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 Alien (1979) which influenced everything from the seats in the Rapiers in Wing Commander II to the character of Angel in the movie. 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: Titanic

Greetings WingNuts,

We loved Titanic! The film holds up extremely well. It was very easy to write it off as a fad in 1997 but rewatching it today there's no question that its success was well deserved. It's an amazing combination of rewarding character drama set against so much hard work to create a world that even Richard Garriott could learn something. And it certainly didn't seem like it was three hours long! James Cameron's position as king of the Hollywood universe is deservedly still secure today. (A note relevant only to this group is that Titanic opened one week before one of our previous films, An American Werewolf in Paris. And it was much, much more successful!)

The big Wing Commander connection was production designer Peter Lamont who deservedly won an Oscar for recreating the Titanic for the film. One of the reasons the movie works so well is that Cameron goes so very deep with his Titanic nerdery: the sheer brilliance with which he sets the table by creating a perfect 1912 ocean liner for his characters to play aboard seeps through immediately. And Lamont's work was one of the big things that enabled that! And he put just as much effort into creating the submarine-like Tiger Claw decks as he did those on the Titanic…

Here's one interesting filming technique that connects the two movies: for Titanic's massive ship set, Peter Lamont built only the starboard half of the ship. When scenes set on the port side were needed (like in the introduction where it leaves port in Southampton) everything was physically mirrored from signage to costumes to background extras. The footage was then flipped for the film. Lamont would use a very similar trick for Wing Commander, building only half of the Tiger Claw's fight deck and then literally mirroring it for shots that required showing its full extent!

One other connection that I completely forgot in the introductory article is that Titanic also stars David Warner! In fact, it was made squarely in the middle between his appearances as Rhinehart in Privateer 2 and Tolwyn in Wing Commander. As Vera noted on the forums, his character is maybe easy to forget because he's much more of a heavy here. It certainly shows his significant range!

And here's Rose flipping Admiral Tolwyn off, in case you need that reference in the future:

David Warner wasn't the only Wing Commander veteran on Titanic, though. It turns out Barry Dennen, who voiced Melek in Wing Commander IV, was also the man praying just as the ship sinks. The resemblance is uncanny!

There are two other Wing Commander veterans in the movie, too! Jari Kinnunen played Bjorn Gunderson (a fictional passenger, one of the brothers Jack and Fabrizio bunk with) in Titanic and the Concordia's Radar Man in Wing Commander. Craig Kelly played Radar Man Falk (of the Tiger Claw) in Wing Commander and Harold Bride, the ship's junior wireless officer, in Titanic. I guess he's a little typecast!

Lamont brought his own crew with him for Wing Commander and he mentioned that many of them were veterans of Titanic's tumultuous production. Here's the full list:

• Suzanne Crowley - Casting
• Richard Roberts - Additional Set Decorator
• Jim Passon - Color Timer
• Jamie Wilkinson - Supervising Set Dresser
• Gilly Poole - Casting
• Barry Wilkinson - Property Master
• Michael Ford - Set Decorator
• Olivier Sarda - 2D Artist
• Simon Wilkinson - Charge Hand Stand-By Props
• Ethan Phillips - Director of Photography Visual Effects Unit
• Chris Holmes - Senior Visual Effects Compositor
• Dennis Davis - Compositing Supervisor
• Dean Coldham - Plasterer
• Charles Dwight Lee - Supervising Art Director
• Jeff Heusser - Digital Compositing Supervisor
• Dave Coldham - Head Plasterer
• Peter Williams - Construction Coordinator

We also took a closer look at the cruise liners from Secret Ops. Here's a fun comparison of the Titanic and the Anna Maria Alberghetti:

Another fun thing we did before the movie was randomly generate ourselves tickets for the voyage, which you can do here. Ali was the only survivor of the group!

Disk Art Mystery Solved

Earlier this month, the science fiction art community was saddened by the passing of artist Chris Moore. Mr. Moore was a famed UK illustrator who painted countless science fiction book and album over his long career. You can find his obituary here. While looking through his artwork, I noticed something familiar:

That's right: his painting "Millennium" was used by Taiwanese publisher Soft-World for the disk labels of the original Wing Commander! It's not clear how the piece made it around the world but it was originally painted in 1988 as a wraparound cover for a reissue of Ben Bova's novel Millennium. It was also used as the cover for the July 1991 issue of Omni, which seems better remembered.

The original painting sold at auction some time ago, which provided an image of both the original painting and Moore's initial layout sketch. The sketch is listed as 12 1/4" x 9 3/8" pencil on tracing paper and the final painting's dimensions are 35 1/4" x 19 1/4" acrylic on board.

If you'd like to represent this very small, tangential part of the Wing Commander in your collection, the book Journeyman: The Art of Chris Moore (2000) includes the painting and also reproduces it on its back cover!

Hawk vs. Panther: Under the Hood

Sharpshooter is back with another smart analysis of a Wing Commander IV mechanic!

This time, they have tackled the Hawk vs. Panther morale mechanic which decides which winning cutscene you receive at the end of the game. Sharpshooter discovered that the morale for Panther is stored at 0x600 and the morale for Hawk is at 0xfe in your WSG (save) file. The character with the higher morale at the end of the game decides the final clip: if it's Panther, you are a flight instructor and if it's Hawk you're an Admiral. If the two values are tied then the game plays the flight instructor ending.

There are a grand total of nine FMV choices that impact Hawk or Panther's morale. Their morale level starts at 5 and goes up or down based only on these choices (and not how you treat them in flight.) Not all of the choices will be played in any one play through of the game and some of them can be ignored if so desired. The first two choices, one for each, happen in Series E (Orestes) and are skipped if you choose not to defect at the first opportunity.

SC. 1221 - Panther: something better to do than killing
Panther +1: Yeah ... You'd think...
Panther -1: She's dreaming...

SC. 1300 - Hawk: didn't you enjoy blasting cats?
Hawk +1: Gotta admit, I did.
Hawk -1: This guy's bloodthirsty.
This conversation is optional and the choice can be skipped.

The next two choices, again one for each character, occur in Series F (Orestes/Pasqual).

SC. 1740 - Panther/Catscratch: is Eisen making the right call?
Panther +1: Straighten this kid out.
Panther -1: Do I look like I have all the answers?

SC. 1760 - Hawk: I fought those animals in the war
Hawk +1: He's missing the point.
Hawk -1: Bitter guy.
This conversation is optional and the choice can be skipped.

The first 'Hawk/Panther' choice happens at the end of the Peleus series where you must decide whether the Intrepid will go to Circe (Panther) or Speradon (Hawk).

SC. 2170 - Hawk/Panther: save innocents or get weapons
Panther +1/Hawk -1: Panther's right.
Panther -1/Hawk +1: Hawk's right.

If you side with Hawk you will have a second chance to impact his morale during the Speradon missions. If you side with Panther you will have a similar choice for her in Circe.

SC. 2690 - Hawk: your friend's really pissing me off.
Hawk +1: Time to be a Captain.
Hawk -1: What a whiner.

SC. 2350 - Panther: your friend with the overactive glands
Panther +1: Tempting, but I can't let that happen.
Panther -1: Maniac's on his own.

The second Hawk/Panther choice happens at the end of either Circe or Speradon. It is the same in either series:

SC. 2510 - Panther/Hawk: how long since Eisen left
Panther +1/Hawk -1: There's always hope.
Panther -1/Hawk +1: We die trying.

And then the final choice happens at the start of the Ella missions where you must decide whether or not to destroy the superbase.

SC. 3230 - Panther/Hawk: should we use the Flash-Pak?
Panther +1/Hawk -1: Panther's right. We can't kill civilians.
Panther -1/Hawk +1: Hawk's right. This is war.

The mechanic uses the same morale system which impacts wingmen in flight. If a character's morale dips too low, the game switches to a different AI profile for them which tend to be less aggressive and more likely to disobey orders. Each character has two sets of comm messages depending on their status. The in flight morale is binary and you can determine which profile is active by asking your wingman to report their status. The no damage responses for Hawk are "No problems here" (high) and "Don't worry about me" (low). For Panther, high morale is "Not a mark on me, Colonel!" and low morale is "I'm fine."

Sharpshooter has gone on to break down some of the different paths you can take through the game and they're pretty interesting! There are a surprising amount of paths although it does turn out you can't get the admiral ending if you side with Panther for all three 'double' choices (or the instructor ending if you side with Hawk for them). You can read the full thread here. I was particularly interested in the 'match the novel' thread which does result in the flight instructor ending despite the fact that you go to Speradon instead of Circe.

Jerry! Jerry!

Early in Secret Missions 2, Shotglass informs Blair that he has seen a suspicious story about the Kilrathi withdrawing from the Deneb Sector on "Jerry Rivers on the Galaxy Network News". Who, exactly, is Jerry Rivers?

From Blair's reaction ("that show will rot your brain") and the name alone, players at the time would infer that Jerry Rivers is Wing Commander's pastiche of a '90s tabloid television presenter inspired by Jerry Springer and Geraldo Rivera.

But there's more to the story! Like many elements of Secret Missions 2, the mention of Jerry Rivers is intended to preface an appearance in Wing Commander II. Jerry Rivers was ultimately cut from the game but his intended story was pretty interesting! The idea was that Jerry Rivers would replace the 'Meanwhile…' clips from Wing Commander I which informed the player what was going on in the war beyond the Tiger's Claw. In Wing Commander II, players would click on a TV screen in the barracks which would play a different interview conducted by Jerry roughly once each series. The surviving Wing Commander II Script Outline gives us a bit of an 'episode guide' showing what these news segments would be. Blair would talk about his conviction, Maniac would promote his TCSO show, Ralgha would provide his backstory about joining the Confederation and so on.

[JERRY RIVERS #1 - "Bluehair interview"]
[JERRY RIVERS #2 - "Starbase episode"]
[JERRY RIVERS #3 - "Maniac interview"]
[JERRY RIVERS #4 - "Angel Interview"]
[JERRY RIVERS #5 - "Prince Thrakhath interview"]
[JERRY RIVERS #6 - "Sickbay episode"]
[JERRY RIVERS #7 - "Hobbes interview"]
[JERRY RIVERS #8 - "Admiral Tolwyn interview"]
[JERRY RIVERS #9 - "The Invisibility Suit" episode]
[JERRY RIVERS #10 - "Admiral Tolwyn breaks Jerry's nose"]

The series would culminate with a series of shows in which Jerry Rivers would come into conflict with Admiral Tolwyn and then 'prove' that stealth fighters exist with a stunt described as involving an invisibility suit. In the finale, Tolwyn would punch him in the face! We get a little more detail on this from the Wing Commander II Art List:

JERRY RIVERS
In addition to his talking loops:

Jerry Rivers in the "cloaking suit"---a dark shape outlined in a faint glowing blue light, set in a completely black background.

Admiral Tolwyn breaking Jerry's nose with a single good punch

We also need a small animation of Jerry talking on the television set, so the player will know when a Jerry Rivers episode is airing, as opposed to the Ultima 6 program filler.

Concordia Rec Room: sitting room for three and Bluehair. This room will have the television set (as in the Peel Rec Room) and the computer console for saving games, as well as a very modern upright piano off to one side (which Jazz will play in various scenes.) If possible, please draw the television set so we can reuse the TV animation from Ultima 6. (Please refer to the CHARACTER POSITIONS chart.)

