BREAKING NEWS: A Different Kind of Interview (May 18, 2007)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
Noted freelancer Paul Semel has interviewed Wing Commander Arena Producer Sean Penney for a story in his videogame blog at Riottt. This article is especially cool because it's a lot less formal than the videos and gaming news interviews we've seen so far - you get the impression that, Wing Commander involvement aside, Sean is one of us. He talks about everything from wanting to work on a bigger Wing Commander title to the continuity of Chris Roberts' Wing Commander movie:
IT HAS BEEN A WHILE SINCE THERE’S BEEN A “WING COMMANDER” GAME. DID THE MOVIE FUCK THINGS UP THAT BADLY?

Um... one of the big questions in the "Wing Commander" community is, "Is the movie part of the universe?" And I had the opportunity in this game, by simply making references to events in the movie, to put a stamp on the "Wing Commander" history and say “this is the next step of the history. And people are looking at this game and are taking it as holy writ for the "Wing Commander" universe. So did the movie fuck up the storyline? No.
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Read the whole thing here. To editorialize for a moment, it's great to see EA letting Sean put his face on this game - it's the sort of 'focus on the creative team' that we haven't really seen since the days of the original Wing Commander games.

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Original update published on May 18, 2007
 
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It's incredibly rare for a game franchise to incorporate elements from their spin-off movies.

It's frustrating to see this route taken as it was less complicated to keep the two mentally partitioned, seperate tellings of the same universe. It's not that I have anything against the movie but it was incredibly unique and attempts to integrate it, or wing commander academy (just how often was Blair supposed to join the tigers claw for the first time? ;)) always made me chuckle. You get such attempts in any hardcore fandom but usually they're denied by the games creators.

Still June release date sounds good to me :)
 
I would first note that there is *no way* a new creator could step into the series and refuse to accept the movie as part of the continuity - he or she would be throwing out something *Chris Roberts* was responsible for. That would never work - "I'm here to pick up the series, let me just get rid of what its creator did..." no one could respect that.

Second, your analysis is generally incorrect - there's a wide open field of ways to deal with movie spinoffs. Street Fighter, for instance, uses both movie and game continuity in its various 1990s spinoffs (comics, TV shows, etc.). Other continuities don't comment at all (Tomb Raider, for instance - the games don't contradict the movie... though there are novels which use both together, so I suppose it's actually more like my first example). There's a big group of games-to-movies that "retell" the same story (Resident Evil) and another that just don't have continuity at all (Mario). The suggestion that there's some universal rule here isn't correct at all. It falls apart even more when you actually consider genre instead of 'whether or not something involved a video game' - Wing Commander-as-continuity has a lot more in common with Star Trek than it does with Moral Kombat.

Third, your world view here is narrow minded. We're a few thousand hardcore fans... but there are a lot of people who know Wing Commander as the movie and its background. When we go to conventions in WC regalia the absolute #1 question we get is "When are they going to make another Wing Commander movie?". It has a significant cult following outside of people who fought with memory managers in the 90s.

Fourth, I would argue that they were never meant to be separate. Chris Roberts has said as much (though not as bluntly as Sean has here) and it's absolutely clear reading something like Peter Telep's movie adaptation and spinoff novel series that they were written using both games and movie for background. He got some good use out of his copy of Claw Marks.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I would first note that there is *no way* a new creator could step into the series and refuse to accept the movie as part of the continuity - he or she would be throwing out something *Chris Roberts* was responsible for. That would never work - "I'm here to pick up the series, let me just get rid of what its creator did..." no one could respect that.
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Its a unique situation, but I don't see why the creator couldn't be a believer in the principle of producing different tellings of the same universe for different mediums. Honestly a line has to be drawn somewhere. Having said that star trek introduced a genetic disorder to explain the varying appearance of the Klingons, why shouldn't the Kilrathi suddenly turn green and hairless?
I'm all for the two being integrated, elements from the movie being borrowed, I'd like to hear more about the pilgrim war, but I'm sceptical about trying to match events in exactly.
 
Its a unique situation, but I don't see why the creator couldn't be a believer in the principle of producing different tellings of the same universe for different mediums. Honestly a line has to be drawn somewhere. Having said that star trek introduced a genetic disorder to explain the varying appearance of the Klingons, why shouldn't the Kilrathi suddenly turn green and hairless?
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Because there's no such "principle" in creative work? It's a thing that sometimes happens - and only rarely in Wing Commander's particular genre - it's not some kind of never-to-be broken rule.

Also, on a wonderfully technical note, the Kilrathi aren't green in the movie - they're under green lighting. Their actual skin is a brown color. The green lighting on the Snakeir bridge was chosen as a reference to the original Wing Commander game, where you only ever saw them in 'green' over the communications system (the Kilrathi appear without the lighting several times in the original script and perhaps once in the current movie - when a few scenes of combat flash by onboard the Pegasus).

I'm all for the two being integrated, elements from the movie being borrowed, I'd like to hear more about the pilgrim war, but I'm sceptical about trying to match events in exactly.
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If you're interested in learning about the Pilgrim War then you should read the Terran Confederation Handbook.
 
Just to clarify what's going on here. I've cleaned this thread up to attempt to salvage it from the downward spiral it was in. I'm unlocking it too so be civil.
 
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, not a console gamer, and I'm not buying an XBox just to play this game. Is there hope for a new pc version of Wing Commander?
 
SOMEbody ought to go back and rewrite the old WC games--at least WC3, The Price of Freedom, and Prophecy--and make them XP/Vista compatible so modern pc gamers can use all the fancy new graphics capabilities to really enjoy the visual quality of the Wing Commander series. Those games were ahead of their time in the quality of the film and visual effects and I would love to be able to run them on my current system.
What are the odds of someone making this happen?
 
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, not a console gamer, and I'm not buying an XBox just to play this game. Is there hope for a new pc version of Wing Commander?
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There is infinite hope, but not for us.

Seriously, though, I don't think anyone here can say it better than the interview linked above. Everyone wants to do a large scale Wing Commander game - we just need to prove to EA that it would be profitable... and Arena is a good tool for doing that.

A big-scale WC game doesn't necessarily mean a PC game anymore - PC gaming is becoming more and more a niche market. (And the whole beating-my-chest Micrisoft-sucks internet-schtick is kind of stupid - even if there is a new WC game and it is for the PC then you'll still need a Microsoft operating system to play it with...)

There's also a chance that Arena could be ported to Windows -- this depends on both the success of Arena on the 360 (I'd bet the farm on this) and of the Windows Live service being properly rolled out for Vista.
 
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Let's hear it for civility!
 
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