Goodbye Kirk Winterrowd

We have some extremely sad news to report today: per the Ex Origin Facebook group, veteran Wing Commander developer Kirk Winterrowd passed away suddenly this past weekend. Our hearts go out to his friends and family. If you'd like to share anything about him for posterity we would be happy to post any messages in a future update. By all accounts, he was both a talented game developer and a decent human being and we would like to take some time to celebrate his contributions to the Wing Commander universe. As we have after other tragic losses we hope that highlighting some of what he created–some of what we've enjoyed for decades now even if we didn't know it!–we will help keep his memory alive forever.

Like many people who attended 'Origin university', Mr. Winterrowd started in quality assurance and quickly proved how capable he was in a range of roles including production manager, music composer and sound engineer. He started his game development career just out of college in 1991 as an Alpha Tester on Wing Commander's second mission disk, Crusade. He went on to serve as Quality Assurance Project Leader on Wing Commander II and then Chris Roberts assigned him as one of the first 'TDAs' on Strike Commander, a role that would be called a junior designer today. In his seven years at Origin he would touch every major franchise and provide some critical pieces to the Wing Commander series that we continue to celebrate to this day. He seems to have been a major part of Origin's famed company culture, appearing frequently in Point of Origin and even working at the Britannia Manor haunted house in 1992!

He was also the original Maniac! When Special Operations 2 brought back the character, he was tapped to perform the voice acting. Maniac's crazed in-flight dialogue for the Morningstar missions remains firmly imprinted in the heads of Wing Commander fans, especially his post-credits Easter egg ("where the hell are you?!"). He went on to perform additional voices in the CD-ROM version of Wing Commander Privateer and several other Origin games including Bioforge, Ultima VIII Pagan and the famous 'talkie' FM Towns port of Ultima VI The False Prophet.

… and he produced, too. He was the project manager for the oft-forgotten (but also passionately loved) Origin FX screensaver for Windows 3. Origin FX was also his first audio credit. He would go on to work on audio on Wing Commander Armada and Wing Commander Prophecy as well as Strike Commander, Crusader, Bioforge, Longbow 2 and a host of Ultimas (Ultima VII, Serpent Isle, Silver Seed, Pagan, the Pagan SAP, The Black Gate SNES and Ultima Online). His audio work went well beyond just sounds, though: he made some great music! Mr. Winterrowd composed four very familiar tracks for Wing Commander Academy: the introduction, the mission builder theme and then the winning and losing gauntlet pieces. He went on to compose additional music for Ultima VII, Serpent Isle, Silver Seed, Crusader: No Remorse and Ultima Online.

After working through Origin's entire golden age, he went on to help develop Ares Rising at Imagine (Joel Manners' unofficial followup to Privateer) and then moved into public relations at Acclaim. After that he left the game industry to pursue the same sort of work in the automotive industry. But even Wing Commander fans oblivious to the work that went on behind the screens knew the name Winterrowd. That's because he was honored with a pretty major tuckerization on his very first project, a ship mentioned in a conversation with Iceman named the TCS Winterrowd! The Winterrowd is said to be the ship where the Society of Mandarins were first discovered. In Wing Commander II, Blair mentions there was a trial held there. And then in a Privateer bartender rumor we're told it was finally destroyed by the Steltek drone! One of those fun stories that would happen in the background across multiple games that only true fans would ever notice (and obsess over).

Wing Commander Credits

• Wing Commander The Secret Missions 2 Crusade - Alpha Tester (1991)
• Wing Commander II Vengeance of the Kilrathi - Quality Assurance Project Leader (1991)
• Wing Commander II Special Operations 2 - Maniac (1992)
• Origin FX - Project Administrator & Audio (1992)
• Wing Commander Academy - Music (1992)
• Wing Commander Privateer CD - Voice Talent (1994)
• Wing Commander Armada - Digital FX (1994)
• Wing Commander Prophecy - Additional Dialog Recording (1997)

Wander the Edge of the Stars with Captain Harlock

Wing Commander Academy storyboard artist Tim Eldred is a true old school anime fan; in fact, his spectacular Art Vault website maintains a continually updated, world class section on the anime that inspired him. His familiarity with shows like Space Battleship Yamato and VOTOMS was a clear influence on the board work he did on Academy.