The idea was to design the game's two "options" screens with a screen you could click on to view the Jerry Rivers episodes. If there was no new episode, the TV would instead display channel animations reused from Ultima VI! Ultima VI's introduction would flip through a collection of six different TV channels that included a news report, a car driving down a road, a music video and more.

The news in the Ultima VI intro was already pretty modular; as part of its commitment to spectacular detail, it could already change between seven different news stories!

Wing Commander Movie Night: Alien

The Wing Commander movie club has sailed the Atlantic with the Titanic and now it's time to get back home… to space! This week's movie is a true classic with some deep ties to Wing Commander: Alien. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Alien needs no introduction, but just in case: Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror film is about a group of interstellar truckers who must battle a relentless monster in close quarters aboard their starship. From the gritty, realistic environs of the Nostromo to the biomechanical alien itself, the spectacular film earned a level of respect that far outstripped the standards of its genres. Countless aspects of Alien are deeply rooted in most any science fiction film made since.

Wing Commander is, of course, no exception. From the chairs in the spacecraft in the original games through to the characters of the movie itself (with a little creative crossover along the way) Wing Commander has plenty of debts to the film. Here's Chris Roberts writing about how Alien's Ripley should inform Angel in his original treatment for the Wing Commander movie:

The audience should empathize with Blair and Maniac's character growth, get to know and like Angel, admire Paladin's sure will under fire, worry about Linders' impact on his men's morale, etc. I also want to work on developing a stronger female lead (probably Angel) for the picture than the outline currently indicates. Think Sigourney Weaver in Alien.

If that sounds familiar it's because Sigourney Weaver has been inspiring Angel's treatment since Wing Commander II. That game's internal character descriptions giver her the shorthand of "Sigourney Weaver mixed with Demi Moore," a definite nod to the Ripley character.

We also share at least one actual actor! Alien's John Hurt had another star turn as Joe the Bartender in Privateer 2: The Darkening.

When it came time to do the lore-filled Booth screens for the game, the designers included some nods to Hurt's legendary Alien character, giving him the same family name!

There was an important behind the screens connection with the movie, too: Chris Roberts had initially hired the great Ron Cobb to develop the vehicle concepts for the film. Cobb was the production designer who concepted much of the intricate detail of the Nostromo for Alien and you can see the influence in what he turned out for Wing Commander. Unfortunately producer Todd Moyer was not a fan and Cobb's work went mostly unused:

… of course great artists steal and the Wing Commander II team had already stolen from Ron Cobb's Alien designs back in 1991! The ejection seat seen in rear views in the game is taken directly from his concept art for the Nostromo:

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

Alien is currently available for rent or purchase on all the standard services. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on BluRay in 2011 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. We will be watching the original theatrical cut, not the later extended version.

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!

Unusual Thrakhath Line Draws Scrutiny

Here's December 1991 issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus's review of Wing Commander II (plus Speech Accessory Pack.) At first glance, this is a usual contemporary review of the game... but there's a twist: the screenshot of Prince Thrakhath. Does anything seem unusual about it?

First of all, the screenshot is using the earlier painted background seen in the CES demo. Here's how the two compare:

But what's particularly odd is the line: "My ships have destroyed the Tiger's Claw, Emperor." That doesn't match the demo ("The pride of the Terran Navy, the Tiger's Claw, has been destroyed and soon my stealth fighters will demolish the rest of the human fleet.") or the final version of the scene ("The Terran carrier, Tiger's Claw, tried to attack us here at K'Tithrak Mang. But my stealth fighters destroyed it!"). This is either a bullshot or a build of the game that existed somewhere between the initial set of marketing shots (which use a different font) and the final release. The same screenshot appears elsewhere so it's likely a case of Origin providing the imagery and not the reviewer capturing it themself... but there's a thread to follow here!

Wing Commander 2 Vengeance of the Kilrathi and the Speech Accessory Pack
By Marcus L Rowland

Produced by Chris Roberts
Published by Origin
UK distributor Mindscape
Systems IBM PC
PC graphics EGA. VGA. MCGA

Supports Roland, Adlib and Sound Blaster sound boards; joystick, mouse and keyboard

Wing Commander 2 is the long awaited sequel to Wing Commander and its two secret mission disks. For anyone who has been on Mars for the past two years, WC is a huge space fighter combat game, based on a long war between the Terran Confeder ation and the Kilrathi Empire, with the outcome of each combat deter mining the next step of a complex cinematic plot. WC2 improves the improves the graphics considerably, and gets rid of a lot of bugs, but unfortunately there are several prices to be paid for the improvements.

The game begins 10 years after Wing Commander ends. The TCS Tigers Claw has been destroyed in a surprise attack by Kilrathi stealth fighters. Only our hero has seen the stealth fighters, since the Kilrathi de stroyed the production facility to stop it falling into rebel hands, and he's generally considered to be the coward who let the Kilrathi destroy the car rier. Now the stealth fighters are starting to appear again, and proving that they exist is a major goal in the game.

For new players the game begins with a long cinematic sequence ex plaining this background, making effective use of speech synthesis (Sound Blaster only) and 256-colour low-resolution VGA/MCGA graphics, but spoiled by sluggish ani- mation (on my 16MHz 386). Characters have slow lip movements that are horribly unconvincing, and move at a stately pace, with little jerks as the screen updates. I've seen much faster animation in other programs, and this aspect is extremely disap pointing.

The introduction leads to entry of name and call sign, with an option to load characters from the earlier game.

This option wouldn't work when I tried it. Next comes a view of a utili tarian chamber containing a computer, airlock entrance, and two other doors, a replacement for the barracks in Wing Commander. There's no mirror to check your me dals, and no access to a flight trainer.

Loading Options

The computer can save and load up to eight missions, showing the number of missions flown and the number of kills for each saved game. A nice feature is an option to add a note describing saved games, but this is unfortunately limited to thirty or so letters in a peculiarly unreadable typeface. The current game is saved automatically after each mission, with saved games giving an option to go back to earlier stages.

Plot continuity deals with the character's life and other events, and is much more diverse than the ship's bar in Wing Commander. So far I’ve seen a murder, a secret intelligence debriefing, a poker game, and en counters in barracks and bars. An implausible number of survivors from the Tiger’s Claw appear. These sequences aren’t interactive. So far none of them have used speech syn thesis, even with the accessory pack added. All are infuriatingly slow.

The missions door leads to com bat missions. Typically these begin with a briefing, but it isn’t always the formal briefing seen in Wing Com mander; sometimes it's just a casual conversation on the flight deck. Sometimes the ‘briefing’ continues after take-off, adding more narrative sequences such as conversations with bases and wingmen.

Combat is fast and furious, and I’d guess that most of Origin’s pro gramming expertise has gone into making it smooth and flicker-free, and improving detailing at all ranges. The flight behaviour of craft remains as implausible as ever, they can make impossibly sharp manoeuvres, shed speed instantly, and stay inclose con tact with the enemy when they should really be flashing apart at 2000kps.

All the combat graphics are en hanced; all the new craft have bigger cockpit canopies, giving a greatly im proved view of the action, and the controls look much more real, some times confusingly so. Missiles and energy weapons are more detailed, again a little implausibly; I wouldn’t expect to be able to see a missile zipping by at 1500kps, let alone count the rivets on it. With the speech acces sory added wingmen reply to their orders, and the Kilrathi snarl their threats and battle cries. There isn’t any noticeable speed penalty with speech, and intercom video (a fre quent cause of problems in Wing Commander) doesn’t seem to slow the game at all. Controls are un changed, with extra features added as needed.

In the Soup

Military hardware has changed considerably in ten years. The only familiar Terran fighter is an upgraded Rapier; particle cannon replace neu tron guns for added range, and chaff pods improve missile defence. This isn’t the sweet killer it was, since the Kilrathi have souped up their own craft considerably. Three other fight ers and a bomber are available at different stages.

The Ferret is a small light patrol fighter, intended for anti-piracy and anti-smuggling operations, armed with two mass drivers. It has a huge bubble canopy, and omits some of the instruments found in other ships. This is roughly equivalent to a fast basic trainer - a lot of fun to fly, but a death trap if the big bad guys are en countered.

The Epee is a little larger and slower, and adds missiles and an im proved tracking system that makes deflection shooting easier. Armour is worse than the Ferret.

The Sabre is the largest fighter, carrying four guns, eight missiles, a rear turret, and chaff pods. I’ve yet to try one, so I can’t say how they be have, but the specification looks good; loads of armour, improved tracking, and reasonable manoeuvra bility and speed.

The Broadsword is a huge jump-capable bomber with three turrets, torpedoes, missiles, and lots of guns. It’s a pig to fly in combat, with rotten manoeuvrability and speed, but it’s the only craft that can take out capital ships, since both sides now use phase shields that block normal fighter wea pons completely.

The advertising for this game makes frequent references to the tur rets; when they’re used the ship flies under automatic pilot, avoiding colli sions. 1 didn’t like this feature at all; without the complexities of flying the ship, taking pot-shots from a turret soon becomes very boring. There also seems to be a bug which makes all the turrets fire continuously if you press the joystick button while the game is paused. I’d be happier if the turrets were fully automated, with ‘ friend or foe’ systems to aim them, or used some sort of split screen aiming (little TV sets in the cockpit?) to tell the pilot when to press the button. I’ll be interested to see how well the Broad sword fares against a capital ship, but so far I haven’t encountered one. The turrets would be most useful on the run-up to a shipping strike, which is the one moment when you don’t want to go onto autopilot, so 1 have grave doubts about their usefulness.

There are some new ways to damage your fighter, the deadliest being loss of radar; when that happens you suddenly realize how hard it is to cover a 360-degree 3D field of view by eye alone.

One major bug of Wing Commander is even worse in the new game; joystick control of afterburners is implemented very poorly, even on the 33MHz machine 1 tried when pre viewing the game, and rarely works if there’s more than one enemy fighter in a combat.

A nice feature is a ‘replay mission’ option, used if your character is killed or ejects. This lets you bypass the funeral or reprimand that would nor mally follow, and go suaight back to the start of the mission after the briefing.

Overall I’m very impressed with the combat sections of this game, but disappointed by the narrative pas sages. Origin says that these sequences were created using Autodesk Animator; I’ve run Autodesk on my computer, and the results were much faster, even with higher resolution.
There are long delays while the computer seems to meditate before loading the next sequence; this is most notable if a pilot is killed, be cause there’s an interminable pause before the cockpit interior is shown. Somewhere this part of the pro gramming has gone badly wrong. Even so, the faults can be lived with, and shouldn’t disguise the fact that the core of this game is an extremely playable simulation. The snag is that many PCs will be unable to run it.

Wing Commander 2 is extraor dinarily big, even compared with its predecessor. In all 1 loaded 19 720k disks and spent several hours tinker ing with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files before everything worked properly. Take a careful look at the sidebar text and the game box before you buy; everything shown is the minimum needed, and the game performs much better with more memory and faster processors.

Well Spoken

The speech accessory pack is a must, if you have the right hardware; it’s excellent, and seems to impose no penalties apart from disk space. Some of the accents are unbelievable, espe cially those of the Kilrathi. As yet there aren’t versions of this pack for other speech products, such as Covox cards. Special operations packs are mentioned in the documentation but not yet available. There is no indica tion of size, however. I’ve got 10-15Mb of hard disk space with a ‘reserved for Special Operations’ file on it.

