The Wing Commander Discography

A stately conductor stands before an orchestra three rows deep. The planet Venice, the Kilrathi capital of the Vega Sector, looms overhead. He raises his baton…

From the very first visual of the very first game, the deep connection between music and Wing Commander was clear… even to PC speaker users! Over the years, the Wing Commander franchise repeatedly pushed forward the public's expectation for what is now called 'VGM' and considered its own respected genre of music. The series would eventually come to host a rogues gallery of top composers and other musicians: George "The Fat Man" Sanger, Nenad Vugrinec, George Oldziey, Alexander van Bubenheim, Cobalt 60, David Arnold and Kevin Kiner… and a dozen others.

Today, Supercade is trying to bring George Oldziey's Wing Commander Orchestral Music Recording Project out as a deluxe vinyl record. You can learn more and back that project on IndieGoGo. The project will be Wing Commander's first vinyl record ever released… but it's not the first album! Over the years, Wing Commander's varied music (and music inspired by Wing Commander) has contributed to nearly thirty different commercially released albums!

In honor of the crowdfunding campaign, we've put together a brief history of Wing Commander albums from 1991 to 2023. From true rarities like the original ORIGIN Soundtrack to obscure compilations including the Prophecy theme it's all here! Consider this one part collector's guide and one part fascinating history of our favorite series. We hope the next time this is updated that it's because we've added Supercade's project to our record shelves!

ORIGIN Soundtrack

ORIGIN Soundtrack was the very first album with Wing Commander music ever released [but not the first album of Origin music! See appendix. - ed]. It contains two tracks of Wing Commander music, a total of seven pieces from the original game and eleven from Wing Commander II. The tracks are recorded from an MT-32, providing a quality far above what most players were familiar with at the time. The record was created by Origin's audio guru Martin Galway in 1991 as a marketing giveaway and sold to the public (but never advertised!) via phone orders. Roughly 500 copies were printed and they appear for sale only rarely today, always commanding hundreds of dollars.

Whether the album existed at all was an open question for many years. By the late 1990s, ORIGIN Soundtrack (typically referred to as Origin Audio CD Vol. 1) was thought to be a myth on the order of Bigfoot. While it was listed in Ultima collecting-related resources there was no evidence anywhere truly confirming its existence beyond the fact that Origin had numbered other albums two and three. That all changed in 2003 when Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum acquired the first confirmed example from a used computer equipment store in Virginia. Since then, a small amount of unsold stock has surfaced on eBay and several ex-Origin employees have sold copies to the public. (For collectors seeking to authenticate, there was never a back insert.)

Signature Sounds

In 1993, Electronic Arts was eager to show off the impressive library of intellectual property they had acquired purchasing Origin Systems. Signature Sounds, a 1993 album featuring thirty one pieces from different Electronic Arts titles, includes tracks representing a number of different Origin games including a montage of combat music from Privateer (Nenad Vugrinec) and the Super Wing Commander opening theme (Joe Basquez). Like ORIGIN Soundtrack, Signature Sounds was primarily given away at trade shows and other marketing events. Unlike its cousin, it was produced in sufficient numbers so as to be relatively easy to locate today.

ORIGIN Audio CD Volume 3

ORIGIN Audio CD Volume 3 was Origin Systems' second in-house record featuring music from Wing Commander and other properties [see Appendix for information about Volume 2 - ed]. The compilation was put together for a very important part of gaming and Wing Commander history: the 'Premiere Edition' of Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. Available only through Electronic Arts directly, the $100 Premiere Edition includes a copy of Fleet Action, a making of VHS, a calendar, a metal film canister-shaped package, a t-shirt and more. It was the direct ancestor of the modern "collectors edition" and the inclusion of the soundtrack CD is something many companies have replicated over the years. The record includes music from Wing Commander III, Super Wing Commander and Privateer, as well as other Origin titles like Wings of Glory. Collectors take note: there were two separate pressings of the album, one for the United States and one for Europe. Other than minor differences to the stock numbers on the disc the releases are identical.

