Making the Games: Wing Commander IV Fighters (October 29, 2008)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
Back in 1996, Origin's Wing Commander IV website was all the rage, for one good reason: unlike the game's manual, it had complete specifications for every fighter -- and with those specifications was a beautiful 'action' shot of each ship. These images (which also appear in the Official Guide) were copied and pasted from Geocities to Xoom back in the day, but are fairly difficult to find today. Captain Johnny's treasure does us one better: higher-than-ever-before resolution images of these same pictures, allowing you to examine the beautiful textures developed for Wing Commander IV. Unfortunately, three are missing - the Banshee, Lance and Dralthi. Did anyone save the web versions? To make up for this, though, you'll see two versions you haven't seen before: alternate paint schemes for the Arrow and the Thunderbolt (Confederation and Pirate, respectively)!

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material!













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Original update published on October 29, 2008
 
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Doing those textures was so very fun - and the results were so nice! It was a shame we couldn't do the same degree of detail on Prophecy, but it was just not to be.
 
We'll be posting some higher res shots of the Wing Commander Prophecy ships in the next few days, too!
 
Sigh. I really love the Vindicator.

And the Razor has always been an interesting ship to me. Being a pirate ship, is it supposedly a modified version of a previous Confed model?
 
And the Razor has always been an interesting ship to me. Being a pirate ship, is it supposedly a modified version of a previous Confed model?

Pirates use all kinds of ships - old Confed, civilian, Kilrathi, etc.
 
It's interesting that we get both the regular confed Arrow as well as the pirate version but not Confed's Cloaking Arrows. Mind you they're pretty much just grey with a purple squigle painted on the sides
 
But let's assume that's an old Confed ship. One that's been modified. Would you say it's maybe an Epee?

I wouldn't think so... but I also don't think there's any reason whatsoever to think that it must be some kind of variation of a design we've seen before.

Even if it were a confed design, we can't assume that somehow the designs we see in-game can be the only ones that ever existed. Obviously the Privateer ships are around in WC3 but we never see them in WC3.
 
But let's assume that's an old Confed ship. One that's been modified. Would you say it's maybe an Epee?
Uh, based on how the pirate Thunderbolts are called Thundercows, and the pirate Arrows are called Pointers? :p

No, regardless of whether it's an old Confed ship, or a civilian ship or whatever, it's safe to assume it's still a Razor, not a modified anything.
 
You folks will be happy to hear that I just finished sorting and converting another 200 images from Johnny's collection - so we've got another month of these updates at least!
 
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