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The Wing Commander movie club had a pretty good time getting all cultured-like with Romeo+Juliet. This week, we opted to vote for a thriller and the winner of that poll is a classic summer movie: Jaws (1975)! It's one of those movies that's thoroughly baked into our culture… but my experience has always been that it holds up great!

In the spirit of previous selections for George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa, we picked Jaws as the representative of Steven Spielberg's Confederation star system. The Spielberg System, which premiered on the 1997 Wing Commander universe map, is located in the hotly contested Enigma Sector:

Of course, everyone loves a shark! Much like real aircraft, Wing Commander's spaceships have been known to sport shark mouths… and that's a tradition that goes all the way back to Prince Thrakhath's Bloodfang in the Wing Commander II demo! We've previously published an article covering that

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We recently updated about an uprez'd version of one of GOG's Wing Commander wallpapers which reminded us that... these wallpapers exist in the first place? GOG created a number of 'unique' Wing Commander wallpapers when they released the games digitally and frankly we hadn't really spent much time ever even looking at them. But on consideration, they do seem like the kind of ephemera that might vanish overnight. So it's a good time to catalog and preserve them! Turns out GOG has included such wallpapers with Privateer, Privateer 2, Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV (two styles). Here's the full set in various resolutions:

• 1280x1024 version
• 1600x1200 version
• 1920x1080 version

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Some intrepid archivist recently uploaded what seems to be a full run of famed gentleman's magazine Playboy. So of course we've done the hard work for you and pulled out every page where Wing Commander is mentioned! You can come up with your own 'reading it for the articles' joke here.

July 1992 - a gift guide mentions Wing Commander II as being one of the top flight simulation games.

May 1995- a short review of Wing Commander III!

April 1996 - this one mentions Jennifer MacDonald's Wing Commander III role in a caption of a photograph of her pole dancing. Huh.

August 1998 - the casting announcement for the Wing Commander movie, plus a lucky appearance from Ultima Online!

November 2007 - A goofy 'history of gaming' sidebar says Wing Commander III was a bad idea. Playboy really did go downhill!

The 1996 issue's page includes full frontal nudity (much of which is not Wing Commander-related) and so we have

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The Wing Commander movie club had a great time with ace's birthday movie, Amadeus! (Happy birthday, ace!). It's not quite a historical movie as it is a movie that contextualizes Mozart's story for modern audiences… treating him as we would see a rock star-style musician today, so that we understand his humanity instead of some more stuffy analysis of his music. The result is a pretty energetic film that doesn't feel like it's three hours long at all!

Our big Wing Commander connection was the name itself, which was nodded to by the doomed medical transport at the start of Wing Commander IV.

There's a little Mozart in the Wing Commander movie, too! When Blair goes to visit Paladin in his quarters on the Tiger Claw, he's listening to a trio from Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte (translation below). It's not one of the operas we see him making in Amadeus, but they did make such productions look pretty fun.

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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 Romeo + Juliet (1996) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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AD has made a nice little discovery! It's a Wing Commander IV preview and Mark Hamill interview from the October 1995 issue (Number 81) of VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine (real title, not made up). What's neat about this one is that it includes some set photos that we haven't seen anywhere else! It's always great to look back in time through this sort of media; I wish we could explore the Wing Commander IV sets at a modern resolution. There's so much detail that didn't capture in the final footage! The article also previews a PlayStation game called Agile Warrior: F-111X which I have never heard of; the Wikipedia describes it thusly, in full: "Agile Warrior is a F-111X flight simulator with several missions." Neat.

A Tale of Two Video Game Shoots

This is the story of two very different upcoming videogames with one big thing in common: full-motion, video footage (FMV). Origin’s Wing Commander