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The Wing Commander movie club has successfully carried the One Ring to Mordor… or… half way there, at least. But we're not leaving 1978! This week, we will be watching The Song of Roland (1978), a French film about medieval knights which stars Klaus Kinski! It seems to be celebrated in France but almost completely unknown in the English speaking world. Color me intrigued! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The Song of Roland is an 11th century French epic poem about the deeds of Roland, the leader of King Charlemagne's knights. You can read an English translation of the poem at Project Gutenberg. The poem is mentioned in the original Claw Marks, referenced by Paladin as one of the epic stories of knight-errantry that inspired him to join the fight against the Kilrathi. The unspoken implication is that it's also the source of his callsign, as Roland was the leader of Charlemagne's

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Here at the Wing Commander Combat Information Center we love old magazine articles about our favorite series... and our beloved type, by far, is ones that come from 'professional' periodicals. Case in point, here's a great article from the June 1999 issue of Computer Graphics World that details the SFX work that Digital Anvil put into the Wing Commander movie. It's the sort of detail you wouldn't get in a PC Gamer! There's something underappreciated about Chris Roberts decision to 'do it himself' with the 3D work for the movie. And I'd argue that the results ultimately hold up better than The Phantom Menace (which got the cover story for this magazine).

FLYING HIGH

PC game creator takes his space battles to the big screen

BY KAREN MOLTENBREY

About a decade ago, when most people his age were obtaining a college education, an ambitious Chris Roberts was teaching the gaming community a lesson or two when

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The Wing Commander IV demo was released online on October 19, 1995, a full four months before the game finally shipped! As a result there's some interesting things in the demo that are a little different from the final game... so we thought we'd take a look. We'll start with the controversy. The... stupidest controversy in history. When the demo was first released, a 43-megabyte download was an impossible thing for most dialup users. I remember having my dad bring several dozen blank disks (that I hastily formatted from AOL offers and unwanted shareware games) to work to download it overnight and PKZIP span back to me. And most people weren't that lucky! So Origin game up with the smart solution of offering a version that was just the mission without the trailer... just 13 megs! That was still a huge download in 1995, but it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE. One impact of this was that when the game started it

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Well, howdy partners and welcome to my rodeo! I love searching the Internet Archive for classic articles mentioning Wing Commander almost as much as people love uploading classic articles mentioning Wing Commander. Sometimes I strike gold and discover something worth a whole CIC update... and someday a huge backlog of things that I thought "hey, that's kind of interesting" gathers. Today, we'll clear that backlog! But it will be back... while you sleep, it'll be waiting.

We'll start off with two sismple articles from 2007 covering the announcement of Wing Commander Arena. This basically just shows how small the rollout was at the time; the days of massive press junkets were over! This is the April 2007 issue of NAG and the May issue of MANiAC.

The October 1993 issue of Game Players magazine has a pretty stunning layout for a Secret Missions SNES preview article! Don't stare directly at it.

Here's a PC

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The Wing Commander movie club has made the trip from Providence to Aspen with Dumb and Dumber… and we were kind of surprised by how gentle the movie comes off today. I had never seen it and assumed from the pedigree that it would be an outrageous, cutting edge sort of a comedy… but if anything it actually drags quite a bit when viewed today. One thing we've learned watching these movies is that comedies are often more ephemeral than you would assume!

And here's our easy Wing Commander connection! Cam Neely played Sea Bass, a trucker who Harry runs afoul of at a diner. One of Sea Bass' friends, played by Sean Gildea, encourages him to "kick his ass, Sea Bass!". And that quote made it all the way to the Tri-System! (Wingman quotes in Privateer 2 are, oddly, not things your wingman can actually say.)

Could this be the Mother Creature? No, it's the Big Blue Bug, an enormous termite mascot for a pest control

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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 The Lord of the Rings (1978) 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!