After this I think that I’ll probably leave Strike Commander until 1 get a new computer; a Cray should be about right....

Installation Notes

MSDOS 5 is recommended because MSDOS 4 consumes too much RAM. Hard disk requirements: 12Mb with files com- pres.sed to minimize space. 15Mb with files expanded to minimize delays, add 5Mb for speech synthesis (Sound Blaster only). Add-on missions may eventually need more megabytes. There is no copy protection.

Installation takes at least an hour for the game. Speech instal lation takes about 15 minutes. De-fragmenting the hard disk is strongly recommended after either installation. For unknown reasoas the game seemed to work much better with VGA memor>' upgraded to 512k.

Annual Fan Vote Under Way

Fan Project of the Year 2024
• Confederation - This past year brought numerous widescreen art updates for this enhancement mod to WC1 by AllTinker. We also got previews of new features, including some highly anticipated slowdown improvements.
• Mac's Lore/Art - Mac delivered both a treasure of slick wallpapers and multiple lore videos jam packed with Wing Commander knowledge in 2024.
• Originator - Originator is a phenomenal hacking and extraction tool that significantly streamlines the process of analyzing Wing Commander assets. AllTinker released more than half of a dozen updates to the program this past year that added support/features for everything from the mainline WC games to P2 to Arena.
• Sketches by CountVonSchnaps - The Count produced a ton of wonderful new artwork in 2024, including pictures of the Arrow, Rapier, Excalibur, Kamrani, Hellcat, Thunderbolt and Longbow.
• WC3 Enhancement Patch - Mash released an amazing patch last year that upgrades the gameplay resolution of WC3 to high definition and also supports incorporation of ODVS' high res videos.
• WC4 Remastered - The WC Respace team continues its steady march towards a modern WC4 remaster with multiple articles highlighting the game's new music, ground missions, beautiful ships and more.
• Wing Leader - Howard started off the year by releasing the Wing Leader assets publicly on the project's Github page. He then proceeded to add new content for the Scimitar, Strakha, Talon, Salt, Krant, Grikath, Dorkir, Lumbari and more. The game also got new features like enhanced damage effects, explosions, cloaking and Kilrathi translations.
• Wing Loader - Not to be confused with Wing Leader, Wing Loader added updates this year to support seamless side-by-side support with Mash's enhancement patch. Other updates support new customization menus, tweaks for the WC1 voice mod and many bug fixes.

Hall of Fame
• Eagle-1 IRC Operator - Eagle fostered the earliest popular real time chat room based on Wing Commander in the mid '90s. The community that began there kickstarted many friendships that endure 30 years later.
• HCl's Mods - HCl was the original legendary Wing Commander modder. Many of his incredible discoveries are tools formed the backbone of the projects of the early 2000s, and you can still see their successors in play to this day.
• Klavs' Art - Klavs personified the artistic talent of the Wing Commander community. He wasn't just one of the most prolific modelers and artists of the last 20 years, he also worked tirelessly to package up and release his assets broadly so that so many other undertakings could benefit from his creations.
• Terran Confederate Underground - Long before the Wing Commander CIC, the TCU website was a comprehensive resource for downloadable files, game walkthroughs, ship stats and more. It included story summaries for the games, bios for the characters and other elements. Unfortunately, no archive of the site exists to this day!
• WC Aces Club Community - The Aces Club was ostensibly based around a series of ongoing play-by-mail fan fiction stories, but it was a lot more than that. At its peak, the club had many hundreds of active users and spread across dozens of websites. Each major campaign was a force unto itself unified by common fan lore, message boards and community.

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 Titanic (1997) which provided Wing Commander's incredible production designer, Peter Lamont! 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 6 PM PST/9 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

PLEASE NOTE that the movie will start an hour earlier than previous weeks. This is temporary to account for Titanic's longer run time.

After Action Report: Judge Dredd

Greetings WingNuts,

I'm sad to report that we didn't think much of Judge Dredd! It's such a weird mess of a movie... the cool British sci-fi world and the world class SFX just weren't enough to balance out a confusing, disengaged plot and some actors... chief among them the bizarre choice of Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider as the leads. The setup is too offputting and doesn't spend enough time engaging you... you just don't ever feel like rooting for anyone. Incredible props, visual effects and sets, though! The happiest surprise of the night was the discovery of the after credits song, the bespoke "Dredd Song" provided by... The Cure?! What was going on with this movie?

... but we DID find our Wing Commander tank pretty readily! The police vehicles show up throughout the film but are especially visible during the opening riot scene and then at the very end of the film when everything has been resolved.

In addition to the two that were turned into a tanker and a repair truck on Wing Commander there seem to be at least two Judge Dredd Saracens extant today: one spent a decade at a Planet Hollywood in North Carolina and is now in private hands and another is privately owned in the United Kingdom. I wanted to learn a little more: how many Saracens were used in the film? Luckily, there's a surprisingly comprehensive Making of Judge Dredd book which confirmed that there were four and talked a little it about the process of adapting them:

To provide a final touch of authenticity, four armored vehicles were adapted for use on the film's back lot. After looking at seeral makes, the designers plumped for the Saracen, a six-wheeled British Army vehicle. Before the Rover deal was even considered, this was how all vehicles in Mega-City were going to be made and David Allday spent a considerable amount of time going around Britain looking for the right ones for the job. "Because of the way the country unloads a lot of military hardware at the moment, you can actually procure this stuff extremely cheaply and in large numbers," he says. "The other useful thing about military vehicles is that they're extremely sturdily built, it's very easy to weld things to them and create a completely different look."

A hood and a bumper was added to cover up the front of the Saracens and they were given bigger wheels and mudguards to make them look even more imposing. An engineer was brought in to fix the bits that weren't working (some of the vehicles had been sitting abandoned in a field for six years!) and the Art Department added the finishing touches. "I'd been looking at a lot of aerospace hardware, bits of engines and things like that we'd found in various places. I found these - I think they're caled afterburners - from a jet plane and we stuck them on the side, four of them on each one and the whole thing looked awesome."

With that, the fleet of road-going vehicles were completed and ready to go on set with no problems - almost.

"We had a few moments with them," Dave admits, "but I would ay that they were superbly engineered and the way they performed was perfect. When one considers the amount of things that can go wrong with this sort of thing in terms of what happened on set. We had a lot of last-minute panics, particularly with the Land Rovers filling up with ehaust and that sort of thing. There were a lot of little adaptations that had to be done at breakneck speed. But, basically, on set they performed beautifully."

While most literature refers to the Saracens used in Judge Dredd and Wing Commander as standard FV603s, the Making of Book shows one before the conversion which seems to be the FV606/611 ambulance model:

Further research even revealed that we've already seen a Saracen during this movie series: one played a German armored car in Squadron 633:

Of course, the Saracens weren't the only thing from Judge Dredd that Wing Commander reused: Jurgen Prochnow played Judge Griffin... and the gravitas he added was nowhere near enough to save the film.

There's even ANOTHER Privateer 2 connection... one of the CIS taunts in the game is quoting Dredd's tagline: "I am the law" when the NPC pilot scores a kill.

Sully is the law.

Goodbye Peter Jason

There's sad news today: the Wing Commander universe has lost another commander. We've learned that prolific character actor Peter Jason has passed away. Wing Commander fans best know him as Daniel (Eugene) Wilford, a Terran Confederation Captain and a Border Worlds Vice Admiral. Jason's Wilford first appeared in Wing Commander IV where he played the Border Worlds admiral giving orders to Colonel Blair and the Intrepid. Much like Ricardo Montalbán in Star Trek II, Jason never actually shared a set with the rest of the cast: his orders arrived via viewscreen. In Wing Commander Prophecy, Jason stepped in following Jason Bernard's untimely passing and played the Wilford character as the captain of the Confederation's new Midway megacarrier. There he worked more directly with the cast, giving briefings and either praising or chewing out the player based on their gameplay.

Mr. Smith Goes to Vega Sector

Here's a great listen: the The Retro Hour podcast has posted an in-depth interview with game development legend Harvey Smith. He's best known as the lead designed for the Deus Ex series and more recent titles from Arkane... but like many in the industry, he got his start at Origin Systems! He tells great stories about his time in the military in the early 1990s and then how he joined Origin (first as a member of the softball team before actually being hired!). And there's one fantastic story about QA'ing Super Wing Commander and running into stealth fighters!

I'll tell you a 3DO story though that you might like. You know one of the games in [Super Wing Commander] and that it was all the... it was the Secret Missions packaged with Wing I and II I think, and it was like a good bundle if you were a Wing Commander fan, right. And this was like while Chris Roberts and his team were working on Wing III, so they called us to the cafeteria one day shuttered the the windows. And they showed us on a big TV on a cart Wing III. And it was just simply a tech demo of the dog fighting against Kilrathi ships but it had 3D models flying around with a lighting model so that the as the ships banked and turned the lighting would play across the facets. And that's nothing now, but I tell you everyone in the room was stunned at the time. And so, like, you know we went from these 2D sprites that flipped I don't remember how many positions they had, but, like you could see the ships flipping right because they only had like, you know, eight facings or whatever.

But anyway we we would sit there and play these missions and write them up and try to reproduce the bugs. Like, oh we're having a crash, make it crash tell us exactly what the three steps to make it crash are. And then the programmer can find it very easily. But the missions some of them are about the Kilrathi developing, the Kilrathi are of course lion aliens like like from the novel The Man Kzin Wars or something, but the part of the plot is about the Kilrathi developing cloaking technology. And I remember we were playing this mission one time. And one of the kilrathi ships went invisible. And I was chasing it and you could only see when they fired their weapons. You could see the brights, that it had the what we would now call B effects on them, for the blasters moving through space. You could, you could see those and the afterburners, the jets, when they came on. You could see those but otherwise the ship was invisible and I remember dogfighting and chasing one and one of the, one of the producers was standing around and he looked over and he was like "what the hell are you doing? What's going on?" And I was just like I'm just playing the game, you know, I'm trying to get this one thing to reproduce and he was just stunned and he called his programmer friend over and they were freaking out and and and finally the programmer was like what is it you think is happening right now? And I was like well I'm chasing this Kilrathi ship and it cloaked and blah blah blah because the game's about cloaking. And he was like "no it's just not drawing the ship. How are you guys playing this game if it doesn't draw the enemy ships?" And QA you get super good at games, right. You memorize the the the floor plan of everything, right, and so I was like I'm just dogfighting this invisible ship but I can see when the afterburners turn on and when the, the blasters fire.

And the programmer... this is like a, a life lesson moment, like you you know if you could look back over your life and you could track the like how many times did something happen that was, like, lit your brain up right. And he said you know every action sphere in Wing Commander is allowed a certain number of ships, a certain amount of art, and so you fly from one action sphere to another there may be another ship fighting you there but it you're not allowed to have all three in the first action sphere you can maybe only have two plus your own ship and whatever and so what has happened here is we've exceeded the amount of art that we can have in this action sphere. So it's literally just not drawing the ship and the reason the blasters and the afterburners come on is those are shared between all the ships and I remember just my brain just going like as a non engineer my brain just going wow that explains a lot that's what's going on here. And what had happened was there was an assert somewhere in the code where like if you ever exceed the memory in an action sphere assert, you know, crash and then give this little report so somebody can go figure out what's going on. And a programmer assigned with the bug for it being you know crashing had just turned that assert off and so which is not a very responsible way to fix that bug, but like what it meant was like, we were fighting these invisible ships in in, in Wing Commander 3DO and the programmers were delighted. And so, uh, I love that yeah but it because it was about cloaking and because process was not as organized like modern QA people are geniuses the the sort of process they have for checklists and making sure on 27 languages everything works and on multiple platforms and all you know but any any case that's that's my Wing Commander 3DO story.