Wing Commander Prophecy Original Soundtrack

In 1997, things got a little weird! Hoping to reinvent the series, Electronic Arts encouraged the team developing Wing Commander V (later Wing Commander Prophecy) to kill their darlings and go against established elements of the series wherever possible. One of these creative choices was to hire a music act named Cobalt 60 to develop music for the game's gameplay sequences. Instead of the traditional Star Wars-inspired orchestral music, Cobalt 60, fresh off contributing music to Command and Conquer, would produce an electronic-industrial tracks that would heat the blood during the game's intense combat sequences. The band members, Jean-Luc de Meyer and Dominique Lallement (both better known for their main project, Front 242), traveled to Austin to record the music using only vintage computer equipment. As part of the deal, the band's German record label, Edel, would put out a Wing Commander Prophecy soundtrack CD.

Then, the creatives got cold feet. Wing Commander III and IV composer George Oldziey was brought back to score the game's cutscenes and then to develop interactive music for the flight sequences that would ultimately replace the Cobalt 60 track. In the end, Cobalt 60's music appeared only as implied-to-be diegetic music in the game's simulator pod… something many players never even touched! It would go on to be reused as the main score for the next game released, 1998s Wing Commander Secret Ops. None of this dismayed Edel's marketing machine. The company was a fervent believer in compilation releases that would promote their entire catalog together and the desire to continue to do that with cool Wing Commander Prophecy artwork proved to be very, very strong: at least eleven albums have connections back to their Prophecy OST!

In the late 1990s, "Original Soundtracks" for films were increasingly not even related to movies themselves. Rather than symphonic scores, popular releases like the Mortal Kombat soundtrack instead featured one or two singles plus thematically linked music from a variety of popular acts… each of whom would happily sell you a CD of their own! Edel's flagship Wing Commander Prophecy Original Soundtrack took this model exactly, including just two Cobalt 60 songs from the game ('s simulator mode) and filling the rest of the list with songs from other industrial acts Edel represented such as Rammstein and Fear Factory. Three of the songs from other groups were said to be 'inspired by Wing Commander Prophecy' while the rest were simply licensed from other releases. Remember this, as it will be important shortly! Three official versions of the soundtrack are known to exist from different local labels in the United States, Canada and Germany. The biggest difference between these is that the US and Canadian covers put KMFDM first while Germany chose Rammstein as they were more popular in the region. The album was also released on cassette in Poland (and in bootleg form elsewhere including Romania, Russia and Thailand).

Spinoffs - Cobalt 60

But the compilation grind cuts both ways: from there, Edel published Cobalt 60's Wing Commander Prophecy music on a grand total of five other releases! The most interesting of these is Wing Commander Prophecy Theme The Clubmixes, a 1997 release given away to German industrial club DJs. The disc contains multiple unique remixes of the Wing Commander Prophecy theme which are available nowhere else. The artwork is truly spectacular as well, with a neat transparent disc effect that makes it look like an irregularly-sized Lamprey shield killer is spinning in your CD player!

A second 'single', Wing Commander Prophecy Theme (TerminalMix), was released as a pack-in with the American Wing Commander Prophecy Special Edition. Released in a nearly identical package to the main SKU and available only in Sam's Club stores, the Special Edition was something of a hidden treasure (though it comes up not infrequently for sale today). While the disc lacks the cool transparent effect, the art is an awesome rendering of the Kraken cap-ship killer.

The year also saw the title track included on the May issue of Edel's monthly sampler, Edelstück.

In 1998, Cobalt 60 released their next (and to date final) studio album, Twelve. Edel released a special version of the album with a bonus disc that contained three Prophecy tracks (and one other song). In addition to Prophecy (TerminalMix) and Darwin Was Right, the Twelve bonus CD is the only physical release of "Galactic Hives". It can be hard to determine from online listings, so make sure the copy you buy has a second disc. Sealed copies should have a blue sticker on the cover.

Finally, in 1999, another Edel series, The Gothic Compilation, released the ninth in their series which included Cobalt 60's "Darwin Was Right". The cover art is horrifying but there's something extremely satisfying imagining nineties Goths listening to a Wing Commander song.

Spinoffs - Music Inspired by Wing Commander Prophecy

But that's not all! Recall that the Wing Commander Prophecy Original Soundtrack included music said to be inspired by the game. Those tracks went on to reappear in several other places as well (and in one case years later with a significant update!). Grouped by group:

German electronic group Das Ich provided a track on the WCP OST called "The Awakening". The Awakening was originally a song called Krieger with new lyrics in English instead of German… lyrics, we assume, inspired by the intense single player combat of Wing Commander Prophecy. For many years it was believed that The Awakening had never been released on another album… until we discovered that it had been renamed 'The Warrior' (a literal translation of Krieger). The song appeared on the group's 2003 compilation album Relikt and then again on a 2011 re-release of their 1998 Egodram which added it on a second disc of rarities.