When he was designing the character sheets for the Tiger's Claw deck crew (first seen in The Most Delicate Instrument) he included a little Easter egg intended primarily for the shows' Japanese animators but too small to really appear on the show: a tattoo of Captain Harlock's distinct skull emblem on one of the crewman's forearms. Well, those animators took the nod seriously and you can ever-so-briefly pause the show to find the tattoo!

Space Pirate Captain Harlock is a 1978 anime series about the pirate crew of a starship defending Earth from an alien invasion from another galaxy. I decided to watch the show to better understand the influence and I was really surprised first by how great the show is today and by how obvious some of the influence was. The blocking for Captain Harlock's mighty Arcadia, in particular, is extremely similar to shots of the Tiger's Claw! This one, the last shot in the final episode of Academy, is very apparently a nod to this shot of the pirate ship that makes a regular appearance on Space Pirate Captain Harlock:

Bioforge-ing the Super Wing Commander Shuttle

Bioforge, one of Origin's most eclectic games, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. Billed as the second of Origin's "interactive movie" products, Bioforge was less Wing Commander III and more a totally fresh take that could have modernized the classic Sierra-style adventure game. (It does share an odd central plot with Privateer 2: the search for your forgotten identity… and Bioforge interestingly plays like a lot of the early Darkening pitches read!) Thanks to GOG, Bioforge is still available and playable today. There's even a dedicated fanbase today with one brilliant person hard at work on "OpenBioForge" which aims to modernize the game's framework. Here's an new anniversary trailer showing off some of that work:

So what's the Wing Commander angle? It's a small thing but interesting: Bioforge and Super Wing Commander share a shuttle! The Bioforge team created a "Mondite Gunship" which is used throughout the game and when the Super Wing Commander group needed a quick cutscene showing a shuttle delivering your character to the Tiger's Claw they borrowed the mesh down to the textures. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at where the shuttle appears in Bioforge and share some of that material so Wing Commander fans can have a closer look at their same ship! Here's it's quick appearance in Super Wing Commander; you can pick out the same fuselage number as Bioforge in a single frame!

The gunship appears in four significant parts of Bioforge and we will run through them next. First, here's a quick look at it as it appears in Bioforge's demo and in Origin's Official Guide to Bioforge.:

Scene Three: The Beach - As the game progresses you will discover one of the gunships you shot down has crashed on the beach. Traveling through a series of jumping scenarios lets you salvage a loose warhead needed for a puzzle…

... and you also get to see the inside! You enter the shuttle and battle its commander to get a special weapon. You even get to see the shuttle's onboard UI to target a weapon to solve one of the game's puzzles!

This scene has some props associated with it: the warhead and the key to open the shuttle's cockpit.

Scene Four: The Landing Pad - As you race towards Bioforge's conclusion, you run into one more gunship. You must avoid laser fire from its chin turret as you attempt to get past it to your own escape. It rockets away with the game's villain after you pass.

Reminder: #Wingnut Movie Night Tonight!

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Aliens (1986) which was a favorite of series creator Chris Roberts when he was working on the first game. You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

After Action Report: Highlander

Greetings WingNuts,

What did the Wing Commander movie club take away from Highlander (1986)? Well, if there was just one lesson it pretty much has to be that there can be only one. But we actually found out something pretty interesting with this screening… more on that below! To our modern eyes, Highlander holds up pretty well; it's a very distinct 1980s experience that feels right at home next to films like the original Terminator. It was an era of movies that created their own sets of rules in order to build a universe you could immediately take part in… and here's an example of that formula working very well.

As for the Wing Commander connection, there's no bones about it: Sean Connery's Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez is a lot like how Paladin was originally presented, from his Scottish brogue to his role as a selfless-but-grumpy mentor for your character. I'd even say there's a pretty clear connection in the original concept art used in Claw Marks!

... and the fact that Highlander casts Connery as an immortal Spaniard that makes no attempt to alter his distinctly Scottish accent at least presages Chris Roberts' unapologetic of casting French-accented Tcheky Karyo as a notable Scotsman. (Yes, we know that Paladin is technically from Ares, only his adoptive parents were Scottish; the Wing Commander IV novel even predates the movie in revealing that his thick accent was only spycraft… but stay tuned for a very detailed biography of Paladin in the coming days that will expand on all of this!)

Highlander is also on a list of Chris Roberts' favorite action/adventure films that was printed in a late 1991 issue of Point of Origin. Which led us to a genuinely interesting discovery: the apparent origin of the name of Paladin's spy ship from Wing Commander II! We were genuinely shook when we realized that Connor twice refers to his dead wife (Heather) as his "bonnie Heather".