You can listen to the entire podcast here or through any popular provider (it's episode 466.)

GOG Sale Squeezes Wing Commander Prices Even Lower

Wing Commander Movie Night: Titanic

The Wing Commander movie club has met the law and... the law won. Judge Dredd wasn't as fun as we'd hoped so we're turning to a certified classic with an interesting Wing Commander connection: Titanic! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along. PLEASE NOTE that because Titanic is a long movie we will be starting one hour early at 9 PM EST (6 PM PST.)

Titanic is James Cameron's famous love story set against an ultra-detailed telling of the final hours of the doomed Titanic passenger liner. Initially derided for its enormous budged, Titanic proved naysers wrong when it shattered box office records on release in December 1997. If you're of the same vintage as Wing Commander, it's a sure bet you remember Titanic!

Titanic's big connection to Wing Commander is a pretty famous one: Titanic's famed production designer Peter Lamont followed that film by taking the same role on Wing Commander... winning an Oscar for his work on Cameron's fim in between! Lamont was responsible for the incredible sets recreating the Titanic and then for imagining another kind of sea-inspired vessel in Wing Commander. Importanty, they were both efforts that he clearly put all of himself into. Here's a clip from the EPK where he talks about "our Rapiers":

Wing Commander's production notes introduce him and quote him on the difference between the projects:

PETER LAMONT (Designer of Production) has been named on three occasions for the Oscar and recently he finally won in the film number one of all the times: TITANIC. Also he has worked as designer of production in many films of the successful series of James Bond: GOLDENEYE, LICENSE TO KILL (LICENSE TO KILL), PANORAMA TO KILL (To VIEW TO TO KILL), ONLY FOR ITS EYES (FOR YOUR EYES ONLY), and OCTOPUSSY. In addition, Lamont has also worked in DANGEROUS LIES (TRUE LIES), with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis; ALIENS the RETURN (ALIENS), carried out by Sigourney Weaver, and TOP SECRET with Val Kilmer.

Lamont also considers his work in WING COMMANDER with similarities and resistances with respect to his work in TITANIC. "On the one hand, I like the details" - she comments -."and at this time that we lived, with better camera systems, it is possible to be seen much more, so I have paid a lot of retail attention in these scenery." On the other hand, "in WING COMMANDER, we are creating a fantasy world, a place that has never existed except in the imagination of Chris. It marks a great difference as far as the type of work by comparison with the work to try a historical detail."

The same notes go into detail about Lamont's leadership on the film:

Now, the producer approaches an enormous steel post that for support. It is covered with serpentine electronic tubes and fuel tanks. Commutators and lamps flash calling attention. Even from a certain distance, everything seems real. [Producer Todd Moyer] strikes one of the surfaces - and it sounds like hollow plastic - everything has been installed and done by the mind of the Oscar-winning Designer Production Peter Lamont and his colleagues.

Lamont had to confront a pile of problems in this production that his experience on TITANIC could not solve. "We had to create it everything: the interiors of the starships, the covers, the equipment," he explains, "it is a very different order from creating a historical reality. I like the detail; we tried to create an atmosphere of high technology with the maximum effectiveness. In these days, with better systems of cameras, the public can see much more; when they observed the scenery of the film they will agree that much attention has been lent to the details. But on certain occasions, the design arises from something familiar, something you know." Moyer continues: "Peter has created a sense as much of immensity as of confinement - very similar to a submarine (DAS BOOT) in space.

Lamont lavishes praises on his equipment, and he comments to a British journalist who is visiting: "Our team has done a fabulous job of aging the sets, integrating itself in the larger effort: the artistic department, the department of accessories, and the departments of painting and construction; all have done a great work." And it concludes: "Most of my team from TITANIC is also here: the director of artistic supervision, the head of construction, the carpenter and the painter supervisors, the decorator of scenes, and the head of equipment and accessories. This group shows its versatility and sense of the commitment towards my conception: "if it is on the paper, it will be in the scenery."

Here's a funny mention from a press release promoting the VFX team's use of Maya for post production:

Wing Commander is a live-action drama directed by Digital Anvil CEO and founder Chris Roberts, who created the highly popular Wing Commander computer game series. The movie, which combines state-of-the-art, sci-fi visual effects with elements of a classic World War II film, is based on story-lines, characters and other creative elements from the first four games in the Wing Commander series. Production designer Peter Lamont, who received an Academy Award for his art direction work on James Cameron's Titanic, has created a retro-future world for the Wing Commander movie that includes extraordinary spaceships, the hangar deck of an intergalactic spacecraft carrier, and a number of other immersive alien and confederate environments.

Digital Anvil fully expects Lamont's work on Wing Commander to be of the same award-winning quality as what he did for Titanic. "Judging from the astounding visuals that he has created for Wing Commander, Lamont's Titanic Oscar may only be his first," said Marten Davies, president of Digital Anvil. Digital Anvil is using Maya to ensure that the world Lamont envisions is as stunning in the final product as it is in concept. "The images rendered in Maya are absolutely beautiful," said Alba. "They are the most realistic we have ever seen."

Camera company ARRI's newsletter talked about how Wing Commander used a significant number of crew members from Titanic:

In the team of over 170 people, such well-known names as Peter Lamont and Michael Ford can be found. They were responsible for the design of the buildings and details of the set construction. Both recently received an Oscar for their work on the mega-production TITANIC. In total, 25 people who worked on the TITANIC production were hired to work on this project.

Of course, the doomed Titanic also has a parallel in Wing Commander: Secret Ops which features multiple doomed cruise liners -- the Twilight Purchase, the Blue Horizon and the Ana Maria Alberghetti. Since the development of that game was contemporaneous with the film's world domination it's a good bet that there's a little creative connection.

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

Titanic is currently streaming in the United States on Hulu/Disney+ and Paramount. 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 BluRay in 2012 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 9 PM EST. Everyone is welcome and we encourage you to join in the conversation; sharing your thoughts helps make the experience better for everyone!

Fan Project Vote Kicks Off

• Confederation - This past year brought numerous widescreen art updates for this enhancement mod to WC1 by AllTinker. We also got previews of new features, including some highly anticipated slowdown improvements.
• Mac's Lore/Art - Mac delivered both a treasure of slick wallpapers and multiple lore videos jam packed with Wing Commander knowledge in 2024.
• Originator - Originator is a phenomenal hacking and extraction tool that significantly streamlines the process of analyzing Wing Commander assets. AllTinker released more than half of a dozen updates to the program this past year that added support/features for everything from the mainline WC games to P2 to Arena.
• Sketches by CountVonSchnaps - The Count produced a ton of wonderful new artwork in 2024, including pictures of the Arrow, Rapier, Excalibur, Kamrani, Hellcat, Thunderbolt and Longbow.
• WC3 Enhancement Patch - Mash released an amazing patch last year that upgrades the gameplay resolution of WC3 to high definition and also supports incorporation of ODVS' high res videos.
• WC4 Remastered - The WC Respace team continues its steady march towards a modern WC4 remaster with multiple articles highlighting the game's new music, ground missions, beautiful ships and more.
• Wing Leader - Howard started off the year by releasing the Wing Leader assets publicly on the project's Github page. He then proceeded to add new content for the Scimitar, Strakha, Talon, Salt, Krant, Grikath, Dorkir, Lumbari and more. The game also got new features like enhanced damage effects, explosions, cloaking and Kilrathi translations.
• Wing Loader - Not to be confused with Wing Leader, Wing Loader added updates this year to support seamless side-by-side support with Mash's enhancement patch. Other updates support new customization menus, tweaks for the WC1 voice mod and many bug fixes.

• Eagle-1 IRC Operator - Eagle fostered the earliest popular real time chat room based on Wing Commander in the mid '90s. The community that began there kickstarted many friendships that endure 30 years later.
• HCl's Mods - HCl was the original legendary Wing Commander modder. Many of his incredible discoveries are tools formed the backbone of the projects of the early 2000s, and you can still see their successors in play to this day.
• Klavs' Art - Klavs personified the artistic talent of the Wing Commander community. He wasn't just one of the most prolific modelers and artists of the last 20 years, he also worked tirelessly to package up and release his assets broadly so that so many other undertakings could benefit from his creations.
• Terran Confederate Underground - Long before the Wing Commander CIC, the TCU website was a comprehensive resource for downloadable files, game walkthroughs, ship stats and more. It included story summaries for the games, bios for the characters and other elements. Unfortunately, no archive of the site exists to this day!
• WC Aces Club Community - The Aces Club was ostensibly based around a series of ongoing play-by-mail fan fiction stories, but it was a lot more than that. At its peak, the club had many hundreds of active users and spread across dozens of websites. Each major campaign was a force unto itself unified by common fan lore, message boards and community.

Hornets! Hornets!

Here's a wonderful 3D rendered Hornet by Algi, based on the original blueprints included with Wing Commander I. It's a good bet the original mesh used to render the Hornet bitmaps looked something like this! Here's the original link on Tumblr. Crazy how close it looks to the rarely seen Kilrathi Saga intro version, too! On BlueSky the artist mentioned that they're just getting started with 3D art... but we'd say they're well on their way!

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 Judge Dredd (1995) which provided two ex-military vehicles to the 1999 Wing Commander moie! 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: Battle of Britain

Greetings WingNuts,

Let it be said of Battle of Britain (1969) that it ws no An American Werewolf in Paris. We joke a lot in this series about boring war movies and... boy was that a boring war movie. The thrilling air battles that enchanted us as children aren't quite as spectacular today and Battle of Britain's 'character adjacent' war story seems pretty plodding. But you can see the bones of why it enchanted so many once upon a time: the air battles, a mix of real vintage aircraft and exceptional model work, are impressive and the entirety of the very long production is full of impressive quality sets and costumes. It's a great culmination of the kind of movie The Dam Busters kicked off fifteen years earlier... but it sure seemed slow as we got through the second hour!

In fact, I couldn't help but notice how similar the Spitfire backdrops looked like the simple ones created for the Border Worlds Banshees in Wing Commander IV:

We talked a little about Fleet Action's reference to Churchill's June 4, 1940 "we shall fight on the beaches" speech. The movie doesn't feature the speech itself but it does have Baron von Richter, the German ambassador to Switzerland, making fun of it! Here's the famous portion of the speech referenced in Fleet Action:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

The Lost Planes of Strike Commander

It's a long standing claim that Chris Roberts' Strike Commander was originally intended to have quite a few more playable aircraft. In the end, the game focuses heavily on simulating the flight model of an F-16 Falcon and only allows the player a second aircraft, the prototype F-22 Raptor, very briefly at the end of the game. But early descriptions of the game mention everything from World War I biplanes to Harrier jump jets. What can we find out?

The earliest surviving marketing material for Strike Commander is this press release announcing the game and providing details on the plans and the extremely qualified development team. It was published in May 1991 alongside a sales sheet with additional details. The sales sheet tells us that the game will allow you to "pilot six different aircraft" and it specifically mentions that there will be NPC's flying World War I biplanes. This is the only mention of the biplanes we've found, but the more detailed press release includes concept art showing an A-7 Corsair II and a flyable P-38 Lightning!

