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In the Distant Future, Mankind is Locked in a Deadly War...
Exactly fifteen years ago today, Origin Systems, Inc. made history when they shipped the original Wing Commander. On September 26, 1990, after ten months of development, the world's first interactive movie shipped to software stores and changed the world. At 5:00 PM CST on that day, during the release party outside Origin's old Wild Basin office, Richard Garriott announced that the game's creator, Chris Roberts, had been hired as Director of New Technologies.
In the fifteen years since that day, the Wing Commander saga set the high bar for quality in computer and video gaming. If your favorite video game today goes out of its way to make you feel like a participant instead of an observer, it is because of what Wing Commander did to gaming. If your computer plays sounds on a Soundblaster, reads games from a CD-ROM drive or makes use of 3d accelerated graphics, it is because Wing Commander pushed the envelope and made these things the standard.
Wing Commander is as alive today as it was in 1990 because of the fandom it inspired. It has been over two years since the last Wing Commander game, Wing Commander Prophecy for the GameBoy Advance, was released.
It has been just over seven years since the last completely original title was released. Despite these daunting numbers, this website receives more and more visitors every single month. Despite this, people play new Wing Commander fan games and read new Wing Commander fiction and argue tooth and nail about new Wing Commander ideas every single day - all because of our community. There are Wingnuts today who weren't even born when the original game first reached store shelves. Take a moment to reflect on this - even if you are nothing else, every one of you should be incredibly proud of this accomplishment.
The importance of the original Wing Commander can not ever be understated. For the industry it was a new way to make computer games, one that continues fully unabated today. For the fans - us fans - it was the most exciting adventure we ever experienced. Never before did a computer game offer such emotion and such interaction.
 We have a lifetime of war stories from that simple computer game: we struggled to save the Ralari, we were thrilled to fly the new Rapiers and any wingnut worth his salt will chew your ear off about the time he lost both his guns and both his VDUs and still made it home in that Hornet, given the opportunity.
We loved the characters -- we followed Colonel Halcyon to hell, laughed at Maniac Marshall, had a not-so-subtle crush on Angel Devereaux and we hated the furballs for what they did to Iceman's family.
We pored over the blueprints and Joan's. We memorized Claw Marks. Show a Wing Commander fan a Scimitar or a Dralthi today, and he'll have true feelings about what flying them and fighting them were like.
Wing Commander was the greatest game ever made; it is entirely appropriate that to this day it has the greatest group of fans ever assembled. I'll see you all for the thirtieth anniversary.
Destroying the remains of the Kilrathi naval power in the sector, the Tiger’s Claw closes in for the kill, and the last Kilrathi planet in the sector falls!
[LOAF] [# 6602] [Discuss]  
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Update published on 9/26/2005. View all news from that day.
Wing Commander CIC - Visit the front page
Official news, fan projects and topics of particular interest to Wing Commander fans.
- Rapiers in High Demand on the Frontier
- 2010-09-02 -- Kevin Caccamo has released photos of the updated Rapier II to be featured in his Freespace mod, WC Hostile Frontiers. Two basic paint schemes have been revealed, and both revolve around the Republic of Landreich faction. Their use in this remote region mirrors their late era service in the Border Worlds (WC4 novel) and Epsilon Sector (Arena).
- Victoria super Omnia
- 2010-09-01 -- TonViper has cleaned up the textures on his Excaliburs a bit more. These will eventually get added to the Homeworld 2 Mod, which will allow them to be built on command. This pushes the design more towards a fresh factory paint scheme instead of a worn scorched look.
- Star Ruler Space Sim
- 2010-09-01 -- wc3 tipped us off about Star Ruler, which was just released for Windows. It's a space sim/strategy game with dynamic "procedurally generated" galaxies. Individual technologies can be developed throughout the game, and there's also a large multiplayer component.
- HCl Develops Sega CD Voice Extractor
- 2010-08-31 -- HCl took a break from investigating the 3DO file formats to dig into the Sega CD/Megadrive. His preliminary work has already produced a utility that allows extraction of Sega CD speech! WC1 on Sega CD includes full spoken dialogue in place of the original game's subtitles.
- Rapier Returns in Paper Form
- 2010-08-30 -- Péricles is working on a new paper model. His latest masterpiece is the Rapier II Blade based on the original Arena 3D meshes. The ships from Arena apparently make great source models for paper designs.
- Road Trip!
- 2010-08-30 -- The CIC Staff's 2010 adventure is under way! Here's our American crew ready to get the party started. We'll be posting periodic updates to the Facebook page and Twitters (@banditloaf, @aclawson & @chrisreid) if you'd like to follow along.
- Bestowing Bob's Badass Bengal
- 2010-08-29 -- Remember that swanky Tiger's Claw in Bob's recent propaganda poster? It was singled out for being a nifty artistic take on the ship, and now it's yours to download! Grab the 3DS Max 7 model here (160 k zip).
- CIC Forums Go Mobile
- 2010-08-29 -- The CIC Forums look better on the latest generation of smartphones than ever before, but they're still a bit cumbersome to use. KrisV fixed that today with an upgrade to support Forum Runner. The new app support allows iPhone users to browse threads and reply to posts as easily as working with email.
- Radical Rapier RocZ!
- 2010-08-28 -- JasonRocZ has posted another star trio of fighters from the Arena 3D Mesh pack. From left to right, these are the Rapier Blade, Vanguard and Cavalier. Although the ships might look unfamliar to some, they are based on the authentic F-54 Rapier II frame - from Super Wing Commander!
- EA Holding Weekend Sale
- 2010-08-28 --
Did you know EA runs some killer deals on the weekends? The EA Twitter reports that Dead space is $10, Spore is $20 and Mirror's Edge is just $5. These are all the digital download PC versions.
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