How They Grounded the Bird

Have you ever wondered why the original Wing Commander's cheat code is referred to as the "finger of death"? Sure, you use your fingers to activate it… but that's also how pretty much every cheat code that exists works. There's a little bit more to the story than you would expect: the term actually goes back to the game's original Quality Assurance team and it's based on a feature cut from the game!

Wait, what? That's right, at one point Wing Commander had a second animated hand in the cockpit. The design was that you would see your 'left' hand react to certain events in combat. If you scored a kill you would make a fist and when your wingman scored you would give them a thumbs up. Here's the original art assignment from the game's production schedule, assigning the task of digitizing the hand artwork to Daniel Bourbonnais.

What does that have to do with the cheat code? As a joke, the team replaced the 'fist' emote with one giving the middle finger. So every time the testers had to 'alt delete' through a level to check something doing so would trigger the finger art over and over and over. Thus the cheat code became known as finger of death! It was ultimately decided that the left arm was too busy and distracting… but it was cut late enough that the animations still appear in the game's files! Here are both hands; note that they have blue sleeves rather than the red ones used in the final game (we recolored the mockup above to match the final art).