The Bonnie Heather first appeared in Wing Commander II and then made appearances in Freedom Flight and Special Operations 1. It also had a blink-and-you-miss it cameo added to the Super Wing Commander version of Claw Marks!

Can you name all of Paladin's similarly styled spy ships? Ebeneezer, Diligent, Bonnie Heather, Grimalkin and Bannockburn!

And finally… who's that on the bridge?

Why it's Hugh Quarshie himself, aka Commander Corey "Magic Man" Obutu (this is canon)! Here he plays the third-to-last surviving immortal in the film's elaborate mythology. Given Chris Roberts' love of the film, this may have been the impetus for his casting as Mr. Obutu!

Farsi Dub Lets You see Farther... I'm So Sorry

My teenaged self would never have believed this but piracy is one of the major forces in preserving our history! Case in point: these screenshots compare two copies of the Wing Commander movie. The first is the commercially available bluray and the second is taken from a recording of the movie as it aired on TV with a Farsi dub! Seeing Wing Commander in another language is pretty cool but there's also something more exciting here: compare the top and the bottom of the two pictures. While the dubbed TV copy is much lower quality it's also clearly taken from an "open matte" version of the film not often seen. As a result, you get to see the entire frame without the 'black bars'.

We'll be on the lookout for more unusual versions of the movie wherever we can find them! You can download the full video here.

Aces High Resolution

Here's a little treat for anyone that likes looking at rare faces: we've done a set of much higher resolution scans of the Claw Marks wingman and Kilrathi ace heads that were redrawn in the Super Famicom port of Wing Commander I's manual. The original versions appeared in Claw Marks but they actually started life as the concept art upon which the Wing Commander I characters were based! For the Japanese SFC release, ASCII hired a local artist to redraw and colorize them!

Interview of the Fat Man

YouTube channel Tech Talk with Daniel Albu has conducted a pretty cool (and exhaustive!) interview with original Wing Commander composer George "The Fatman" Sanger! He goes through his entire long and storied career and spends some time talking about how he got the job working on Wing Commander and how he was involved in its innovative interactive music feature. You can find the full video embedded below or accessible directly here; the Wing Commander portion is around the 1h43m mark.

The Fatman: But my assignment for the Tchaikovsky thing for Loom was to make Loom sound good on the MT-32. Which was something that I already had proficiency on, that instrument. You know I kind of knew my way around it from having done karaoke versions of things. So that was kind of how I fell into it. So it was always in my mind it was always meant to be MT-32 and then they were somehow pushing the MT-32 as a sound module. And don't know what their price point ideas were or how they decided that it should go out but this sort of thing really played in my favor because it wasn't long before word got out word got to me that there was a company in town that was doing, in town in Austin of all places, that was doing a game that was \going to use the MT-32. So I don't know if you're ready for this segue but I found out about that and I wrote a letter to Richard Garriot that was something like "I am proficient at MT-32, I am. You need to use me, I am the best." You know it might have had a joke in it or a threat or some other ridiculous thing in it but it was definitely arrogant and confident and desperate. All those things, you know. It was just a bit much because I was very excited about it and not very filtered. And I heard that it made it up onto his dart board but somebody else, and I think it might have been Dr. Cat, another game developer who was a friend of mine from the GDCs, went back around and said "Richard you got to use this guy." And so that was how I was eventually approached to do Wing Commander.

...

Interviewer: Now still in 1990 you were credited for the music in Wing Commander. Now, what were the biggest challenges you faced in implementing the dynamic music for the game? And you know when it comes to dynamic music, how did you maintain the thematic consistency in the game?

The Fatman: Well there's a little secret to that. So we got the gig for Wing Commander and I was very busy. We had the creative brief that was that we should do something that's sort of like Star Wars and sort of like Star Trek The Motion Picture. Chris Roberts was a very cinema oriented guy and this was the first time to my knowledge that anybody asked a game audio person to imitate John Williams or to do a movie like soundtrack. Before that nobody kind of bothered with that. It was like video, it's got to sound like a video game or just put music in it. And me being busy I went to Govett who had done some of the other little doodly stuff with me and I said "Well you want to handle this?" He says "Yeah I got something in my head. It's been up there since high school, I'll just put it down."

