Jerry Pournelle Defeats the Kilrathi, Soviets

Here's a neat discovery courtesy of a brief memory someone mentioned on BlueSky. A documentary where Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven played Wing Commander? It sounded too specific not to be real and sure enough, a quick search revealed that the pair appeared in the second episode ("To The Brink of Eternity") of a 1992 British documentary called Pandora's Box.

The documentary itself is about much heavier things than Wing Commander and Pournelle and Niven are appearing not as science fiction authors but because of their involvement in proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars") to the Reagan administration. But as part of their interview, the film crew captured Pournelle very eagerly playing Wing Commander to use as coverage. Here's that clip:

It's worth noting that based on the ship flown (Rapier), the skybox objects (red nebula, blue planet) and the progression of enemy ships (a Gratha followed by Salthi with a Fralthi) that he is clearly playing the second mission in the Venice series… approaching the last mission of the game! That's because in addition to his writing and his work on SDI, Jerry Pournelle was a very early advocate for Wing Commander. He repeatedly mentioned his love of the game in his BYTE column, Tales from Chaos Manor. He was at one time assigned to co-author the third Wing Commander novel which was intended to be a story about the destruction of the Tiger's Claw. Pournelle died in 2017. And here's Larry Niven, namesake of Wing Commander II's Niven System and the ostensible creator of the Kilrathi, who seems to have been watching his friend and co-author play the original Wing Commander between takes.

The entire episode has been posted on YouTube or if you are in the UK it is available on iPlayer. We've archived a copy here (714 meg).