Wing Commander

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Today we have something a little different. Dead Decks is a pair of hicks who review extinct collectible card games. The video shows them open up a Kilrathi starter and booster pack of the Wing Commander CCG. They know nothing about Wing Commander and just hate the cards - their favorite part is the back. It's kind of funny in a terrible way and not safe for work. If they can get ahold of a Terran starter, we may get to see them play. Just to be clear: the game is wonderful and these guys are just big dorks.

Harry and Richard bore themselves and you with another lackluster video er...game. Another try to 1995 and another fly-by-night CCG: Wing Commander

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randomthefox tipped us off about an absolutely stellar sketch of a Kilrathi and her Dralthi drawn by Heresy. The pilot's armor is exquisite with a wonderful mix of futuristic claws, ornamental plates and even a tail. The helmet is also reminiscent of Bhurak Starkiller's famous visage. A blur effect on the Dralthi and rest of the background complete the package nicely. You can find more of Heresey's work on DeviantArt or Patreon.

A female Kilrathi pilot from the Wing Commander computer game series.

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The new Star Trek Picard series premiered last week, and the show is chock full of rich continuity. The crew putting it together have spared no detail, and that includes a number of connections with the last TNG movie, Star Trek Nemesis. Among them is that Romulans use a nifty knife with two blades. Star Trek fans have confirmed that this is the legendary Double Shadow knife designed by Gil Hibben in 1991. Wing Commander fans will also recognize it as Seether's iconic and deadly knife from 1996's Wing Commander 4. It's what he uses to threaten Blair on Nephele and also later kill Captain Paulsen.

LOAF profiled the prop in greater depth a couple years ago. It's certainly the go-to sci-fi exotic blade and shows up in a wide variety of productions, but it's cool to see it here too. And if you're not watching Picard, we can't recommend it highly enough! The first episode is streaming now - it's one

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We've solved a small Wing Commander mystery! This

unidentified ship

appeared in a single act of an episode of Wing Commander Academy ("Invisible Enemy.") It wasn't an obvious match for a fighter from the games and it was only seen the once. Well we’ve tracked down the original script for the episode and discovered that it was meant to be... a FERRET!

For reference, this is the P-64C Ferret (and P-64D Super Ferret!) patrol fighter as introduced in Wing Commander II:

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Back in 2016, the

Decipher SciFi

podcast devoted an entire

episode

to the Wing Commander movie. The show starts off with an overview of the Wing Commander computer game series with a focus on

Wing Commander 3

as a revolutionary interactive movie and the ever increasing production values and development budget up to Wing Commander 4. The show runners are all familiar with the franchise, having played the originals back in the 1990s on DOS PC or Amiga, and they even went to see the film when it was playing in theaters. The movie segment of the show touches on a wide range of topics, including unlikely fraternization, the traitor subplot getting axed, production challenges as a first time director with a limited budget, and Pilgrim pick-up lines. Check out the episode

here

.

As children of the 90s, we have to wax nostalgic over the Wing Commander video games. They were really, really important at the time.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Back in 2016, the

Decipher SciFi

podcast devoted an entire

episode

to the Wing Commander movie. The show starts off with an overview of the Wing Commander computer game series with a focus on

Wing Commander 3

as a revolutionary interactive movie and the ever increasing production values and development budget up to Wing Commander 4. The show runners are all familiar with the franchise, having played the originals back in the 1990s on DOS PC or Amiga, and they even went to see the film when it was playing in theaters. The movie segment of the show touches on a wide range of topics, including unlikely fraternization, the traitor subplot getting axed, production challenges as a first time director with a limited budget, and Pilgrim pick-up lines. Check out the episode

here

.

As children of the 90s, we have to wax nostalgic over the Wing Commander video games. They were really, really important at the time.

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DefianceIndustries is still doing what he does best: creating and updating high quality models of clasic Wing Commander ship designs! Today he shares his Vindicator and Raptor...