Origin's 1991-92 catalog, published a little later that year, drops mentions of the prop planes and instead goes all in on Helicopters. It also identifies a fourth intended player aircraft, the Harrier jet! The bullet points mention an NPC Chinook helicopter and one of the screenshots seems to show a Soviet Mi-28 helicopter. The attack helicopter also appears in a screenshot of a cutscene printed around this time in magazines!

Another source for cut aircraft is the Origin FX screensaver. It advertised itself as having aircraft taken from Strike Commander in the 'Air Show' module but four of them do not appear in the final game including the SU-25 ground attack plane, the A-4 Skyhawk, the P-38 Lightning (again) and an P-51 Mustang with a distinctive 'anarchy' symbol on the nose. It's likely that many of the "vintage" aircraft that were cut from the overall plan for Strike would've been intended to resurface in 'Phoenix Force', Origin's intended "Strike Commander 1.5" followup.

A final source for learning cut planes is Strike Commander's single release addon, Tactical Operations. Origin created expansion packs using material left over from development of their base games… so it's likely that the B-1 Lancer and the F-117 Nighthawks added in Tactical Operations were cut from Strike Commander itself! Here's a page from a November-December 1991 preview showing both the A-4 (in a cutscene) and the Harrier model.

That's a lot of cut planes but we still don't know all of the original six planned for the game. The F-16, F-22, P-38 and Harrier make four… but what were the remaining two?

Victory Fan Film and Beyond

Last year, we reported on some wonderful 3D renderings of the TCS Victory created by AEdwardBaker. Today we're following up and sharing a number of other Wing Commander pieces he's created! These three pieces are, respectively, Angry Hornets, Homecoming and Sisters. Very cool to see the Victory and the Tiger's Claw together!

They also have two new renders of the Victory, seen both fore and aft.

... and those renders are actually from a pretty cool fan film that they've created featuring the Victory!

Lastly, there's even a phone wallpaper!

VGHF Collection: Writing Wing Commander II

This is the fifth in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

It's our final VGHF update (for now!) we've saved the best for last… this one is absolutely fascinating! It's a June 1992 issue of The Journal of Computer Game Design (Vol. 5, No. 5), an early academic-style publication covering game design… and it features a four page interview with Ellen Guon that goes into a great amount of detail about her writing for Wing Commander! This is the kind of article narrative designers today should be reading, it's absolute gold that's still relevant today. And as she talks about developing Angel's story for Wing Commander II, you'll think she probably should've had a story credit on the movie.

Making It Real

Ellen Guon and Katherine Lawrence

[This article is based on the seminar that Ellen and Katherine presented at the 1992 Computer Game Developers' Conference.]

Ellen: This is a brief introduction to the "building blocks" of storywriting. I look at story as something you construct, not art but craftsmanship. You create and fit pieces together to create a complete work. We'll cover the basics now, get into finer details in the Q&A.

My name is Ellen Guon. I started out as a children's television scriptwriter, working on various shows: "Jem," "My Little Pony," "Bravestarr," and "Dinosaucers." I'm a published fantasy and science fiction author, with one book out and two more that'll be published this year. I started in computer games as a Project Manager for Sierra on game conversions, and then was a lead writer and occasional director at Origin Systems for five of the Wing Commander games. I'm starting at Electronic Arts in their educational games department in a couple weeks.

Katherine: My name is Katherine Lawrence, and I've been writing for television since 1985. My credits include "Dungeons & Dragons," "Jim Henson's Muppet Babies" and most recently, "Conan the Adventurer" which will air this fall. I've worked in series development at Marvel Productions and Filmation Studios. Development is where "Making it Real" starts.

First comes deciding what the series is going to be about. This usually means either obtaining the rights to a pre-existing character, like Spiderman or Conan, or starting from scratch by choosing a target audience. By target audience, I mean an age range, and gender. (Television executive perception is that there are shows with "boy appeal" and "girl appeal" though there has to be some cross-over to get good ratings.) You wouldn't expect 2-6 year olds to watch the same series as 8-12 year olds. Not that they don't but one shouldn't expect it.

Ellen: In a computer game, development begins a similar way. You'll have a basic premise, such as is the project going to be a flight sim, an adventure game or an RPG, and you may have an existing universe to work within. You SHOULD have a target market. If you don't have a market in mind, I suggest you figure that out before you start. In any case, you'll have similar guidelines to work within, just like a television show.

Katherine: Once you have the initial idea, and know who your audience is, you begin creating the backstory, the history of the characters, and the universe.

Let's take an example, and follow it through. We decide we want to create an action/adventure show aimed at 8-12 year olds, since that's what the network is most likely to buy this year, or so rumor has it.

Ellen: or in computer games, you know you want to do a flight sim, since that's what's selling this year.

Katherine: So we sit around and come up with the time period. Do we want "today," futuristic, or from history? We choose historical, something vaguely medieval. And since we're aiming it at 8-12 year olds, we want real adventure with risks, not strictly moral "feel-good" characters. We want characters that can DO something so the audience will identify with them.

Ellen: What Katherine is saying is KNOW YOUR MARKET before you start. Do your research. Figure out what's going to sell to your selected audience. Doing a story that's appropriate for 5-7 year olds won't sell in an 8-12 market. Once you know your basic direction, you can start figuring out the details. Like story and character.

Basically, computer game development is similar in this regard to television. A good place to start is figuring out what your universe is. Once you have that, you can narrow down to specific characters and story. Again, all of this builds out of your basic approach to the project.

In the Wing Commander universe, Chris Roberts decided that he wanted to create a space combat game, a flight simulator. From that basic concept, the universe of humans vs. Kilrathi evolved. Later, when Origin realized that players were interested in the story aspect of the game as well as the space combat, the game evolved into characters and involved plotlines.

Katherine: Once you identify the universe, and the type of story you want, based upon the target audience, you begin creating characters.

You need your heroes and villains. Because this is television, we have certain "rules." We need a strong mix of ethnic types and genders. And we can't have a lot of weapons with sharp edges since the studio and network might get sued if little Charlie decides to use a butcher knife to play Adventure! with his little sister as the villain from last Saturday's episode.

Ellen: While those same guidelines don't apply in the computer games industry, as we don't have anything like the network's "Standards and Practices" board, there still should be some sense of moral responsibility in your writing. The television guidelines are worth looking into just to see what guidelines exist. When creating heroes and villains, I tend to think in terms of shades of grey rather than black and white. "Flawed heroes and redeemable villains." There is no such thing as a perfectly altruistic person out there in our world.

Katherine: Well, perhaps Mother Teresa.

Ellen: If there were, would you want to buy a used car from that person? Likewise, no one thinks of themselves as being totally evil. To make a character interesting, as well as "real," a hero should have problems, even a potentially fatal flaw in his or her outlook or character.

Overcoming that flaw or problem is part of what makes your story interesting, part of the B storyline. (We'll talk more about that later.) And a villain should be someone whose motivation you can understand, maybe even sympathize with. A villain such as some of the world leaders we've had in this century doesn't think of himself as a villain, or as evil. They're justified in their own minds. It's these kind of innovations in a character that make you care about what happens to them.

The Journal of Computer Game Design The trick with this is to make the character flaws or problems believable, as well as use it discreetly. This was a problem in the "Back to the Future" movies, where they really slammed you over the head with Marty McFly's problems about being called a coward.

Katherine: What Ellen said is what works in television as well. Even the worst villains on "G.I.Joe" had their vulnerabilities and the heroes were never perfect.

Okay, you've got your main characters down. The next thing is to build the character inter-relationships. Not just who is in love with whom, but who has a grudge against whom, who yelled at whom yesterday, and what they want to do with the other character tomorrow. None of us live in a vacuum, nor should our characters.

Ellen: In WC2, Steve Beeman and I did this in a very direct and concise fashion. Those of you who've read Mike Harrison's "WC Strategy Guide" may have seen our one-paragraph character descriptions which describe exactly how all the characters interact with each other.

One character may be a lover to the hero or heroine, or a parental figure, or a sibling, or a rival, or anything else. Once you lay out these inter- relationships, a lot of the character interaction in the story becomes very clear.

In WC2, Ralgha/Hobbes and Downtown have a very special parental relationship. Ralgha is a renegade Kilrathi who rescued Downtown from slavery on a Kilrathi planet. Now Downtown has grown up, is a combat pilot, and they're serving aboard the same ship. When someone accuses Ralgha of being the murderer aboard that ship, Downtown very naturally is going to leap to Ralgha's defense. There are many other examples of this in WC2, which are natural interactions based upon the existing relationships.

Katherine: The next and final step to building real characters is character quirks. Those little things that aren't essential to survival, and may even be counter-survival, but are SO very human (or Kilrathi).

It's from these that stories can grow. For example, my first script sale was for the "Dungeons and Dragons" series from Marvel Productions. One of the characters didn't DO anything, and I figured it must bother her. So I came up with a story that depended upon that sense of isolation and uselessness she felt when surrounded by all the other heroic types. That's what CBS liked about it, and they bought it. (Yes, that's one of the secrets to successfully pitching story ideas in television: find the least-utilized character and build a story around him, her it.)

Ellen: In WC2 I used this trick of building quirks as well. Actually, Angel's "by the book" attitude wasn't a quirk that I put in, it was in the original game before I started working on the series. I thought about that, the kind of personality that's SO dedicated to everything being proper and military, by the book. What would happen to that kind of person when she realizes it's only a facade that she's put up between herself and the world, and it's crumbling down?

In SM2, when Bossman is killed, that's the first break in Angel's armor: the scene where she asks Bluehair (the player) just to stay with her awhile, talk to her. She doesn't want to be alone. Later, when her best friend, Spirit, dies, that destroys the last of the facade and prompts the love affair between herself and Bluehair. This is a case of the plot developing directly out of a character's quirks.

Katherine: Remember, there are almost ALWAYS reasons for personality quirks. That's why there are so many psychiatrists and therapists around.

Okay, you have your universe and your characters. Now comes using them to make the plot real. As Ellen said, and as in my example, plot can come out of character. It can also come from wanting to torture your character with a situation. (Sometimes I think all writers are sadists at heart, considering what we put our characters through.)

Ellen: Basically, stories break down into two kinds. In television we call them the A and B storylines. The "A" storyline is your action-based story. "B" is your character evolution story. A good plot needs both kinds of stories. Without both, you'll either have a non-stop action story that has no character involvement in it at all, or a story that's all characters that aren't DOING anything. "Steel Magnolia's," while a terrific film, certainly comes to mind as an example of that second possibility.

The best stories interweave the A and B plots into a single cohesive whole. If you can, try to intersect the climactic scenes of both stories at the same point. A good example of this is "Star Wars," where Luke finally figures out how to use that dratted Force and overcomes his various problems and insecurities (the B story) at the same time he's trying to destroy the Death Star (the A story).

You can create tension in your storyline by interweaving these two types of storylines. It's like a rollercoaster ride. What I prefer to do is alternate the high-tension scenes of both storylines, so that there's always some kind of dramatic tension, either in the action or character development storyline. My favorite movie that illustrates this is "The African Queen," which has Hepburn and Bogart professing their undying love for each other as they're about to be executed. The tensions in both A and B plotlines build upon each other, especially when Bogart asks the German ship captain to perform their marriage ceremony before he has them executed. As the Captain says, "I now pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution."

