Display MoreAD has come upon a pretty fascinating vintage article that had not been in our community consciousness. It's a preview of Origin's product lineup from the April 1991 issue of The One, an Amiga-focused computer outlet. It includes a very early description of Wing Commander II and some rendered images of ships in progress… including one we've never seen before!
We asked Wing Commander II director Siobhan Beeman about the unknown ship and she was kind enough to think back so far to figure it out:
Vaguely. Early drafts of the story had more capital ship engagements, which is why torpedoes were introduced and why the Concordia is a strike carrier with a spinal-mount weapon. I believe this art is for a frigate or destroyer class that would have shown up with multiple names.Awesome! You can certainly see how a frigate with this design would fit right alongside the Gilgamesh destroyer and Waterloo cruiser in the final game. Though we know the Waterloo model was originally built as the patrol carrier TCS Peel which was where Blair was to serve before the Concordia, so it's possible that this was originally the destroyer and that all of the Confederation capital ships traded classes when the game plan was reworked that summer.
We strongly suspect that the missing frigate was ultimately reworked as Super Wing Commander's Venture-class corvette. It's not exactly the same model but it's extremely similar. The majority of the meshes used in Super Wing Commander were taken from Wing Commander II and Privateer. Many were simply retextured but others were reworked into new ships, like the Kamekh that lost its wings to become a Snakeir or the Sabre fuselage that was turned into a Kilrathi corvette! Super Wing Commander was also the ultimate home of other cut WC2 models, like the Lumbakh civilian transport.
Note also the mention of six flyable spacecraft instead of five; at this point, the Mongoose was still in the cards! It would've been a single turret bomber that would've introduced you to torpedo runs earlier in the game.
The other WC2 images are also great. A shot of Angel's Deluxepaint screen and then early renders of the Rigakh and Drakhri.
There's a lot of other interesting material in this article as well, including a very early take on Strike Commander then referred to as Ground Commander and details on Mindscape's early attempt to port Wing Commander to the Amiga. Origin had initially tried to port it in house and this represents Mindscape's first attempt outsourcing the project to Eastridge Technology. The project would eventually go to the needed genius, programmer Nick Pelling. There's even mention of a Japanese Ultima theme park, though we suspect that's a case of something being lost in translation. Oh and there's a LOT of braggadocio from a young Chris Roberts!
And if you can believe it, this wasn't the first new vintage Wing Commander ship we've claimed in 2025!