I started looking over some of my older stuff and found a few issues with my original Vindicator model. There were some scaling issues and a few misses from a modeling perspective (not tapering the fuselage into the cockpit section being the most egregious) So I set about making a new one. This version is closer to the FMV model, has a more accurate texture and paint scheme, and is alot lighter on the polygons.\

Next I started on a WC1 favorite of mine - the good ol' A-14 Raptor. Of all the WC1 ships this one gets the least love I suppose. but who doesn't love a X-wing/Gunstar hybrid? Besides, the combination of neutron and mass drivers makes it especially lethal in my book. I know most of you are Rapier fans, which is

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There's a handful of scenes that don't show up in any of the workprints I've seen from the movie, so I've recreated these from the raw takes. These are work in progress edits with no real sound enhancement and minimal attempts to at least make the color consistent (though sometimes the footage is too dark to truly rescue). I understand why they would cut this particular scene for pacing reasons, but at the same time I think it's a decent moment that sets up Blair and Angel's relationship a bit more. Plot-wise, it's not essential, but if I had a choice I'd keep small character moments like this in the movie. It's not really a long scene either.

This scene also has one of the few outtakes I've found... more of a prank really (not included in this video) where in one take the elevator doors open and Blair and Angel are pretending to make out on the ground.

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Garth Harmon has scanned and sent in a nice high quality scan of the Super Nintendo Wing Commander manual. Like many of the various iterations of the WC1 documentation, it's a derivative of Claw Marks, but there are some cool elements. It has some nice representations of the SNES controller (which later inspired a similar spread in the Arena Star*Soldier manual), and the initial pages with screenshots of the cockpits and Tiger's Claw are all in color. We previously had the Secret Missions manual in our archive, so it's nice to add this missing link. Grab a copy for yourself here!

Object of the Game

The game begins on your mother ship, the TCS Tiger's Claw. Onboard, you move from room to room to learn about your comrades-in-arms and your combat mission. Once you know your flight mission, you're off to fight the Kilrathi. If you fail, the dreaded Kilrathi will prevail as overlords on all human

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GOG.com is running a

Games Come True

sale to commemorate the 2 millionth wish being fulfilled as highly desirable classic games are added to the catalogue. The platform relies on community feedback to determine which old games are worth pursuing the rights for and then revamping to work on modern computers. Of the 250 or so games discounted this time around, Wing Commander features prominently in this promotion because of how many people wanted to see the series released digitally before it appeared on the service. It made quite a lot of people happy and topped the sales charts for some time during the year it came out. This is a pretty cool validation of the community's demand for Wing Commander!

To celebrate completing over 2 million wishes from its Community Wishlist and to show appreciation for gamers’ engagement with the program, GOG.COM is holding a special Games Come True Sale, featuring

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Former Origin artist

Denis Loubet

has completed another portrait. This one is a tribute to his friend and fellow Wing Commander veteran Aaron Allston. Sadly, Mr. Allston passed away about five years ago. He was known to us as the original creator of the famous Claw Marks magazine and a designer of The Secret Missions, but he was also an extremely accomplished novelist. You can read more about his life

here

. You can also find high resolution versions and behind-the-scenes material on Mr. Loubet's work at his

Patreon page

. He does a lot of cool stuff for Wing Commander and Ultima fans there!

Here is a stealth portrait I've been working on for the last few weeks. It's a portrait of Aaron Allston, my late roommate, premiere game designer, and New York Times bestselling author.

He is most famous for his many Star Wars novels, and yes, Wedge Antilles was a major character. Doc Sidhe is an original

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Let's slide into this weekend with a nice painting from Rear Admiral Tarsus. He has a really simplistic art style that still manages to convey a lot. The Gilgamesh and Venture class ships are very distinct, as are the burning Ralatha and Kamekh. I would love to actually see this battle go down!

Edited 5/29 with fighters, ordnance and more!

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Red-Jackal

recently

posted

a neat 1993 Privateer advertisement from Computer magazine. We've shown it off

before

, or so I thought, so I almost passed it by. It is a little bit sharper than the one we have in the archive though, so I decided to take a second look. Upon closer inspection, tiny little differences started to emerge. This one is listed as "Circle Reader Service Number 248" instead of Circle Reader Service #94." The text indicating the game was "Available at a software retailer near you" and that it's "A stand alone game made in the USA" were conspicuously missing. One word of the actual ad text is also different: enemies "

also

want your cargo" rather than "want your cargo

too

." Last, but not least, the word

Privateer

is no longer italicized before the awesome quote,

"Where deals are made with a handshake and broken by the volley from a Meson cannon."

Pretty neat!

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The Digital Antiquarian has posted a lengthy and exhaustive look at Origin history circa 1992-1994. The focus is on the company's acquisition by Electronic Arts, which is a great subject to dive into. Over the years, there's been something of a mythology built up around the topic with some assuming there was a hostile takeover, that it happened much later than it actually did, and that Origin was immediately stifled and had its creative freedom axed. The reality is more nuanced, and there were both significant positives as well as negatives as the deal unfolded.