Katherine: Not that either just an A story or just a B story won't work. Flight simulations are just A stories, for example. But when the B story, the "character arc" is added, it becomes something "real."

When creating your stories, however, you should also look down the road to the "pay-off." How are you going to capitalize on what you're doing? As in "Star Wars" where we get the payoff of feeling good that the Death Star is destroyed, and also identify with overcoming fears and insecurities. You don't just need to have a conclusion, you need to grab the reader, audience or game player and make them not only take the journey with you, but perhaps even drag YOU along, they're SO involved in the story.

Ellen: The payoff is what you're building to throughout the story. In the A story, that's a physical victory, such as destroying K'Tithrak Mang at the end of WC2. The payoff for the B story in WC2 is a little more complex than that. At the beginning of WC2, you've been court- martialed, demoted, shipped off to the middle of nowhere, and basically had a very bad day. Everyone in the universe seems to hate you now, especially Admiral Tolwyn, who presided at your court- martial.

The A story of WC2 is simple: you destroy the bad guys' space station. The B story payoff is that you're restored to your original rank, your name is cleared, and most importantly, everyone thinks you're a hero again. Especially Tolwyn. Earning his respect is possibly the most major payoff out of the entire story, even though it may only be part of the adrenaline rush of the ending for most players.

The payoff is the single most critical aspect of your game. Without this, there won't be the emotional punch for your audience, a sense of satisfaction at the end of your story.

Katherine: For example, using "Star Wars" again, the emotional payoff isn't the destruction of the Death Star, but that ceremony before the assembled Alliance when Luke receives his medal from the princess, and fulfills his dreams. THAT'S the reason people went to see that movie again and again, not just the incredible roller-coaster ride of the adventure.

Now you've got your series or game created, have the characters, and interweaved plots. Is your job done? Not necessarily. As "Happy Days" and "Wing Commander" have proved, there's a definite market for spin-off stories. You can take all this work you've done and build on it. There are Secret Missions and "Mork and Mindy" as examples. When you've created a "real" universe with real characters and stories the game player or viewer like, use all that work and keep the audience coming back for more. That's the real point of "Making it Real."

Ellen: In other words, once you've put all this work into your story and characters, get the most mileage out of it that you can.

We've talked a lot about some of the similarities between television and computer games, and some "tricks of the trade" from television that you can use in games. But computer games are a very different medium, and there are some things you might want to consider when creating a story and characters for use in a game.

The Journal of Computer Game Design Computer games are interactive. Games have elements other than story, such as combat, puzzles and tasks the player must accomplish to win the game. When you're creating a story for a game, you want to interweave these elements into your story, just as seamlessly as you'd add the character motivations and quirks, the background for the universe, etc. Make these ele- ments PART of your story, integral to the plot, etc.

Katherine: Whereas in television your primary concern is coming up with sufficient cliff- hanging act-breaks to keep the viewers coming back after the commercials.

Ellen: Chris Roberts said it very well, "People buy WC for the flight simulator, not the story. But the story is the glue that holds the missions together, that makes you want to play just one more mission every time."

Katherine: And always keep in mind the ancillary rights. Video games have already been turned into television series, and there's no reason a really good computer game can't be turned into a movie.

But this is a two-way street. In another couple of years, some of you could well be up here, telling television or movie scriptwriters how to make the interactivity work. We all create magic with our writing, the only difference is the medium. That's what makes what we do SO important, and SO rewarding.

Lastly, we both highly recommend J. Michael Straczynski's THE COMPLETE BOOK OF SCRIPTWRITING, from Writer's Digest Books. A new edition is coming out this Summer (1992). It covers radio, stage, television and movies, and is one of my own resource books. It can be ordered from the Writer's Digest Book Club, or found in most bookstores, including the chains.

Wing Commander Movie Night: Judge Dredd

The Wing Commander movie club has successfully ended the beginning with a pretty uneventful watch of Battle of Britain; maybe have some characters next time, movie! And that next time will be 1995's Judge Dredd, a fun action sci-fi movie with a slight technical connection to Wing Commander. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Judge Dredd is a British comic book antihero whose stories have appeared in 2000 A.D. since the late 1970s. He's an ultra-powered police officer in a dystopian world where the police are judge, jury and executioner. The 1995 film adaptation is a big, brassy action movie that trades some of the satire of the source material for Jean-Claude Van Damme and a big '90s action movie production. No one thinks Judge Dredd is the best movie in the world (or even the best Judge Dredd movie) but it's certainly a mood!

The big Wing Commander connection to Judge Dredd is another technical one: two of the deck vehicles that appear on the Tiger Claw's flight deck originated as troop transpots in Judge Dredd. So be on the lookout for converted military transports while we watch! Judge Dredd was not shot in Luxembourg, so these APCs made their way from Shepperton Studios in England for Wing Commander. Here's a bit from Wing Commander's production notes that mention the vehicles:

Among other impressive transformations from real-world finds are a kind of space bulldozer, and a refueling unit that [Producer] Todd [Moyer] calls the fuel "tanker." Both, previously used on the set of JUDGE DREDD, are converted troop transport vehicles. After several attempts, a trucker fuels the "tanker," and it fills the set with diesel fumes. Moyer half-jokingly, half-derisively refers to the device as "the most expensive tanker I've ever had on a set."

And here's the same mention from a tour given to GMovie magazine:

Other interesting space vehicles include a "space nulldozer" and a tanker, both recycled from the movie "Judge Dredd". The tour continues and [Producer Todd] Moyer points out a storage room which is full of containers and piles of boxes. The walls are covered with monitors, cables and other wires - all very realistic looking. All of it came from the mind of the Oscar nominated ("Titanic") production designer Peter Lamont and his colleagues. "The small and confined areas on board of the "Tiger Claw" remind me of 'Das Boot in Space'" says Peter Lamont.

The vehicles used in these film were Alvis FV603 Saracens, a type of armed personnel carrier manufactured from 1952 to 1976. They are largely retired today but were a familiar sight for generations around the world, particularly in conflicts involving commonwealth countries. While the descriptions refer to the fuel tanker and the bulldozer, Wing Commander ultimately used its Saracens as the tanker and the repair truck. The bulldozer appeared only in CG!

It appears that at least one of Judge Dredd's Saracens retained its original deco and was auctioned off as memorabilia some years back... sadly, it looks like no one wanted it!

One other slight connection is that Judge Dredd also stars Jürgen Prochnow as another Judge. Looking forward to seeing Commander Gerald show up, though we already saw a lot of him in Das Boot!

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

Judge Dredd is currently available for rent or purchase on all the standard services. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on BluRay in 2012 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!

Wing Commander Free on YouTube

Here's a little treat from the universe: YouTube has the 1999 Wing Commander movie available to watch for free (in the United States, at least)! YouTube's rules prevent commercial movies from being embedded but you can follow this link to watch the movie. As a bonus, making the movie available on YouTube means that lots of people are seeing it for the first time... and if their social media comments are any indication, they aren't hating it! Weird what a couple decades an do to a film.

This is a legitimate licensed stream rather than somebody pitching up the sound and playing it under a filter... it's the real Wing Commander experience! We don't know how long Wing Commander will be available but past availability suggests that you should have at least all of February to catch it. A big thank you to Sebastian for letting us know!

VGHF Collection: Movie Stars and Supercars (on the 3DO)

This is the fourth in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

Here's another cool, likely otherwise forgotten collection from the VGHF Digital Library: the original black and white "3DO Club News" newsletters that were mailed to early adopters of the unpopular (but well-Wing Commandered) game console. The fourth issue is from February 1995 and includes multiple items of interest for Wing Commander historians. The first is a neat two page preview of Wing Commander III 3DO, coming in a couple of months:

WING COMMANDER III: HEART OF THE TIGER

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is more than just the sequel to the best- selling flight simulation game of all time. At a production budget of nearly $4 million, it's also far and away the most expensive CD-ROM game ever made - and the first to use full- motion, live action video from start to finish. "I wanted to make this the biggest, baddest CD-ROM game ever, with true movie-quality production values," boasts WC3 designer Chris Roberts. What he ended up with is the next big leap in interactive enter- tainment.

The cast alone puts WC3 into the Hollywood league, with Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars trilogy), Malcolm McDowell (Star Trek Generations), John Rhys- Davies (Sallah in the Indiana Jones series), Tom Wilson (Biff in Back to the Future), and Ginger Lynn Allen (Young Guns II) playing featured roles. Working with Hamill was a lot of fun, Roberts recalls, because Star Wars had been a major inspiration for the entire Wing Commander series. "It was a logical casting choice," he notes, "because every kid wants to be Luke Skywalker-though I think Blair (Hamill's character in WC3) is deeper than Luke. He's 15 years older, for one thing. He's been disgraced, and he's wasted his career fighting in backwater systems. It's still Mark Hamill, but he's definitely not the blue-eyed farm boy we saw in Star Wars."

Making WC3 was very different from regular film making, for two reasons. The first departure was that, because the player determines which character to befriend or which one to pursue romantically, the script had to cover all the options.

There was reportedly much more preparation for each scene than in a normal film shoot and the actors had to approach the same scene in response to all the possible choices. Though it was a stretch for the actors to remember which story branch they were in and keep track of the variables, they enjoyed the novelty of exploring several different endings to a single scene.

The second departure was the absence of sets. The actors performed their roles in between missions in a virtu- ally empty green studio during five weeks of shooting. Computer- generated backgrounds-including spaceship control centers, fighter planes, and galactic landscapes - were added later by artists using Silicon Graphics' Alias software. (Roberts describes the technique as "real actors on a virtual set.") After shoot- ing, Origin's artist team, led by Chris Douglas, touched up the backgrounds and added detail. Finally, Western Images in San Francisco-the same online editing facility that did the Young Indy series - edited it down from 100 hours of raw footage to the three or four hours of film you see in the game.

The final result was four CDs' worth of 24-bit color, with full Dolby CD sound. For the PC version, this was adapted to 8-bit color, with far fewer polygon faces and a much lower frame rate. "But the 3DO ver- sion looks better," reflects Roberts, "because of the 16-bit colors and the higher face count on the polygons. It also sounds more realistic, because the 3DO system supports Dolby stereo.

And the gameplay is superior, because the frame rate is very high-about 20 frames per second. This is especially true in the flying sequences, due to the polygonal engine: the planes are more responsive, and they move with more finesse. All in all, the 3DO version does far more justice to the artists, actors, musicians, and programmers who worked on it. All that money we spent on content really shows!"

Wing Commander III is the final installment in a trilogy chronicling a war between humans and Kilrathi invaders. As the hero, you're a mature squadron commander who's lost two carriers and countless friends in the 40-year-old war. Assigned to the TCS Victory, you deploy squadrons of starfighters in what could be the final confrontation that ends the war once and for all.

The early returns are already in on the PC version, which shipped before Christmas. Steve Honeywell of Computer Game Review calls it "a tremendous work, above and beyond anything that's been done." Other reviewers are joining the chorus. But Roberts isn't fazed. "They coined the term interactive movie' to describe Wing Commander I," he recalls. "It may have been a bit of hype back then. But this time, it's the real thing."

