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!