Project Pitchfork, unrelated to the Star Citizen effort, provided a song called Gravitation Zero to the WCP OST. Gravitation Zero was re-released in 1998 on an EP called Carnival (regular and expanded versions exist) and then again in 2003 on the compilation release Collector: Fireworks & Colorchange.

Die Krupps, the third group, provided The Vampire Strikes Back which… is pretty fun if you're imagining flying around in an F-109 Vampire while you listen. The band did not release the song again in the 1990s and instead held off until 2015 to include an updated version on an album release, V - Metal Machine Music. A second disc of bonus music included with album also republishes the original version… and there's even a box set version that comes with a pair of fingerless black gloves! The group actually spoke about the song's video game origins during press for the record which was frankly extremely cool.

Spinoffs - Music NOT Inspired by Wing Commander Prophecy

Last and strangest of these connected albums is the case of Bravo ScreenFun Hits, a compilation of game music released in 1999 as a pack-in with Germany's Bravo ScreenFun magazine. The case promises music from Wing Commander Prophecy, the booklet features art of ships from the game… and the track listing tells us that's because it includes Brooklyn Bounce's The Theme (Of Progressive Attack). A popular song, to be sure, but not one that has anything to do with Wing Commander Prophecy… except legally, since it was included on the Wing Commander Prophecy Original Soundtrack and then sublicensed for this release. A second volume in the Bravo ScreenFun Hits series was released in 2000 but it did not include any Wing Commander music (but then of course neither did the first!).

The Movie

There's plenty of criticism of the Wing Commander movie to go around… but whenever geeks get together and mention the film, there IS one thing they agree on: the music was perfect. And it should've been! David Arnold, the mind behind the theme, was a veteran of top film scores and Kevin Kiner, his then-protege who composed the rest of the album, has since shot to the top of the industry. Sonic Images Records released the Wing Commander - Original Soundtrack on CD in 1999 to plenty of acclaim. It remains a favorite today but there's more music in the movie that has not been released; we remain hopeful for a longer version of the score someday!

Since the release of the movie, David Arnold's spectacular theme has appeared in a number of other places. The first of these was a 2006 five-disc collection called Top Shelf Library from FOX Music. In addition to being a wonderful collection of movie music, Top Shelf Library is a collection of production music: pieces that can be licensed (then from FOX) for use in other productions. Production licensing is done digitally now but copies of Top Shelf Library remain readily available.

But that's not all! In recent years, the Wing Commander theme has become a favorite of none other than The Band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines! That's right, the United Kingdom's military has performed the Wing Commander theme on multiple occasions… including in front of royalty at the Mountbatten Festival of Music in 2017! They have released two albums that contain performances: The Mountbatten Festival of Music 2017 and Beating Retreat 2018. The former was also available on DVD.

The Fatman & Team Fat

Since the closure of Origin Systems, two of the series' original composers have released tracks from the game on their own. George "The Fatman" Sanger and his group of collaborators, Team Fat, maintain ownership of some of their music for Wing Commander I (Wing Commander II was contracted differently) and have been able to make several releases. In 2000, The Fatman provided a live track of Team Fat performing a surf theme version of Wing Commander's main fanfare. The track was recorded at a trade show but it first appeared in print in a pretty appropriate place: on the album Water Logged, a promotional effort by Austin radio station KFJC. The fourth in an annual series of surf albums, Water Logged is one of the rarest and most unusual albums with a Wing Commander piece!

Mr. Sanger also provided the same track to a group of Amiga enthusiasts in 2011 who put out a double album called Immortal 4 which is full of songs from different games that appeared on the Amiga. Don't tell them that Mark Knight actually redid the Wing Commander score for that version of the game!

Most exciting but sadly only digitally, The Fat Man has published two albums of the complete Wing Commander score. Wing One appeared in 2007 and an updated version, Wing Commander I Complete Original Soundtrack - MT-32 Archival Edition, released in 2022.

George Oldziey

Wing Commander III, IV and Prophecy composer George Oldziey has released three Wing Commander albums of his own over the years, including the Orchestral Music Recording Project now being crowd funded for release on vinyl. His first is one of the most obscure and challenging to find: Music from the Wing Commander Universe was published in 1998 as a promotional release for Daylight Productions, a company made up of former Origin employees who would be doing work tied to the company (including the DVD conversions of two Wing Commander games).