But wait, there's more! The newsletter also features a preview of The Need for Speed, the then-3DO exclusive racing game coming from Electronic Arts. And that preview gives some interesting details on the old story that Richard Garriott and Chris Roberts loaned their supercars to the development team to include in the game.

Now that we know Chris Roberts' car was the 1992 Ferrari 512TR (F110) and Richard Garriott's was the 1993 Lamborghini Diablo VT I thought it would be fun to look them up in the game itself. Here are their selection screens:

And, per the NFS wiki, here are their in-game models!

Finally, the NFS community has extracted the in-game videos that introduce the cars and posted them to YouTube. Here's Chris' Ferrari:

And Richard's Lambo:

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 Battle of Britain (1969) which was an inspiration for the Wing Commander movie and a historical event closely tied to Wing Commander's lore and themes! 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: An American Werewolf in Paris

Greetings WingNuts,

An American Werewolf in Paris was kind of a surprise: it really was a 'so bad it's good' style movie, which are actually a rarity! We all had a great time watching it swerve in crazy directions with awful CG werewolves and crazy jags of slapstick comedy followed by untenable gore and weird sex. A terrible movie that contained multitudes, there's no doubt! Kind of like another film we love…

We will skip some of the funny coincidences–like a character who clearly would've been played by Freddie Prinze Jr. were he available, a climatic 'here me baby, hold together' and the fact that it also concludes with the French female lead being attended to on a stretcher in favor of a couple of fascinating real connections, but there was a lot to watch for for imaginative Wng Commander fans! (I will mention one memory was that the movie came out on Christmas in 1997… a day many of us remember playing with our new copies of Wing Commander Prophecy and/or original 3Dfx cards!)

At the outset we mentioned that the big connection (beyond the production company and the tax shelter) was that this movie used the same former ammunition factory for its Gothic cathedral set as Wing Commander did for the Tiger Claw's flight deck. We weren't sure that would actually mean anything we could see on the screen… so we were pretty surprised to see how obvious it was that they were the same locations! Compare these two establishing shots (remembering that the flight deck is actually mirrored; only one side existed)!

It turns out the German BluRay of the movie contains extensive extras with almost two hours of featurettes about the making of the movie. You have to be pretty obsessed to want to watch all this but there is extensive footage (and discussion) of the cathedral set in Luxembourg!

You can also download these from the Internet Archive here and here. And if you really want to celebrate this weird movie, you can even download a Microsoft Plus theme!

According to the IMDb, Wing Commander and Werewolf share 24 below the line credits… which means there's about a 10% overlap in the crew between the two films! Here's the complete list, which you can see includes everything from second unit assistant directors to set builders to stuntpeople!

• Willem de Beukelaer - Stunts
• Roger Simonsz - Camera Operator / Director of Photography: Second Unit
• Roland Goddijn - Stunts & Special Effects Assistant
• Graham Johnston - Video Assist Operators
• Harry Wiessenhaan - Special Effects Supervisor
• Jill Robertson Kibbey - Assistant Model Maker
• Rozenn Le Pape - Production Coordinator
• Tiffany Rodenfels - Assistant Prop Electrician
• Rick Wiessenhaan - Stunt Coordinator
• Laurent Dumas - Unit Manager
• Diana Wiersma - Stunts
• Philippe Lebreton - Utility Stunts
• Claude Ludovicy - Second Unit Assistant Diector
• Guillaume De Esteban - Dresser
• Carlo Thiel - Focus Puller
• Seppe van Groeningen - Boom Operator
• Bruno Zenatello - Construction Manager
• Jean-Luc Simon - Third Assistant Editor
• Jan Bernotat - Motion Control Operator
• Martin Lader - Stunts
• Frederic Roeser - Location Assistant
• Manuel Demoulling - Stand-by Props
• Pascal Charlier - Location Manager
• Veronique Souques - Third Assistant Director

And here is the werewolf for your consideration. Could the, ah, quality of CG that a mid-budget film was capable of in 1997 be the reason the producers pushed back against Chris Roberts' desire to do the Kilrathi that way? It's cold comfort, but this may help you appreciate the rubber Kilrathi a little more!

Another aspect of the werewolf is that we occasionally get first person 'smell vision' scenes where we see out the werewolves' eyes. Wing Commander imagined and even shot such sequences for the Kilrathi, too! This is likely a coincidence, though, as the Kilrathi POV scenes appear in Wing Commander's script.

VGHF Collection: The Darkening Days Ahead

This is the third in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

Another welcome addition with the VGHF Digital Library is access to the full run of vintage US PC Gamer magazines which have been surprisingly difficult to preserve online in the past. And to show that off, what better than the September 1995 issue (Vol. 2, No. 9) which features a full page preview for "The Darkening". This article was one of a collection that came about after Electronic Arts junketed the Privateer 2 film shoot well before the game was part of the Wing Commander universe or even named Privateer (as the article's title hilariously incorrectly predicts). It also features a couple of rarely seen shots of the game's sets… these early, early previews are a great way to learn about what was once imagined for the game.

Move Over, Wing Commanders!

Origin begins production of new interactive movie

With sales of the interactive-movie extravaganza Wing Commander III topping the software charts across the globe, and production underway for Wing Commander IV, the folks at Origin Systems aren't about to give up on the interactive-movie thing anytime soon. In fact, they're preparing to launch another assault on the interactive warpath, with a project currently being developed in England.

The Darkening is being produced by 25-year-old Erin Roberts (yes, he's the brother of Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts), and it promises an even stronger mix of first-person flying action and movie-style story sequences than WCIII - with a few new twists of its own.

Set in an entirely new game universe, The Darkening boasts an impressive live-action cast, including Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter, Pulp Fiction), John Hurt (Alien, The Elephant Man), Jurgen Prochnow (Das Boot, Body of Evidence), and David Warner (Star Trek VI). Filling out the cast are Clive Owen, Amanda Pays, Brian Blessed, David McCallum and Mathilda May.

The Darkening tells the story of Lev Arris, who awakens from cryogenic sleep with a case of amnesia and a handful of shady characters out to kill him. Taking control of Arris, the player will interact with 50 characters and fly any of 16 different ships between eight fully-realized planets.

Roberts has designed a darkly complex new setting from the ground up. Open-ended gameplay lets you choose your own path through The Darkening's story: you can take flight as a mild-mannered trader (with the aid of wingmen to fight off enemies, of course); merely fly around and blast people in your way; or play private detective using e-mail, public records, and word-of-mouth to work your way to the game's surprise ending.

"The technology we're using makes Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger look like a dinosaur," said Roberts, whose $5 million budget is one of the largest ever for a computer game (Wing Commander IV is rumored to be close to $7 or $8 million).

To be specific, the game's two and a half hours of movie sequences are being shot on 16mm film, which will be translated to CD-ROM via Digital Beta, a new format that Roberts says is far superior to the Beta SP format used for Wing III. The Darkening will also use a stripped-down SVGA graphics engine, more compact and faster than the one used in Wing Commander III.

The Darkening began filming in May under the direction of Steve Hilliker of London's Nelson Films. The footage is being shot at England's Pinewood Studios, home to the James Bond films. The game is scheduled for release early next year.

CAPTIONS

John Hurt makes his multimedia debut in The Darkening as Joe the Bartender. Let's hope he doesn't have to relive that stomach-bursting scene from Alien.

Production for Origin's newest interactive adventure/sim, The Darkening, is being done at Pinewood Studios, the same studio that brought us many of the James Bond films.

The cinematic style of storytelling that was used in Wing Commander III takes a strange new turn in The Darkening.

VGHF Collection: The Borst Around

This is the second in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

There's a lot here to enjoy but one fact that was totally new to me was that the mention that they originally intended Wing Commander IV to feature a first person mission which would've played like DooM. It's a good bet that was the plan for the Black Lance infiltration that kicks off Act 3… but the limited timetable for the game forced them to abandon the idea.

DESIGN AND STORY: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE WING COMMANDER SERIES

by Terry Borst, co-writer, Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV

Koyaanisqatsi: Game Out of Balance

How many times have you looked at a game and thought: "Great graphics, but the story and dialogue really sucked"? How often have you played a game and thought: "Story's cool, but all they did is substitute mouse clicks for page turns -- I should just be reading this"? Far too often, one creative element of an interactive entertainment dominates the others, when they should be blending together to create a kick-ass joyride or an intellectually and emotionally rewarding experience.

White Noise and Useless Clutter

In the predictable backlash against the use of Full Motion Video (FMV), a school of thought has arisen that writers were never really necessary to the art of creating great interactive entertainment, and in fact got in the way of it -- as if it was the writer's fault when linear video clips were poorly integrated into gameplay (everyone else, presumably, was just standing around with his hands in his pockets).

In fact, FMV vs. 3D Graphics is a False Issue. If not a single frame of video is ever used again, the points to be raised in the following paragraphs will be equally valid. Other pseudo-oppositions include "story games" vs. "environment games", "twitch games" VS. "interactive movies", server-side vs. client-side (i.e., Web VS. CD-ROM), and so on. Writing and Design need to shake each other's hand, early and often, in all these modes.

A Quick Case Study

Part 1: Wing Commander III

In WING COMMANDER III, creator and designer Chris Roberts was making a number of technological leaps, including the implementation of a new gaming engine and the introduction of extensive FMV into the successful franchise. WING COMMANDER is an interactive entertainment designed for a broad audience: a flight-sim game aimed at players who aren't hard-core air-combat junkies.

Simply because of the learning curve associated with such an ambitious undertaking, the screenwriters (Frank De Palma and myself) were brought in very late in the development process. Missions had already been designed and the player interface was already in place. The screenplay that developed the narrative (a story of the Confederation in its darkest days in the galactic war with the Kilrathi) became an overlay on the basic game design.

While the screenplay allowed the player to shuffle around the video segments that he/she viewed, and guide some of the interpersonal relationships (which would also tweak the mission AI -- the pilot on your wing would perform better or worse depending on your interactions with him), the video segments could impinge only peripherally on the space combat itself. Aside from the basic shoot-em-up, the missions themselves weren't really interactive. Thus, decision points were offered in the video segments that required emotional (or at least entertainment) decisions -- but these emotional decisions rarely had a payoff in winning or losing a mission. Conversely, little such decision-making subtlety was offered in the missions: shoot or be shot was the choice, pretty much a no-brainer.

In addition, occasional cheats were inflicted on the gameplay to service the narrative -- the most glaring being the famous Behemoth cheat, where it was absolutely impossible for the player to destroy a ship (thus violating the basic precepts of the flying and shooting environment) because its destruction was required for future story and gaming elements to work.

Part 2: Wing Commander IV

WING COMMANDER IV had a crushing production schedule and a daunting task: top WING COMMANDER III and do it in a year.

There were a couple of things on the side of the development team, however: the gaming engine would be the same, and the player interface and basic elements of the franchise would remain.

In addition, the screenwriters (again, De Palma and myself) were brought in at the beginning of the project, with everyone's goal being to better weave together the gaming and narrative elements.

An initial challenge was to create an entirely new conflict: new antagonists for the player/Col. Blair alterego. What do you do for an encore after you've won the Galactic War and vanquished the enemy? (It's no secret that WING COMMANDER is influenced by "Star Wars"; but I'll point out that even George Lucas has dodged this challenge, and is now making PREQUELS to the famous trilogy. We're rather proud of having tackled this head-on.)

