next year, so there's still time to work through options and figure out how to close the gap and make this a reality. Of course, Wing Commander fans are nothing if not patient. Stay tuned for future updates!

Hi everybody... thank you so much for supporting this project. I'm incredibly excited to make the Wing Commander orchestral score on deluxe vinyl a reality. That said, it goes without saying that I'm disappointed the campaign did not reach it's minimum funding goal and am in the process of sorting out some issues with this platform as a result. I