Display MoreThe Wing Commander movie club is back from old Detroit and there's no way around it: RoboCop 3 is a bad movie. Like the sequels to Starship Troopers and Showgirls, this is another case of an artful Verhoeven movie being cut down into only its most literal parts. Which is fine: RoboCop said everything it needed to say… following it up with endless sequels focused on how cool it is that there could be a robot cop kind of just reinforces the original message. And you know, it did end up being sort of fun: RoboCop 3 drags in the first half but it has a pretty fun third act that climaxes with RoboCop flying a jetpack and saying absolutely nothing about the human condition.
What about Wing Commander? The only direct connection was a piece of music used in the Wing Commander workprint and we reviewed that in the intro post. But the one thing we couldn't get out of our minds was the Righteous Fire introduction. Is the "cop" that informs you that your Steltek gun was stolen a robot? A cyborg? A person in armor? And if so, was he inspired by RoboCop?
The short answer is that it's unclear. Like most elements of the expansion, the 'security guy' was actually leftover material from the original Privateer. The scene was originally conceived and rendered as a losing endgame for the base game. The guard would inform you that the game was over and that they were seizing your ship if you ever had a negative credit balance. This situation was possible only if you landed at a base with a balance such that you could not pay the 50 credit docking fee. In the end, Privateer moved the focus away from economics and managed to save disk space (a significant concern) by simply adding a rule that the game wouldn't charge you the fee if you couldn't pay it. You can actually see shots of this scene in the very first set of Privateer screenshots released to the press in 1992:
In this original formulation, there's a strong indication that he is intended to be a man wearing an armored suit. Specifically, he was intended to be a 3D representation of the armored security forces seen in the game's concept and manual art. They were originally imagined as more of a 'storm trooper' style and a lot of his 3D appearance seems to match how Origin's artists were doing characters at that time: compare him to the Super Wing Commander pilot, Bioforge's Lex or even the Avatar in Serpent Isle!
Looking at the surviving Privateer development material, his filename is ENFORCER. Looking at his individual parts they're all labeled like a body: fingers, feet, shoulders and so on. The smoking gun in all this is his helmet, which is explicitly a helmet rather than part of a head. We think that's enough to confirm that it was originally intended to be a man in an armored suit. If you'd like to explore his original model you can find it here.
But Wing Commander's soldiers typically aren't armored. And that's true: in Wing Commander I human soldiers wear only shirt sleeves and berets. Starting with the live action games, they're portrayed by live actors in familiar modern fatigues and this is mirrored by appearances on Wing Commander Academy and references in spinoff novels and games. But in 1993 that was not at all an established trend. When Privateer was first imagined the most recent security guard had been the Warhammer 40k-style guards protecting Jazz after his arrest! Ah ha!
But that's just how Enforcer was imagined… for a role he didn't play. While it was the original idea, Privateer never establishes it as canon that there's big metal guys at every base. Instead, we see only one on Jolson in Righteous Fire. And Righteous Fire's change to the dialogue is a key consideration. With the original lines about confiscating your ship removed, the new dialogue was recorded not with an actor but with a text-to-speech library similar to the one used by Dr. Sbaitso. Voice work in these games was done in-house and often used Origin's developers instead of professional actors… so it's not a case of making him a robot because there wasn't budget for anything else. The Righteous Fire development team decided to make him seem more robotic (or RoboCopic?) on purpose.
Could this be an indication that he's a cyborg like RoboCop? Maybe; after all, RoboCop speaks with a robotic voice. And visible cyborgs are actually pretty common in Privateer… except they don't speak with robotic voices! Additionally, the new conversation in Righteous Fire does seem to imply that whatever he is is standard equipment rather than a surprise specific to one man on Jolson. Burrows doesn't seem shocked by his existence and refers to him as a "metal man"; and his further mention that he didn't pay for a "bunch of tin idiots" seems to suggest he's a normal example of base security.
And so the mystery endures! My strong suspicion is that the original character was inspired by RoboCop but was intended to represent a 'normal' future cop wearing armor like in Wing Commander II. But he was further roboticized for Righteous Fire on purpose. But do I think that just the Enforcer's face texture is enough to add a truly great movie to the upcoming pool: the original RoboCop. This discussion will continue!
My friends call me Sully. You can call me… Sully.