Because the interface and gaming engine were already in place, a traditional Design Document elaborating these elements wasn't really necessary. After discussing basic story- drive and game-drive with designer Chris Roberts for several weeks, we developed an 80- page treatment that "beat out" the storyline, the narrative branches, linear scenes and decision-points within those scenes, and bare-bones mission concepts.

We then spent 3 long (but very productive) days in a conference room with the designer, art director, project manager, and gaming programmers, fleshing out the design of each mission and trying to marry design and narrative as much as we possibly could in the limited time we had. I believe that the writers contributed to even more inventive and richer missions, while the programmers and artists contributed to stronger and more interactive narrative.

The result was both better gaming and better drama, resulting in a more affecting interactive experience. A few examples...

Narrative could now be interwoven into the fabric of the missions themselves. Decision-points were required mid-mission that went beyond simple shoot-or-die reflexes: choices to be made to rescue A or confiscate B, to proceed to planet X or asteroid Y, to move now or wait 60 seconds, and so on. Audio was now as important as video in providing cues and directing traffic, further immersing the player in the experience.

The player was offered the choice to switch sides on more than one occasion, and this affected the player's homebase (what ship he was flying from), choice of wingmen, ships, weaponry, etc.

The player could even design his own missions on a limited basis, choose which mission to fly from a slate of missions, and even which goals to pursue on the mission (ideally enriching the repeat-play experience).

As always in production environments, some of the best ideas don't make it into the finished product. At one time, a Doom-like sequence was going to be woven into the game, taking WING COMMANDER into an entirely new direction. The logistics of integrating this sequence into the WING COMMANDER franchise, given the production schedule, proved its undoing.

WING COMMANDER IV hardly approached perfection in the marriage of story and design. But I think there is little question that the gaming is a more satisfactory experience because the writers and programmers were on the same page from the beginning of production.

Getting Paradigmatic

WING COMMANDER is a very particular type of game, and it may be tempting to dismiss these experiences as Singular, and not relating to your CD-ROM, DVD, or Web project. In fact, these lessons can be applied to any entertainment project in any medium. Wouldn't you agree that "Twister" would have been just a little better if someone had spent time on (or even cared about) the screenplay? Sure, the graphics were cool, but the cardboard characters and cliched dialogue and situations.

If you think about it, it's television that provides some of the most affecting entertainment experiences you might have these days. Whether it's "Larry Sanders" or "Frasier" or "NYPD Blue" or "X-Files", what they all have in common is that a writer is onboard from the conception of the show.

Nor does this apply only to original material. For better or worse, the greenlight is also given to developing existing or "repurposed" franchises. That's a fact of the marketplace. But an example of clever repurposing is the TOY STORY ANIMATED STORYBOOK. It would have been easy to simply "re-do" the movie and put in a few games. Instead, the writers and designers together decided to re-imagine the story from the point-of-view of a peripheral character, and to design games that interweaved both the player's psychological concerns and the motifs of the movie, enriching the finished product.

The Web itself, and its struggles to emerge as an entertainment medium, offer a final object lesson. As this is being written, Microsoft is downsizing its MSN entertainment content development: its "shows" are not drawing an audience. American Cybercast is in bankruptcy court, and online soaps also appear to be a novelty item. Why are these things happening? I would argue that it's because each mini-genre lacks something in the interactive medium known as The Web. The online soaps had some narrative, but lacked interesting design and interactivity for its participants. The MSN shows have gaming elements, but lack content, narrative, and emotional pull. One is yin, the other yang.

It'll take more than bandwidth to marry the two: it will always take a conscious effort, and something more than lip service to the concept.

Techno-Fashions and the Grail

A few years ago it was CD-ROM, then 3D graphics, then the Web. DVD's next, and there will continue to be new technologies and delivery systems. As entertainment creators, however, hardware and bandwidth is beside the point. It's a matter of understanding the key elements of creative development for interactive media.

The holy grail is melding design and story to the point where you can't tell where one stops and the other picks up. Design is story, story design. I'm not sure I'm going to see this in my lifetime, but the excitement is in trying to achieve it.

VGHF Launches Digital Library / Party Like It's E3 1999

The Video Game History Foundation has launched an impressive new initiative that aims to help out anyone interested in video game history… and you'd better believe that means us! The VGHF's new Digital Archive offers an impressive collection of preserved media that anyone can access without jumping through any hoops! They've got hundreds of issues of gaming magazines like PC Gamer alongside an impressive amount of inside baseball content like promotional CDs and GDC-related publications… and it sounds like that collection is just going to grow. You can read more about the effort in their launch announcement or access the collection yourself here!

Before we look at our first library item, we'll share that we (accidentally) had a very small part in this project! The folks in charge of the VGHF were recently kind enough to help investigate a pair of tapes that I had acquired from a collection of material found in a former Origin employee's garage. One was labeled Ultima VII and the other Special Operations 2. Unfortunately they weren't able to recover anything from the Wing Commander tape but the Ultima ones contained the source recordings for the Guardian's dialogue from Ultima VII: The Black Gate (you know, the guy that flung the Avatar past the Tiger's Claw in Super Wing Commander)! It's pretty fun to listen to and amazing that such a thing could be recovered today. You can access the VGHF entry for the tape here. (And if you are a data backup whiz, drop us a line about that other tape!)

Here's the recording itself. You can download a copy of the source file here.

With that out of the way, we thought we'd start by looking at something from the library's impressive collection of industry material: a biography of Chris Roberts printed in the 1999 E3 Directory. This would've been the little booklet they handed out at the trade show that introduced everyone appearing on panels; this would all be digital today. E3 '99 was held from May 13 to 15th in Los Angeles and Roberts appeared on a panel called "Computer Animations - Are We Talking Again?" which discussed the rise of 3D accelerator cards for gaming. This would've been just as he was changing focus from the Wing Commander film to Freelancer but it's most interesting in the history of Wing Commander for the rare sales numbers it includes!

Chris Roberts
CEO & Co-founder, Digital Anvil

Chris became one of England's best-known game designers and by 1987 had three #1 hits in the United Kingdom: "Match Day", "Wiz Adore" and "Stryker's Run". Prior to founding Digital Anvil, Chris Roberts was Vice President of New Technology at Origin Systems, Inc. as well as Executive Producer for Origin's parent company, Electronic Arts. Roberts' first project during his eight year tenure at Origin was "Times of Lore", which hit #1 on Ingram's Best-Seller List in 1988. He followed that achievement with "Bad Blood", a post-holocaust role-playing game in 1990. His next project, "Wing Commander", skyrocketed to the top of the charts, where it remains today. Chris was instrumental in Origin's growth from a $4 million a year company to nearly $50 million in 1995. His "Wing Commander" product line has accounted for more than 60% of Origin's revenues for the past five years, and has generated over $110 million since its creation. To date, "Wing Commander III" has generated over $30 million in revenue, making it the most profitable single title in Electronic Arts' history. Chris also directed the feature film "Wing Commander", based on his best-selling game series. It opened nationwide on March 12th.

Wing Commander Movie Night: Battle of Britain

The Wing Commander movie club had a surprisingly fun time watching An American Werewolf in Paris. It wasn't a good movie but it was a good time... and that's really what we need these days! You'll also be surprised at how obvious the Wing Commander connection is when the after action report comes out. But this week we're heading back to World War II with what is probably going to be our final movie about the RAF: 1969's Battle of Britain. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Battle of Britain is a war movie covering the 1940 Battle of Britain (well, duh). The battle pitted the outnumbered but courageous RAF against the might of the German Luftwaffe as heroic fighter pilots desperately fought to defend their homes from Nazi bombers. The movie was lauded for its spectacular flying sequences; the story itself is less a character piece and more a Longest Day-style anthology that covers the entire event.

Our Wing Commander connection isn't so well explained, however obvious the ties to a classic film about heroic fighter pilots might be. Our choice for including this film in movie club sources back to a quote from Chris Roberts about the movie which appears in the production notes, on the official website and in the liner notes with the original edition of the DVD:

"WING COMMANDER is a hard-core war movie set in space. In some ways, it has more in common with Midway and Battle of Britain than with a science fiction film," he adds. "It has lots of effects and combat scenes, all of which serve the characters and story. I wanted to make a film about people under the incredible tension of battle."

Beyond that, we do have a few small historical character connections to the actual Battle of Britain! Particularly, Fleet Action reveals that Admiral Tolwyn has multiple family connections to the battle:

"I am not a politician, I am a warrior, following in the thousand year tradition of my family who served in the ancient navy, army, and air force of Britain and the space forces of the Confederation. My family has seen the best of those moments, proud of the memory of six Victoria Crosses in our past. Tolwyns served at Waterloo, on the Somme, in the Battle of Britain, at Minsk and the siege of London and shed their blood heavily in this latest war. We have seen the best and we have endured the worst, and sir, I fear that this decision might very well produce the most disastrous defeat in the history of the human race, and perhaps even spell its eventual annihilation."

Towards the end of the book, he mentions another, unexpected family connection to the battle: "He thought for a moment of a distant ancestor... who... announced that even if England fell, the Empire, and with it the fleet, would still continue the fight." This is referring to Prime Minister Winston Churchill's defiant 'we shall fight them on the beaches' speech given during the battle... which will surely be seen in the film!

But Tolwyn isn't the only character with ancestors who faced off against the Luftwaffe: Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander Prophecy notes that Lieutenant Anderon, the Midway's friendly comm officer, traces his family's lineage back to an officer who served in the battle. And while there's no real 'Tolwyn', there was a real Anderson: Squadron Leader Michael Anderson, a Beaufighter squadron leader and a heroic member of "the few".

1st Lieutenant Liam Anderson

Anderson (he never uses his first name socially) can trace his line back to an RAF pilot who helped fight off the Blitzkrieg. Military service (as officers, never enlisted) is simply some- thing the Andersons have always done (Some of the more fanciful family histories trace the line right past the world wars of the 20'^' century and all the way back to a knight who fought in the Norman Conquest.) The Anderson family history is a study in British modera- tion — never seriously poor, and never inconveniently rich. In military service the line is unmarked by either cowards or heroes. It's not surprising that an Anderson should go through four years at the Academy, then opt to become a communications officer rather than a fighter pilot.

To most of his shipmates, Anderson is simply a calming voice talking them quietly through the necessities of flight, whether they involve a pirate ambush or a routine landing. In per- son, Anderson is much like he is on the comm screen — cool, pleasant, competent. He has made vague references to having a fiancee waiting back home, but other than that his post- service plans and ambitions remain a mystery to his shipmates.

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

Battle of Brtain is currently available to stream for free on YouTube! It is also available on free services including Pluto and Hoopla and availabe for rent or purchase on all the standard services. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on BluRay in 2008 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!

GOG Sale Ending Soon, Check Out Their Dreamlist

We Found the Champion

Last year, we reported about the discovery of the original stock photo behind Blair's pinup in the Wing Commander movie. Today, we've discovered another one: meet... "The Champion!". He's the figure who appears on one of the pinup posters in the Tiger's Claw's lounge in the Wing Commander movie, most visible behind Maniac just after the pulsar jump.

To create the prop they placed him in front of a Confederation logo along with text that reads CHAMPION with an additional text bock at the bottom. It's obscured but it looks like his name ends in 'PACHO' and then there's text that partially reads MARTIAL ARTS and 2653 below him. Most interesting of all, the graphics department seems to have added a Kilrathi text tattoo to the stock photo model's bicep!