Happy New Year's Eve! (A Look Back at 2023) (December 31, 2023)

ChrisReid

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
We've come to the end of another year, but before we say our last goodbyes to 2023, it's time to take a look back at the highlights from the past twelve months!






The year began, as many do, with lots of glorious fan art and beautiful creations. Mac and Klavs had another very prolific year with a steady stream of gorgeous sights. Many of Klavs' designs were later released as 3D models while Mac took his renders all the way to multiple full fledged lore videos on YouTube.

It didn't take long to get our first "official," WC release when Google finally added Freedom Flight to their digital bookstore in January. Although it's been available for years on competing platforms, having this one title missing from such a major outlet was a constant annoyance to completionists.




Fan projects like WC4 Remastered and many different impressive Lego builds were frequently in the news through the (northern) spring. Dominus of Exult uncovered some very cool vintage Origin patch disks and DaveO put his massive video archive back online. An especially impressive new release was Destro's Wing Loader, which added official Sega CD speech to DOS Wing Commander. It was subsequently updated multiple times to add features to later games as well.

In May we got Van Burnham's campaign to create a vinyl album of George Oldziey's music. It failed to meet the necessary fundraising goal, but we'll continue to press on this one in 2024. On the brighter side, May also saw the first peek at AllTinker's massive WC1 overhaul, Confederation. While work continues on that project, it's already spun off a very useful tool called Originator that modders and curious fans are already using to great effect.






On the delisting front, Wing Commander Academy was removed from Peacock in July, although it remains readily available on DVD. We also got the sad news that Wing Commander Arena will be coming down from Xbox Live Arcade when that store is sunset next July. Buy your copies now! However, we also learned about WC products that we never even knew existed, such as official South Korean translations of both Academy on TV and a localized WC3.






There was plenty of artistic muscle flexing this year. Alexis made a glorious Wing Commander tote for LOAF's birthday and we finally brought back CIC glasses at our 25th birthday party. EmuMusicFan completed the full first chapter of his Freedom Flight comic and we found the source of the iconic SNES Secret Missions box art. And that wasn't even the only artist find! The true origins of the End Run cover art were also revealed in 2023.






There was lots of crafty 3D printing, as usual, headlined by LYP's amazing Centurion and Cpt. Streets' intricate Tarsus. Knight26-77 also made a really cool time lapse of an Excalibur being made.

AD once again did great things via exploration of the Wing Commander Movie's deleted scenes. This includes highlighting the movie's crazy console effect, exploring relationship context, analyzing the evolving cockpit, discovering the Dorkir and more. He and LOAF also GREATLY expanded the CIC's Holovids video archive for Privateer 2, Prophecy and Secret Ops. LOAF also brought back the streaming show in trial form with live steams featuring the Confederation Handbook, Voices of War, lost Academy missions and for the CIC's 25th Birthday.


Lastly, but certainly not least, LOAF had an absolutely banner year in terms of Wing Commander research. Here's a list of some of the topics he (with a few articles peppered in by others) explored in 2023!


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Original update published on December 31, 2023
 
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