In 2015, Mr. Oldziey successfully crowdfunded an opportunity to re-record music from Wing Commander III using a live orchestra. The result was The Wing Commander Orchestral Music Recording Project, a wonderful collection of reorchestrated Wing Commander III, IV and Prophecy music.

A second crowdfund resulted in 2019's Wing Commander: The Jazz Album, an EP of sorts which recorded the various jazz pieces that he had written for the TCS Victory's lounge in Wing Commander III. Once you think about them you'll be humming all day!

The Heck?

And we will end this catalog with a really weird one: the 2000 Velvet Acid Christ album Twisted Thought Generator includes a hidden second album called Dimension 8. Dimension 8 was recorded years earlier and never released and the odd connection is that it samples, of all things, Super Wing Commander.

Appendix - Related Albums

Origin Audio CD Volume 2

While the story behind ORIGIN Soundtrack was unknown to the fandom for many years, the story of Origin Audio CD Volume 2, formally Origin Soundtrack Series The Music of Ultima VII and Strike Commander, is a familiar one. Origin's 1992 release, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, included a series of jokes at the end of its credit scroll. The general idea was that it had all the same disclaimers as a big movie production: no animals were harmed in the making of this picture, the producers would like to thank so-and-so and so on. And one of these was "Soundtrack CD available from Origin". The team intended it as a joke but after the game was released the company's customer service found they were getting lots of calls asking to buy the made up soundtrack! For the release of Ultima VII, Part 2: Serpent Isle, marketing made the joke a reality with a commercial CD of Ultima and Strike Commander music. It's a wonderful record that just doesn't have any Wing Commander on it!

Other Origin Systems-related albums

Yes! Music from several non-Wing Commander IPs has appeared over the years. The very first was 1987's Ultima Mix, a Japanese release containing remixes of Tsugutoshi Goto's Ultima Exodus NES score. This was also the first vinyl record ever to include Origin music! It was also available on CD and cassette. In 1999, Origin included an Ultima IX-only soundtrack with the Dragon Edition of Ultima Ascension. An updated version with additional tracks was published commercially as Original Music from Ultima IX: Ascension - The Enhanced CD. In 2020, Limited Run Games released a stunning double vinyl of the System Shock soundtrack.

Wing Commander games with Red Book audio

Old school gamers may recall that sometimes CD-ROM games could play their music in a regular CD player. This was because those games used what was called Red Book audio, essentially storing their music as CD tracks and triggering them to play off the disc when needed. Origin was not a frequent user of Red Book audio as it often made interactive music game design ineffective. One exception to this was that the FM Towns versions of Wing Commander, The Secret Missions 1 & 2 and Wing Commander II all include their music as Red Book tracks. The Wing Commander and Secret Missions releases both use high quality recordings of MT-32 tracks (both are identical) while the Wing Commander II recordings are somewhat off.

The main theme and several pieces of endgame dialogue over music in the Sega CD (and Mega CD) versions of Wing Commander are also Red Book.

Licensed Music

The Wing Commander movie credits four pieces of licensed music including three pop songs which play in the background during the mess hall scenes. These are "Cross the Line" and "Foxy's Den" by Cuba and "The Sleeper Car" by Thievery Corporation. The fourth piece of licensed music is the Mozart opera which plays while Blair visits Paladin to discuss his Pilgrim heritage. It is credited as "Trio from 'Cosi Fan Tutte" arranged by Lee Ashley for Ole George Music. This, like Top Shelf Music listed above, is an example of production music. The track was sourced from OGM Premium 27 Classical.

Digital & Streaming Albums

The following albums listed above are available digitally through services such as Amazon, Spotify and iTunes:

• Cobalt 60 - Prophecy - Wing Commander Prophecy Theme The Clubmixes (1997) (listed as "Prophecy - EP")
• Cobalt 60 - Twelve (1998)
• Das Ich - Egodram (1998)
• David Arnold & Kevin Kiner - Wing Commander - Original Soundtrack (1999)
• The Fat Man and Team Fat - Wing One - Music from Wing Commander I (2007) (digital)
• Die Krupps - V - Metal Machine Music (2015)
• The Massed Bands of Her Majesty's Royal Marines -The Mountbatten Festival of Music 2017 (2017)
• The Band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines - Beating Retreat 2018 (2018)
• The Fat Man and The Team Fat - Wing Commander I Complete Original Soundtrack - MT-32 Archival Edition (2022) (digital)

A company called Buysoundtrax (run by the former owner of Sonic Images) has just this month released a new digital version of the Wing Commander movie theme. It's a special release because it is available as a lossless FLAC file for the first time.

