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You've probably heard talk of some excitement going on in Portland, Oregon and it's all true: Wing Commander I and II composer George "The Fatman" Sanger will be appearing at next weekend's Portland Retro Gaming Expo! The convention runs October 17 to 19 at the Oregon Convention Center.
We were also honored to loan a Wing Commander Prophecy flight suit for display at their FMV Zone museum exhibit. So if you're in Portland next weekend, you can really have some Wing Commander fun!
Oct
…Earlier in the year, we held a pair of Saturday morning marathons that celebrated Wing Commander-connected media that didn't quite fit with the Friday movie club. And now we're bringing them back! This Saturday, October 18, we'll be bringing you another themed morning of '90s media and great Wing Commander conversation. This time, we're taking a look at a series that was pretty influential during the making of Wing Commander III: Mystery Science Theater 3000. We'll be watching two episodes that are referenced in WC3 and talking all about what life was like on the internet way back in 1994!
"Manos": The Hands of Fate (1993, s4e24): MST3k brought Manos to the world, introducing future generations to what may be the single worst movie ever made. But it made for a pretty funny episode! And one that was clearly appreciated by Wing Commander III's development team, which named the crucial Torgo system after
Oct
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Last week, the Wing Commander movie voted on a movie from a list of Oscar winners. It turned out to be Rosemary's Baby, which was a great way to start a spooky October. Sadly, this time around I thought it would be fun to vote from a selection of Razzie winners… and after two rounds, the winner was Ishtar (1987). Ishtar is famous for being an enormous box office bomb and was once considered the worst big budget movie ever made. Modern critics are much kinder, though, so it'll be interesting to see what it's like! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
What does Ishtar have to do with Wing Commander? This is another one of the 'joke' movie names used to label original Privateer concept art. Specifically, it was used for the very first sketches of the game's incredibly familiar mining base options screen. You can hear the music just seeing the screenshot!
Where can I find a copy of the
Oct
…Lakon Spaceways has praised the success of its sponsored mining trials for the Type-11 Prospector, praising independent pilots who flew them.
Engineers reported that the data gathered has exceeded expectations, with the Prospector's custom mining systems maintaining consistent, high-yield results.
A Lakon senior design engineer, who oversaw the trial, stated:
"The feedback from pilots has been very positive. The Prospector's unique hardpoint configuration and enhanced limpet systems are proving themselves in real mining conditions. We built this ship to be one of the best surface mining vessels you can buy, and these trials have shown that it is exactly that."
Several pilots involved in the campaign described the vessel as "ripping through asteroids with ease", praising its ability to produce unprecedented fragment yields. The feedback is also welcomed by the news of a permanent 8% boost to
Oct
AD has found another interesting historical radio broadcast. This one aired on KRFC 88.9 FM on December 30, 2018. It's an hour long interview with Jen Parker. Ms. Parker got her start in video game magazines and went on to become a brand manager for Origin Systems in Europe... and later headed up Electronic Arts' worldwide marketing. Her whole life story is pretty interesting and it starts about 40 minutes in. We've clipped out just the part covering her work on Wing Commander III here:
Oct
…The 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
Oct
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Rosemary's Baby (1973) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
Oct
Full version of Freelancer The Nomad Legacy is coming. Also in English!
Oct
…You will be forgiven if you've never heard of the Keyboard And Terminal Technology (KATT) Game Master Matt. It was a very obscure mid-90s game controller keyboard. Its gimmick was that it was pre-programmed to support specific games and you could buy different layout "matts" (sic) that would customize the device to 'look' like the game you're playing. They might, for instance, show a jet cockpit or an RPG character sheet with the custom buttons labeled. The device was not a success and it's best (barely) remembered for small ads which appeared in magazines like PC Gamer which listed the different game mats available.
We've known that there were several Wing Commander mats sold but none of them had ever been seen before. Enter LiqMatrix who has been researching the Game Master and who kindly stopped by our forum to share what they've learned. They were recently lucky enough to win an auction for what
Oct
…Lexi October, billionaire investor and head of the October Consortium, has issued a statement clarifying her organisation's ownership of the HIP 87621 permit.
"The October Consortium acquired system rights through all proper and legal channels over a decade ago," October declared. "Our researchers are conducting a legitimate study of several planetary bodies. Any infringement upon these rights will be rigorously challenged through interstellar courts. Permit access is not granted lightly, nor will we tolerate attempts to undermine lawful operations."
October also questioned the intensity of media and scientific scrutiny directed at her organisation:
"Zachary Rackham's recent survey campaign enlisted thousands of independent pilots to scour the galaxy for planetary data. Yet Rackham has not shared the promised results with the scientific community – not a single piece of scan data. Why, then,
Oct
…I thought it would be fun to take a look at Wing Commander III's magnificent Warbirds 2669 poster with some 'behind the screens' notes where they came to me. Do you have fond memories of Warbirds, or anything else fun to note with the pages? Let us known on the forums!
- Warbirds is Wing Commander III's "feelie," the traditional 'extra' included with Origin games. Wing Commander games typically had paper feelies compared to the physical runes and coins and the like included with the Ultima series.
- The foldout was included with the original PC release of Wing Commander III as well as the Macintosh and 3DO ports. It was not included with the PlayStation or the Kilrathi Saga versions.
