I know you can't give specifics for matters like these - but are there any whispers in dark corners about upcoming releases, or other projects in development?
Sorry, no.
Does anybody know of non-game Wing Commander products that didn't make it out of the doors? I know there was that Peter Telep novel, Pilgrim Stars...or was that Pilgrim Truth. I forget.
Pilgrim Stars made it out - Pilgrim Truth is the third unpublished book. It's finished and on a hard drive at Mr. Telep's house... but he doesn't want to release it without EA's permission. Others include (again, in varying stages of completion):
* SciPubTech Poster - This was a coool one. A cut-away drawing of the movie Tiger's Claw from the company that did similar posters of various Star Wars and Star Trek ships. It was apparently drafted and advertised but never sold. I've attempted to contact SciPubTech several times and had no response.
* LightSpeed Fine Art - The company that makes those fruity Star Trek/Star Wars/Stargate paintings that they sell at conventions had the rights to the Wing Commander movie. I ask their President about this at every DragonCon and he gives me a different story as to whether or not they actually did a Wing painting each year (ranging from no to that they did but it was sold to someone).
* Movie Toys - Rapier and Dralthi vehicle toys were prototyped. X-Toys talked about doing more figures (including a 6" run and some based on the games) if the line was succesful... but, of course, it wasn't. (I met the guy who ran the company and he was the nicest person in the world... but he had absolutely no luck with picking toy licenses. Wing Commander, Wild Wild West and Saturday Night Live-at-its-low-point. Also, searching the internet for 'X Toys' was always a dicey proposition.)
* 3D Action Ride - Back in 1999-2000 a company called Showscan which makes those '3D action rides' you see at places like Dave and Busters announced they were going to put out one based on the Wing Commander movie. They went out of business before it was finished and no one knows how much (if any) work was done.
* Alternate Baen Novels - The original first three-book 'package' of Baen novels was initially planned differently. The first and third were the same (Guon/Lackey and Forstchen), but the second was planned as a book about the loss of the Tiger's Claw by Ellen Guon and Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle, some years later, wrote in his Byte column that he had a concept for a Privateer novel he would love to write.
* Comics - Origin approached several comic book companies about doing an Ultima book in the early 1990s. None were interested, but that lead to some talks with (Marvel?) about a Wing series. Didn't happen.
* Wing Commander Academy Toys - Playmates Toys had the option to produce Wing Commander Academy toys if a second season of the show were produced. They would have been based on the succesful line of ExoSquad toys, focusing on the vehicle rather than the character and having two 'sizes' of product (fighters and bombers, in this case -- the launch wave would probably have been a Scimitar and a Dralthi at the lower price point and a Grikath and a Broadsword at the higher).
* Wing Commander Academy Season 2 - WCA had great ratings (... for a cable animated series) and plans were set in motion for a second series, including a broader storyline (ie, seeing the larger picture of the war and the political maneuverings behind it).
* Privateer the Series - Mentioned above, the idea that there would be a Privateer TV show bookended by Privateer 2 and 3 releases actually made it to Hollywood. We talked to Aaron Allston, who wrote the series bible, a while back... he said that after the show left his hands it had become significantly more generic (including a script about a planet of Amazon women).
* Wing Commander TV Show - In late 2001 a Wing Commander TV series came very, very close to being made, with pre-production work and location scouting being done. Chris was able to sell the series based on the early success of Star Trek Enterprise and the post-9/11 interest in military shows... but everyone jerked up both of those faster than Wing could make it out.
Any idea what happenned to that code from the Armada windows port? It'd be interesting to see armada running on windows without dosbox.
That was a Windows *3* port.
I don't know where the code is today, if it even exists. The game did show up in a TV commercial, though! There's a 1994 Intel advertisement with a boy showing his parents how he can switch between fighting the Kilrathi and learning about space in a digital encyclopedia.