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We've gotten some questions lately about the classic Wing Commander 3 Warbirds poster, which is just gorgeous, so we wanted to take a moment to put it front and center for everyone to enjoy. The regular game came with a black and white version, but Premiere Edition owners were treated to this beautiful foldout in full color. You can also grab it in a concise PDF here (9 megs). You can find all kinds of other WC documentation here!
Jun
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.
Jan
…Here's an excerpt from the end of Privateer 2 where we see the player (and others) escape Kronos' doomed flagship. Unfortunately only the published 320x200 version survives so it can be hard to see some of the neat details. Let's try and identify the ships!
Since the player can choose from 18 different ships there was no way to know which they'd actually fly the last mission in. To hedge bets, the escaping fleet includes four of the most likely options. First out is a Drakkar!
Then we've got a Danrik in an all-grey livery. (And that's a good choice because you were probably flying a Danrik here!)
Then there's a Shaman...
And out in front but not identifiable until you get to the second shot is the game's signature Heretic!
Cinematics not knowing what ship to use wasn't a problem exclusive to Privateer 2, either. Wing Commander Prophecy gives the final hero flyby shot to the Devastator instead of the
Apr
…OldTechAdverts recently reposted a spiffy advertisement sheet for Wing Commander Academy. LOAF took a moment to appreciate it and point out some interesting elements below. It can be hard for modern audiences to appreciate Academy today, but if you were there to see things like this in magazines back in 1993, you knew how cool this was! You can find more classic WC ads like this in the CIC Documents Archive here.
This ad is a master class in marketing copy. Everything fresh and appealing—“CyberSchool’s holodeck console,” “cybernet wingman”, etc.—is just describing the fictional setting and doesn’t touch the gameplay at all.
The bottom screenshot is one of my all-time favorite bullshots, too! None of these wingmen are in the game and that VDU face appears nowhere else! Final game doesn’t use “zealous”, either.
If you look closely at the Wraith cockpit you’ll see it isn’t finished... the left VDU is
Oct
Spacedockhas put together a neat short clip on the nature of fighter space combat. Daniel talks about the need to turn into your enemy, avoid jousting and aim for large targeting surfaces among other things. Wing Commander isn't the focus of the video, but it may as well be as most of the topic is relevant to fighting in the WC universe. A second video talks about how hard it would actually be to evade missiles in space. Tough times for fighter pilots!
Spacedock gives some handy day-to-day advice on Space Dogfighting.
Mar
…The Wing Commander Academy press kit says that there were twelve cadets transferred to the Tiger's Claw. Can you name them all?
Alright, let's see if we can find them! We're looking for the original twelve cadets transferred to the Tiger's Claw's command school. So Victoria/Viking here and the veteran replacements from the Trafalgar who are added after Chain of Command don't count.
First up, the three leads. Christopher "Maverick" Blair played by Mark Hamill and designed from his live action appearances in Wing Commander III and IV (minus 19 years). Bios are from the series' press kit:
Todd "Maniac" Marshall voiced by Tom Wilson and also designed from his WC3 and 4 appearances (though a little bit more The Real Ghostbustersy).
And new character Gwen "Archer" Bowman played by Dana Delany! She voiced Louis Lane on Superman that same season and it sure feels like both character designs were influenced by the
May
I went back to see how the sprite-less Jalthi was mentioned in the original SNES Wing Commander. You can see it wasn’t mentioned in the US/EU manuals at all! And that as with everything else, the Japanese version is much, much better.The SNES version doesn’t have enough memory for five ships, so it tints the Salthi green and calls it a Jalthi! The US manuals pretend it doesn’t exist while the Japanese one embraces the weird change.They also had to drop the Exeter to include the Venture, so the Gwenhyvar becomes a corvette.
Jul
Here's a couple of new items for EmuMusicFan's graphical novel project. The first sketch depicts his first take on a Kilrathi warrior's mane. It might not be something you ever think about as the viewer, but from an artist's point of view, drawing a Kilrathi from behind takes some extra skill with fur. This Kilrathi is supposed to be none other than Khitz nar Ki'ra. There's also a more lighthearted image showing a Kilrathi instructor teaching proper vocabulary to a youngster.
The plot I want to write is that the player is walking while checking the map on the cellphone without looking at the road, and then hits Khitz's back at a corner.
"Teaching our cubs to learn about human culture is not an easy job."
Sep
…After releasing six episodes of his Defiant Few audio series, Plywood Fiend has been out of the WC fan project world for a bit, but he's back with a new simpler take on amusing his fellow Wingnuts. It's essentially a live-streamed play through of the original Wing Commander, but it's been edited to include his own comedic take. He's already completed everything from Enyo to Venice, and they can be found in a Youtube playlist here. That's a lot to check out! The first mission and a couple of samples also embedded below.
My most recent whimsy-work is a bit humbler, but just a bit. I'm doing a let's play of Wing Commander 1, but one riddled with my own peculiar brand of humor in the (text only) commentary, and with peculiar, (usually) funny intro videos, snippets of which I'll include below, best I can. Rest assured that for those like myself who've played this game more times than they'd care to
Jul
Today we have a short musical piece that was written as part of a film school project. The artist, Sean Sumwalt, used about a minute of footage from the end of the Wing Commander Movie right after Angel ejects and Blair is forced to keep moving. A new instrumental track accompanies the scene and attempts to set the tone. AD found it while looking for Overture covers, and it's definitely not that, but it's not bad.
Mar
Here's how a Privateer 2 ship - the
Shaman- changed during development, from concept model to alpha build to marketing render to final game asset! Look how the monster face evolved away...