And so he got out his MT32 and slam bam he did that. He did that intro just about the way you hear it and he did the dogfight music just about the way you hear it. And we turn and it's like that was a jaw-dropper right there because people hadn't heard very much on an MT-32 and now they're hearing cinematic music for a video game. That's crazy! And it was all Govett. It's just like this guy that I picked up from the bus stop. And he's always like that. He's always an incredible person. People always, you know, there's a temptation to underestimate him because he kind of sounds like he's from West Texas. Because he is. But he just became a legend. He was very early, innovating and doing the under the hood work in the early sample libraries and eventually people were having him come over. Like Han Zimmer had him come over to help him out with the sample library And the O Show in Las Vegas, the Cirque du Soleil, had him and and the fourth member of Team Fat, Kevin, come over and help them with their giga samplers. So they were up in the booth during the performances helping them work out their technology. But in the meantime this was the moment at which Dave Govett went from nobody to very much somebody. I mean in the historical sense. In my heart he was always adorable. He was always a great friend. But he was right place, right time, earnest effort again.

And then Chris Roberts hears this thing and he says "Well I've got I've got this idea to do interactive. So can you give me for the dogfight, I'd like a piece of music that could be this long and it should be the missile is chasing you. You are chasing the missile. Your wingman's been hit. You know, dire situations blah blah blah blah blah blah." So we just went back to that original piece and we cut it into sections and we labeled them. We slopped a label on them to match what Chris had asked for. And then there were two other guys, Herman Miller and a cat who became a very good friend of mine and a bandmate later Marc Schaefgen. Great guitar player, real bluesy guy, real gritty fellow. I like him. They created the MIDI you know. They put the MIDI into the program however it needed to be to play the sound cards. They created the interactive engine and then it all got played through John Miles's sound thing. and then there's stories about John Miles too but but what I wanted to get back to was that funny story is this was the second time that I became the hit of the trade show because they took this thing out again to one of the Consumer Electronic Shows or something like that and everybody crowded around the booth to to see and hear this this demo. And the press was nuts about this interactive soundtrack. But it wasn't interactive. What they were playing was just dogfight music as David had written it from beginning to end with a dog fight showing on the screen and the words interactive soundtrack and they were just playing the video over and over again. And boy we became famous for doing this great interactive soundtrack that worked so well and so musically but it wasn't that yet. Eventually it became an interactive soundtrack but again you know it's a nice moment. It's nice to be part of something that is the hot thing for a minute. And I wish everybody had that. I hope everybody gets their equivalent at that. But I had that happen a couple of times. So anyway, that's some Wing Commander right there!

Wing Commander Movie Night: Aliens

If there's one thing we learned from Highlander it's that there can be only one. No, we actually learned the origin of Paladin's ship's name! More on that in the after action report. But next week's movie is even more of a crowd pleaser: Aliens (1986). So get ready to join the space marines and learn what Wing Commander took away from James Cameron's all time classic. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

We were first inspired to look at Aliens because of another quote from Chris Roberts' original treatment for the Wing Commander movie. Here he compares his goal to Aliens in a way that frankly makes a lot of sense: they're both movies where the characters are stuck on their own in a terrible situation and drama arises out of how they respond differently to that situation.

"The idea behind this project is to create a film that has the feeling of a tight character-driven rollercoaster ride--e.g., James Cameron's Aliens. The protagonists are placed in a situation in which there is no easy way out, no cavalry to rescue them. They have to rely on each other and their ability to rise above what they think is possible in order to fight their way out.

There's little doubt that Aliens was inspiring the series much earlier, though! Here's a 1991 list of Chris Roberts' favorite action films from an issue of Point of Origin which includes both Highlander and Aliens!

With this in mind, it's pretty clear that the entire character of Dekker the space marine from Wing Commander IV and Prophecy is based on the Colonial Marines from Aliens. We even get a callback to one of Aliens' beloved quotes, "Marines, we are leaving!" in the first mission of Prophecy.

Similarly, Privateer 2 quotes Aliens' famous "game over, man" as the death comm for some of the hireable wingmen. These comms are used for Delphinius, Alopecia Cook, Welpped Iuvenil and Pinet El-Susse. Privateer 2's files also list an NPC ship named SULAKO... but no one has ever found where or if it appears in the game!

There's a nod to Aliens in the Secret Ops passwords, too: the losing version of the first set of passwords is ACHERON, after the moon on which Aliens is set.

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

Aliens is currently streaming on Disney+ and Hulu. It is also available for rent or purchase on all the standard services. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on UHD in 2024 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!

Happy CIC Easter!

Be sure to check everywhere for eggs today!