- The full color version seen here was included with the premiere edition of Wing Commander III. Most other releases include a greyscale version (with colored highlights for each faction in purple or orange).
- The European 3DO
Oct
…Have you ever wondered why the original Wing Commander's cheat code is referred to as the "finger of death"? Sure, you use your fingers to activate it… but that's also how pretty much every cheat code that exists works. There's a little bit more to the story than you would expect: the term actually goes back to the game's original Quality Assurance team and it's based on a feature cut from the game!
Wait, what? That's right, at one point Wing Commander had a second animated hand in the cockpit. The design was that you would see your 'left' hand react to certain events in combat. If you scored a kill you would make a fist and when your wingman scored you would give them a thumbs up. Here's the original art assignment from the game's production schedule, assigning the task of digitizing the hand artwork to Daniel Bourbonnais.
What does that have to do with the cheat code? As a joke, the team replaced the
Oct
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The Wing Commander movie club has made it through RoboCop 3 which, while not a good film by any means, ended nicely. But after two weeks of objectively lower quality films, we asked everyone to vote from a selection of six Oscar winners. And the victor was psychological horror classic Rosemary's Baby (1968), which won Best Actress in a Supporting Role. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
Why Rosemary's Baby? We previously talked about directors honored with references in the Wing Commander universe, specifically George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Akira Kurosawa and their associated star systems. We've since picked out two more for the movie pool: Michael Cimino (the TCS Cimino appears in the Prophecy simulator) and Roman Polanski, tuckerized as the Wing Commander movie's "Bishop" Polanski. As with the others, we've selected an additional classic to represent each. We'll be back in
Oct
…Several years ago, I purchased an unusual Wing Commander shirt from a 'picker' in Malaysia that I found on Instagram. Such sellers dig through unwanted clothing given to thrift stores or otherwise discarded for treasures that will appeal to collectors of vintage clothing. I've found several Wing Commander promotional shirts this way over the years… but this one was different, I'd never seen it before. It simply reads "Wing Commander" in glittery letters. Were it not for the small text mentioning "Wing Commander Productions" I would've assumed it had nothing to do with our favorite franchise.
Then last week, AD thought up the idea to search the Internet Archive for the Japanese website for the Wing Commander movie. It was set up by distributor Gaga Corporation at wc.gaga.ne.jp (now defunct) for the film's local release. It has the usual collection of cast biographies and a brief background… and this
Oct
Here's a preview of Wing Commander SNES that we found on eBay, of all places! We snagged it from one of those 'cut up magazines and sell them as posters' accounts and as of this moment we don't know where it was from. The listing claimed it dates to 1992, which makes sense, but we haven't found the specific magazine it comes from. When we do, we'll track down a higher resolution version! But we thought it would be good to go ahead and get it in the archive because the article layout is just so pretty. Look at those cool alternating icons!
Oct
…I think every member of the Wing Commander movie club can agree that 1492: Conquest of Paradise was not the most thrilling film in the world. It's not that it wasn't well made but it just… sort of sat there with lavish production values that never seemed to quite live up to the story it was telling with characters that just weren't engaging enough for you to put your full head into them. But my philosophy is that mediocrity should be met with a little extra work to make things better… so we're going to use our viewing of 1492 as an excuse to really look at part of the Wing Commander movie!
We watched 1492 for a very important reason: its opening titles were a major influence on the ones Chris Roberts created for the 1999 Wing Commander movie (alongside Sphere and The Fan, which we will be viewing in the future). So technically our Wing Commander interest was over in the first four minutes but it was
Oct
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Robocop 3 (1993) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
Oct
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The rarely seen 2006 film Visual Futurist: The Art and Life of Syd Mead is back! The group responsible for preserving Mead's legacy has remastered the film and made it available for sale and rent on streaming services:
I watched Visual Futurist in advance of this update and found it very compelling! I went in knowing that Mead was both an incredible talent and someone loved by their peers... and the documentary quickly confirmed both of those things. The film doesn't cover his work on Wing Commander Prophecy's Nephilim but it does showcase a lot of incredible art from his storied career, with extended sections covering fan favorites like Blade Runner, TRON, 2010 (topical!) and Aliens. Learning about his thought process about industrial design was fascinating and there was plenty I'd never heard before. I had no idea that he had designed a luxury yacht for Donald Trump and
Oct
Display MoreBitterman stopped by the CIC Discord the other night with a cool present for the community: scans of four Wing Commander cover stories from French magazine Joystick. The Wing Commander Prophecy preview is especially interesting... look carefully at the right VDU images in the screenshots and you'll see that some--but not all!--are from the E3 demo.
Joystick 62 - August 1995 - Wing Commander IV preview
Joystick 68 - February 1996 - Wing Commander IV review
Joystick 77 - December 1996 - Privateer 2 review
Joystick 89 - January 1998 - Wing Commander Prophecy review
Oct
GOG.com is turning 17 years old! The Wing Commander series is discounted by 50% to celebrate the milestone. We first reported about them back in 2008 when the company was announced, and their first WC title was Privateer in June of 2011. It's pretty wild how long they've been serving up classic Wing Commander!