May
…All of us at the CIC are in shock at the news of Klavs' passing. We all get caught up in the frenzy of our hectic lives, but moments like this really make you realize you don't know how lucky you are to have everyone in your life until it's too late. I had the honor of meeting Adam Burch in person once about ten years ago. He flew into town on behalf of the kit-built aircraft manufacturer that he worked for at the time. I couldn't believe how knowledgeable he was about all aspects of the plane, plus the marketing and business sides, and then he could even fly it! I work in aerospace myself, so I know how complicated this all was, and his expertise was astounding. He was also exceedingly generous and kept mentioning how he'd like to return some day so he could take me up on a flight. If you didn't know, he didn't just design Wing Commander ships - he was also a spacecraft artist/designer at
Sep
Found a nugget tonight: an tiny uncatalogued Privateer pre-release screenshot in a 1993 Mindscape catalog! An earlier version of the New Constantinople landing pad.
Nov
Found a neat little Easter egg in the Wing Commander III 3DO texture files: the Confederation space station's textures are labeled BABYLON6.
May
Scimitars may not be known for going fast, but blink and you might miss this one. Hit the gear in the lower right and you can slow the clip down in slow motion. At 0.25 speed you can admire the design a little more. This is just one of the Wing Commander fighters that
Stephen Fenderis working on. He's got four Confed and four Kilrathi ships coming together, and with that he's considering putting together a Lego movie or comic. Whatever form this ends up taking, we'd love to see it!
A little LEGO model I designed in Lego Digital Designer, converted to 3DS, then imported into Lightwave for a quick test render.
May
Today we've got a little snippet unearthed by Sash's RetroBytes. It's a segment from the British TV show Bad Influence! that peeks behind the scenes of Wing Commander 3. Most of the footage looks like material we'd have seen on other longer WC3 BTS features, but it's always nice to see times when Wing Commander was showcased on television!
The Heart of the Tiger! Hollywood comes to video games in a big way - as we see in this clip of Bad Influence series 3 episode 4 where they went behind the scenes of the production of Wing Commander III. #Retrogaming #dosgaming #wingcommander #technology #90s#GameTVNibbles pic.twitter.com/kU9j4qkdol
— Sasha's RetroBytes (@SharkaBytes) October 9, 2023The Heart of the Tiger! Hollywood comes to video games in a big way - as we see in this clip of Bad Influence series 3 episode 4 where they went behind the scenes of the production of Wing Commander III.
Feb
…Again, it should be pretty obvious that this is a photo from the set and not a frame from the movie. But it did get me thinking about Tchéky Karyo headshots...
This picture shows up as a lobby card and in other promotional material... but it turns out it's NOT the same as the headshot that's used in the movie!
But here's some neat continuity: that in universe one DOES match the photo in the Confederation Handbook for Paladin's psychological profile.
I also checked the archive of the movie's official site, which had this little bit of lore we've saved all these years. A third photo!
... but here's another great touch: the signature on the letter at the movie site matches the one used for a letter he authored in the Handbook! Now THAT is attention to detail.
On a separate note, Mr. Karyo was born in Turkey, which suffered a terrible earthquake this week. You can help donate to relief efforts in Turkey and
Dec
…
bsmith1702 was recently going over the killboard in Wing Commander 3 and noted that while it called out ace kills specifically, capital ship destructions were not included. It's just a fighter killboard. Then he had a truly "eureka!" moment. Most pilot rosters like this are sorted either by displayed name or number of kills. The WC3 board isn't ordered either way though, so it's easy to dismiss the question and assume they're more or less randomly assigned. But actually, the pilots are listed by each character's last name, not callsign! That's a pretty cool realization. Jace Dillon comes after Wingston Chang who comes after Laurel Buckley and so on. And now you're an even smarter Wing Commander fan because you know!
Another random thing I noticed was how the names are listed in the kill board. At first it didn't make much sense to me (and I liked how in WC1 the names were ranked by number of
Oct
…We've got a couple smaller updates for the WC4 Fan Remake today based on questions from fans at the CIC Forums. The first request was to add VR headset support, which the team was surprisingly open to. There are existing tools out there that facilitate conversion to VR, but they are rapidly evolving, so it would be something the team revisits much later on when the mod is closer to release. There were also questions about cockpits, and we got another beautiful shot in reply that shows off their potential. They look like a good mix of classic WC style with information embedded while being rather inobtrusive like in Prophecy. As designed by Origin, WC4 reacted hard to the popularity of invisible HUD cockpit options in Armada, WC3 and Kilrathi Saga. While they may have been the predominant way people were playing in 1995, the game loses a little something by not having them as an option. It's nice
Jan
…As the calendar crosses over into another new year, we took a look back and were once again amazed at all of the happenings in the world of Wing Commander. You guys were busy! And so were we - here's a look back at some of the highlights of 2018.
WC Toolbox
One of the more surprising things to me was how much happened with WC1/2. UnnamedCharacter's
opened the door to some pretty fun stuff. In conjunction with Goliath and Howard Day, they're working on amazing
model upgrade tests. Sheppard developed
Wing Hardto adjust game difficulty. Rehsin is
adding charactersand creating
campaigns. Some of this is bleeding into WC2 and Privateer 2, and it was pretty neat to see a WC2
arcade cabinetat Britizencon. We continue to learn a lot about these games even after 28+ years, including the recent discovery of multiple
easter eggsburied in WC1. And it's neat to still see WC easter eggs pop up elsewhere in