At its core, rising development costs/longer development cycles, the cost of production/distribution of floppy disks and next-generation investment needed for the oncoming multimedia wave all contributed to the situation. Origin was at significant risk of being able to stay in business and fund many of the great things they did in the

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Today we've got a Dralthi sketch by DingoPatagonico. I suppose I have no idea how long sketches are supposed to take, but this one apparently took under an hour, which seems impressive. It's really smooth for a freehand drawing, and by my eye, this one runs very close to the Claw Marks lineart. You can't go wrong with that as your inspiration!

Done in 50 mins in the calm of the work. I think looks a quite good X3

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Up for a little late night Wing Commander lore? Claw Marks includes the earliest published timeline. The late, great Aaron Allston imagined the major battles of the first two decades of the Kilrathi war. Including the 2639 “Enyo Engagement”:

Claw Marks also establishes that Knight is a veteran of the Enyo Engagement and that it was where he earned his callsign. (I know what you’re thinking; Knight was a combat pilot for 15 years?!?!)

Next, the Wing Commander I & II Ultimate Strategy Guide, which heavily references Claw Marks, says that one of Blair’s Academy instructors was Lt. Col. Blakely, the man who planned the Confederation’s counterattack.

Uh, don’t you mean Prankster and not Blair? Regardless of how you choose to deal with that, Blair being in Blakely’s class is mentioned in one of his yearbook signatures in the Kilrathi Saga manual:

The second iteration of the Wing Commander timeline is published

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The Digital Antiquarian has completed his long-awaited analysis of Wing Commander 4. He started digging into the series way back in 2017 and covered the first couple of games in a series of articles. His WC3 review dropped in 2021 and now he's dug into WC4. It's a long article that's far more thorough than most overviews in print, although it doubles down quite a bit on the somewhat overplayed criticism than too much money went into the film shoots compared to the spaceflight engine. I would argue that there was little more to iterate gameplay-wise given the very short production time. WC4 was slated to arrive just one year following WC3 - right after Origin had spent a considerable amount of time (starting with Strike Commander and then forking into Armada) making the leap into proper 3D. Until the arrival of 3D accelerator hardware later in the '90s, there just wasn't much more they were going

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The Digital Antiquarian has posted a lengthy article on the history of Wing Commander 3. Much like his previous works, the piece is extensively researched and draws on both archival materials and personal interviews to build the historical context for game. It's a good recap of what WC3 was and how it came to be. The later parts of the article shift more into a meta review from the perspective of 2021. Our author here comes across as fairly critical of the more formulaic missions, binary nature of the plot choices and cheesiness of big space cats. He seems to realize the tonal shift is somewhat jarring after talking about how impressive a product WC3 is, so he ends on a conciliatory note. You can check out the full article here.

The presence of so many recognizable actors on the set, combined with the broader mass-media excitement over multimedia and CD-ROM, brought a parade of mainstream press

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Following our Wing Commander references in StarLancer we thought it would be a good idea to archive the other major Wing Commander reference in a Digital Anvil game: this loading screen from Conquest: Frontier Wars which claims the game is "Loading Pegasus NavCom AI". This references the Confederation space station that appears at the start of the movie (and it's related MacGuffin, the NavCom AI device that will allow the Kilrathi to reach Earth). Conquest, a real time strategy game set in space, was the second Digital Anvil game released, published by Ubisoft in 2001. The NavCom message is one of several that flip by while any of the game's maps are loading. It's currently available on GOG for anyone interested in trying it themselves (though we'll warn you the 'Pegasus' loading message now passes too quickly to be seen with the naked eye!).

We've also learned that a higher quality version of the

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The Wing Commander Movie is seeing a rare digital discount this week. The Blu-ray and DVD went out of print after the film rights reverted back to Chris Roberts, and digital copies were slow to pop back into the various storefronts. It's starting to appear again more now though, and Microsoft has it on sale for just $8. It's then playable on Windows PCs and Xboxes. There are different storefronts for different regions, but it appears the discount applies in multiple countries. VUDU, Fandango Now, Google Play, YouTube and Amazon also carry it once again for $10 now.

On the gaming side, Solstice may be a few weeks away yet, but the GOG summer sale is in full swing. The Wing Commander series generally gets about a 75% discount, but there's a small bump to 80% if you buy three or more games at once. That's a whopping $10.24 for all of the original DOS and Windows Wing Commander games, including