Ultima Companions Hidden in Plain Sight

We recently put together an article covering the names of the different transports in Wing Commander II. A few weeks later I was surprised to discover I had received a pretty fascinating anonymous message about it:

I was just reading the Wing Commander II transports article, and noticing the breakdown with the comm portraits I remembered: have you guys ever written about how those portraits are originally from Ultima VI (Gwenno and Nomaan)? I can't be the only one who noticed that, right?

We had not written such an article because we had never noticed the connection! But sure enough, it's 100% true: both of the VDU images for the male and female freighter pilots in Wing Commander II are reused from NPC portraits in Ultima VI! To the best of my knowledge (and despite the huge amount of crossover between Wing Commander and Ultima players, myself included) I've never seen anyone else point this out. Kudos, what a find! Here they are:

For those not familiar with Ultima lore, Nomaan is a more minor NPC who appears in Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny and Ultima VI: The False Prophet. He runs Naughty Nomaan's, a weapons shop in the city of Jhelom in both games. Like many Ultima characters, he is based on one of Richard Garriott's friends from the Society for Creative Anachronism, Jerry Self. Self's SCA character was named Nomaan Bucharde.

Gwenno, on the other hand, is one of the most significant characters in the Ultima series. She appears in some form or another starting in the original game, often as a potential party member and the wife of crossbow master Iolo. She is based on Kathleen Jones, the wife of the real Iolo, David Watson. Both were old friends of Garriott (again from the SCA) and together they composed Ultima's most famous piece of music, Stones. Mrs. Jones sadly passed away in 2000 and is memorialized in the world of Ultima Online. Her appearance seems to vary from game to game.

This is not the first time we've known about plans to reuse Ultima VI material in Wing Commander II. You can read about a cut feature that was designed for WC2 which would've reused the TV animations from the Ultima VI opening.