While we were visiting Gaia Industries in New York last month we were treated to an amazing slide show of concept art from Wing Commander Arena - everything from Wing Commander characters to familiar (and new!) ships to space stations. We were so impressed with this cache of previously unseen 'behind the screens' work that we insisted it had to be preserved for the future. Luckily EA Producer Sean Penney agreed and granted permission to release some of this spectacular art! Special thanks to Taino at Gaia, too, for providing it (and, of course, for creating it in the first place). First up is a beautiful splash screen showing a Rapier II in hot pursuit of an Arrow set against an asteroid field. I'm surprised that this didn't make it i nto the finished game as one of the loading screens somewhere - it's at least as beautiful as the Arrows on a flight deck. It's just a stunning piece of artwork - and it makes a great widescreen Windows background! Keep watching the news over the next few weeks - future Art of Wing Commander Arena posts will be interspersed with Point of Origin updates... along with a third 'Wing Commander History' series which will be revealed soon! If you would like to thank the guys at Gaia for making the effort get us this art then you should pick up Street Trace NYC on XBLA... it's a fast-paced racing/combat game - some of the guys from #WingNut put it through its paces last weekend and it's a lot of fun! There are plenty of game modes, beautiful graphics similar to those in Arena and a neat future setting that you can lose yourself in. I'll Street Trace with a WingNut any time! -- Original update published on September 26, 2007
Well, the pic is 1280x720, and I run 1280x1024. With a black desktop background, It makes a nice (and very WC-ish) letterbox-type wallpaper for me. It makes me want to add the Arena logo to the black borders like in WC1 autopilot sequences.
