Wings Addendum: All That Jazz

Last month, we published an article cataloging the wings worn by Wing Commander's various fighter pilots. We failed to include one pretty important reference: Jazz's wings from Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi! You may remember that these wings played an important role in Wing Commander II's treason mystery and as a result got their own closeup shot! When Jazz shoots Specialist McGuffin for discovering his communications with the Kilrathi, McGuffin grabs his wings as he dies. Jazz then steals Stingray's wings and he is blamed for the murder (until Sparks provides an alibi). Of course, as we pointed out in the initial article there's not a clear place on the Wing Commander II duty uniforms where wings are worn! But the scene provides a great look at them:

In case you aren't familiar with the joke about this scene, Specialist McGuffin is named after the idea of a "MacGuffin" which is a word used by writers for something that motivates a story but isn't necessarily important to it in any other way. The joke being that he appears only for this scene, which moves Wing Commander II's story forward. The term was first used by screenwriter Angus MacPhail and was popularized by famed director Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The Wikipedia quotes his explanation from a 1939 lecture:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?" And the other answers, "Oh, that's a MacGuffin." The first one asks, "What's a MacGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers, "Well then, that's no MacGuffin!" So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

At the Edge of the Universe...

A BlueSky user named revenant was recently noodling around with the SNES port of Wing Commander and made a pretty exciting discovery and a cool tool for taking a closer look at the game's assets! Revenant turned ROMs of the two surviving SNES ports into in flight object viewers that let you explore the in-game background layers, essentially letting you scroll through the different ships and objects stored in the game! Their first thread starts here.

completely pointless activity of the week: hacking a Mode 7 object viewer into the janky SNES port of wing commander

(d-pad cycles objects/frames, start button exits)

right now this only shows the 'up close' frames for ingame objects (which are background layers rather than the sprites used for distant objects)

also the displayed names of objects come from the list of text strings which doesn't always match the actual object - i.e. unused Venture graphics are called Hornet, and some non-ship objects show names of expansion-only ships instead

These text strings, which include Spikeri and Snakeir (a corvette cut from the original game and the Kilrathi carrier from Secret Missions 2) seem to suggest that the SNES version at least started with the PC codebase! You can download the viewer ROMs below and explore them using your preferred SNES emulator:

• Wing Commander Viewer
• Secret Missions Viewer

These tools are, on their own, fascinating. I am so excited to get this small look into the SNES ports, which is something I'd love to see more of; wouldn't it be cool to explore Wing Commander Prophecy GBA or the Sega CD port of the original? Or more SNES material! And I had not realized how close to the bone some of the cuts were; for instance, capital ships in the SNES version have five angles each instead of 37! Compare the Lumbari across both versions of The Secret Missions:

But the viewers led to something even more interesting being revealed: a graphic logo labeled "The Edge of the Universe / No Flash Photos". Huh?! Luckily, revenant was able to discover exactly what it was for: if you travel to the very edge of displayable space, the game displays an 'edge' to the map! From the screenshot it looks like that edge is over 8 million klicks from your starting point... which means you'll need to fly in a straight line at top speed for well over five hours to see this.

But wait, there's more! Revenant checked the Secret Missions SNES and found that not only did it upgrade to a fancier 'edge of the universe' graphic but it included an unusual object: the face of a moustachioed man wearing a helmet labeled GRENO!

From there, they dug into the game to find out what was going on. And the answer was a pretty incredible Easter egg that you can activate on the original hardware if you have a second controller! Here's the original thread.

silly new discovery in the SNES version of Wing Commander: The Secret Missions

pressing L+R+Sel+Start on both controllers at once unlocks "The Really Really Secret Missions", adding a photo to the credits, replacing asteroids w/ former Mindscape CTO David "Greno" Grenewetzki...

...and after completing the game, you get an additional couple of scenes based on what I can only assume is a 100% true story

Wow! The cutscene part of this egg was uncovered several years ago by Music_Guru but his solution involved accessing it directly with an in-game password or Game Genie... so we never saw the asteroids or the alternate introduction! Hard to believe something like that could stay hidden for so long.

This also lets us get a great look at the famous 'green Salthi' Jalthi, so look forward to another update summarizing that story!

Cyber Tuesday: WC Edition

Wing Commander Movie Night: Crash

The Wing Commander movie club had a good time with Westworld; it's a movie that spends most of its time just explaining its setup... but that's just fine because that setup is delightful. For this week we asked members to select a type of thriller (as defined by the Wikipedia) from our queue and the surprise winner was the 1996 erotic thriller Crash. It's a David Cronenberg movie about people that are sexually attracted to car crashes, so this should be an interesting one! (You know, Star Trek Discovery star David Cronenberg.) You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along. Please note and plan appropriately: Crash is rated NC-17 for "explicit sex scenes" (but not car crashes?).

Crash is another movie that was used to temp track the 1999 Wing Commander movie. A track from Howard Shore's score, Triton, was chosen to play from Blair's fight with Hunter through to his conversation with Angel in the hallway outside. Truly the definition of a weird pull! Here's the piece:

Where can I find a copy of the movie for the watch party?

Unfortunately, owing to its NC-17 rating Crash is not available for rent or purchase on the standard streaming services. A copy is available for download from the Internet Archive. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on UHD Blu-ray in 2020 and remains in print around the world. If you are not able to locate a copy please stop by the Discord and ping a CIC staff member before Friday's showing.

How do we watch the movie together?

It's pretty low tech! Simply join the Wing Commander CIC Discord on Friday and we will be chatting (in text) along with the film in the main channel. Everyone who wants to join in should bring their own copy and we will count down to play them together at 10 PM EST. Everyone is welcome and we encourage you to join in the conversation; sharing your thoughts helps make the experience better for everyone!

How can I help pick future movie club movies?

The movie club movies are voted on each week by the Wing Commander Discord. The poll is typically posted 24 hours before each week's screening and the next movie is announced at the end. The choices for the poll come from a master pool of Wing Commander-related movies. If you would like to suggest a film for inclusion in that pool you can post it to this thread.