Ride or Die

Back in April 1999, a company called Showscan announced that it was developing a Wing Commander motion simulator "ride film" under license from Digital Anvil. Unfortunately, the film never materialized and no one has ever come forward to tell the story behind it… though we do know that it was in active development for months! You can see the original press release that we reported twenty six years ago here.

I routinely trawl places like LinkedIn and the Internet Archive to see if I can find anything from the project (which we do know was in active development for at least four months and possibly for as long as a year before Showscan went into administration). I haven't found anything from Showscan directly but I did recently come across a pretty fun bit of ephemera: a news report from the July 1999 issue of GamePro covering the Showscan announcement that features a cartoon of a roller coaster being ridden by Street Fighter and Wing Commander characters!

While Wing Commander never happened, the Street Fighter II ride announced alongside it did! You can watch a copy here to get an idea of what the Wing Commander presentation might have looked like: