RIP Dilbert

Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, passed away earlier this week. Mr. Adams had become quite a crank over the years and precious few people are mourning his passing... but we can take the occasion to mourn our youth! No matter how we might want to deny it today, Dilbert was a massive part of the pop culture of the early 1990s that produced Wing Commander. And the comic inspired the development of the series several times!

Dilbert began in 1989 and reached the height of its popularity in the early 1990s. The strip lampooned white collar office work and was celebrated by tortured engineers and creatives around the world for capturing exactly how they felt about their pointy haired bosses. Fridges, cubicles and offices everywhere sported favorite Dilbert strips... and Origin Systems was not immune. Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander III describes art director Chris Douglas' office's 1990s pop culture ephemra, complete with printed Dilbert comics on the door:

Chris has decked his door with "Dilbert” comic strips that he downloaded from the Internet, and his walls are hung with Maxfield Parrish posters. Compared to the other people on the Wing 3 team, however, the interior of his office is fairly uncluttered. Besides his PC and SGI there is only the black television that he uses to play tapes from his collection of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a comfortable chair, two strings of blue and purple origami cranes and thirty-four miniature Star Trek spaceships. "When I was a kid, I would have given anything for some of the toys they have out now,” he confides. "I’m pretty bitter about how empty my childhood was when today kids can get all sorts of neat stuff. . . now I just wish they’d come out with some Babylon 5 ships.”

The game itself confirms the inspiration by specifically listing Dilbert among the inspirations saved in its hidden quotes file!

TEAM INSPIRATION
X-Com; People On Fire; Two-Fisted John Woo Action; Doom II; Dilbert ; Simpsons; More Doom; Seinfeld; Net Doom; Star Trek (so sue us)

... and Wing Commander Armada, developed simultaneously, even has a star system named DILBURT! It's in Sector 6 of the campaign mode (DILBURT can also appear in randomly generated Armada maps).

And here's a copy of Wing Commander producer Warren Spector's 1996 bookmark file which includes, of course, the Dilbert Zone:

And the team's love of Dilbert continued through the development of Wing Commander Prophecy! When producers distributed the weekly component manager meeting notes (what we'd call a leads meeting today) he included a weekly Dilbert:

Finally: in 1997, Electronic Arts decided to eliminate Origin's crack creative services department, the part of the company responsible for published material like box designs and game manuals. The team, commanded by the great David Ladyman, opted to reform as an outside group offering its services to the entire industry... including the Wing Commander team. They would go on to develop the Wing Commander Prophecy guide and documentation, the Confederation Handbook for the movie and even manuals and subscriber magazines for Chris Roberts' Star Citizen! Ladyman and crew named their company Incan Monkey God Studios after a joke from a specific Dilbet strip. The company still maintains a website which includes the history of the name:

Our Name

And just what IS an Incan monkey god, you ask? What being has fostered our devotion? The force of which we speak emanated deep from within a delirious mind, when one of our own fell into the dreaded Stupor of Wordlessness. Finally, haggard and uninspired, he sought out ethereal counseling. With the help of the Incan Monkey God, he emerged victorious, manuscript in hand.

Imagine a cartoon below…

Panel 1

Dilbert greets Tim and comments on his haggard appearance.

Tim comments that he hasn’t slept for five days because he’s been trying to finish a manuscript.

Panel 2

Here, Tim confides that he overcame his mental block with the help of the Incan monkey god.

Panel 3

Lucky break, says Dilbert.

Now, says Tim, he has to translate the resulting material into something legible.

The above text summarizes the Dilbert cartoon that led to the name for Incan Monkey God Studios. Sadly, for legal reasons, we do not have permission to display the strip here. If you want to see the original strip, click here.

We are not actually aware that the Incans had any monkey gods; the only monkey god we’ve ever heard of was first imagined by Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams. However, we certainly relate to Tim when we’re up against a deadline, especially at those times when the material has to be written before the game code we’re describing has been created.