Albums by George Oldziey are available for purchase digitally directly from the composer:

• George Oldziey - The Wing Commander Orchestral Music Recording Project (2015)
• George Oldziey - Wing Commander: The Jazz Album (2019)

There are also several digital-only compilation albums available through digital streaming services which include Wing Commander music:

• 8BitAllstars - I Play 1990 - (includes Wing Commander Theme (From "Wing Commander") [Entertainment System Mix]) (2014)
• 8BitAllstars - I Play 1993 (includes Space Flight (From "Wing Commander" [Entertainment System Mix]) (2014)
• 101 Game Themes 3.0 by 8-Bit Arcade (2014) (includes Wing Commander (Main Theme) and Wing Commander III (Game Theme)).
• 100 Videogames Themes - Video Games Theme Orchestra (2015) - (includes Theme from Wing Commander)

Complete Discography

• Various Artists - ORIGIN Soundtrack (1991)
• Various Artists - Electronic Arts Music Sampler - Signature Sounds (1993)
• Various Artists - ORIGIN Audio CD Volume 3 (1994, US)
• Various Artists - ORIGIN Audio CD Volume 3 (1994, EU)
• Various Artists - Wing Commander Prophecy Original Soundtrack (1997, US)
• Various Artists - Wing Commander Prophecy Original Soundtrack (1997, Germany)
• Various Artists - Wing Commander Prophecy Original Soundtrack (1997, Canada)
• Cobalt 60 - Prophecy - Wing Commander Prophecy Theme The Clubmixes (1997)
• Cobalt 60 - Prophecy - Wing Commander Prophecy Theme (TerminalMix) (1997)
• Various Artists - Edelstück > 5 - 1997 (1997)
• Das Ich - Egodram (1998)
• Cobalt 60 - Twelve (1998)
• Project Pitchfork – Carnival (1998)
• Project Pitchfork – Carnival (1998, Limited Edition)
• George Oldziey - Music from the Wing Commander Universe (1998)
• Various Artists - The Gothic Compilation Part IX (1999)
• Various Artists - Bravo ScreenFun Hits (1999)
• David Arnold & Kevin Kiner - Wing Commander - Original Soundtrack (1999)
• Various Artists - KFJC - Water Logged (2000)
• Velvet Acid Christ – Twisted Thought Generator (2000)
• Das Ich - Relikt (2003)
• Project Pitchfork – Collector: Fireworks & Colorchange (2003)
• Various Artists - FOX Music - Top Shelf Library (2006)
• The Fat Man and Team Fat - Wing One - Music from Wing Commander I (2007) (digital)
• Various Artists - Immortal 4 (2011)
• 8BitAllstars - I Play 1990 (2014) (digital)
• 8BitAllstars - I Play 1993 (2014) (digital)
• 101 Game Themes 3.0 by 8-Bit Arcade (2014) (digital)
• 100 Videogames Themes - Video Games Theme Orchestra (2015) (digital)
• Die Krupps - V - Metal Machine Music (2015)
• George Oldziey - The Wing Commander Orchestral Music Recording Project (2015)
• The Massed Bands of Her Majesty's Royal Marines -The Mountbatten Festival of Music 2017 (2017)
• The Band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines - Beating Retreat 2018 (2018)
• George Oldziey - Wing Commander: The Jazz Album (2019)
• The Fat Man and The Team Fat - Wing Commander I Complete Original Soundtrack - MT-32 Archival Edition (2022) (digital)
• Deep Impact: Classic Science Fiction Film Themes (1995-1999) (2023) (digital)

We hope you've enjoyed this walk through Wing Commander album history! And you can make that history continue by backing George Oldziey's Wing Commander vinyl album crowdfund. Learn more here.

Cockpit Mystery Solved

Back in 2016, we reported on Joe Garrity's discovery of Deluxe Animation animation files that seemed like they could be unused Wing Commander art. The files were located on a 5.25" disk that once belonged to Origin artist Daniel Bourbonnais and were dated between 1991 and 1992. We published an analysis that concluded that while it was possible the art was intended for Wing Commander it was also just as likely it could be connected to another project.

Now, we have the real answer! Mr. Bourbonnais himself has identified the material. He writes: "I drew the hands for the throttle controls animation on Wing Commander in 91… [but] oh, that was a demo I created to get freelance work. It is in a video on YouTube. Daniel Bourbonnais computer artist or animator." That video is available here: :

The animation in question starts at the 2m27s mark and includes many impressive elements not found on the original diskette. While the art isn't connected to a Wing Commander game it was done just after Mr. Bourbonnais completed his work on Wing Commander II in 1991 and became a freelancer (and as noted originally, it does reuse some Wing Commander cockpit elements!). The entire reel, which also includes the spectacular 1990 'We Create Worlds' painting, is a blast from the past full of similar spec artwork.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Rapiers All in One Place

ChrisReid: While looking up links associated with the Rapier for a couple of news posts this past week, I notice we'd never taken LOAF's massive research on the ship and turned it into a singular article. It's a huge amount of info, so buckle your seatbelts and hang on! Here's LOAF with everything you ever wanted to know about the Rapier:

LOAF: The Rapier fighters in the Wing Commander movie were constructed from the cockpits of eight F.53 English Electric Lightning jets. I decided to read up on their history and it turns out they're part of a group of 34 ordered by the Saudi Royal Air Force in 1965!

How did I mess this up even further? As part of the movie's licensing deal, a series of 'movie books' were written by author Peter Telep (better known today as the co-writer of several Tom Clancey books!) These started with an adaptation of the film.

Mr. Telep is a wonderful man and he does very thorough research, even for a video game movie adaptation. He reached out to me through my fan site at the time and asked if I could provide him with background about the WC universe. I was fifteen or so at the time and thought I'd handed responsibility for the fate of the universe. I sent him copies of the games and he sent me a list of proper nouns. He couldn't share the script, but could I provide background on these things referenced in it? So I happily wrote up every single fact I could think of about RAPIERS, DRALTHI, KRANT, ANGEL, the TIGER'S CLAW and so on. I made him exhaustive lists of ships and Kilrathi language references and maps of how known space was laid out. But all I knew was the game, I had no idea what they were doing with the movie. I didn't know the Rapier was old and neither did Peter... so instead of the CF-117b, the book features the brand new F-44A described just as it is in Wing Commander I (straight from my notes.)

The first sequel novel, Pilgrim Stars, includes an explanation that just adds another layer of trouble: "[Blair] surveyed his instruments, noting a few differences between his present fighter, the CF-117b Rapier, and the old F44-A he had flown only three days prior..." "The new model had increased missile capacity to ten guided or dumbfire missiles and packed a second generation nose-mounted rotary-barrel neutron gun that allowed for longer continuous neutron fire."

If you're still here, thank you very much and I'm very sorry about inadvertently making starfighter lore a little bit more confusing.

I just thought of another kinda silly Rapier story! There was a toy line for the Wing Commander movie, with eight different Star Wars-scale action figures (including the traitor who was fully cut from the film.) The package also advertised Rapier and Dralthi vehicles coming soon.

We had lunch with the guy and he told us his sad story. They followed the Ws up with a series of Saturday Night Live toys that also didn't sell. He talked all about what else he'd wanted to do for Wing Commander! C'est la vie. He also mentioned he was onto the next big thing (tiny skateboards that rolled) and in fact he was about to meet a big name skater about licensing. "Tony Hawk?!" Joe and I said in unison. "No!" he replied angrily, "why does everyone keep asking that?!" Poor X-Toys.

Anyway, here is the prototype of the toy Rapier, which is safely in a box in my office! Joe Garrity kept the Dralthi in his museum.

See How WC2 Concept Cockpits Stack Up

I went back and compared those Wing Commander 2 WIP cockpits we recovered with the final assets. Check out these Broadsword turrets which lose, among other things, the hand graphics!

A set of three hard drives belonging to an unidentified Origin Systems employee was recovered by Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum and Dan Chisarick. The contents included installations of Wing Commander I and II and a copy of DeluxePaint with several Wing Commander II-related animation files saved.

While the images were originally stored as ANM animation files they are actually collections of static images, likely grouped together as animations for ease of organization and/or presentation. Inividual unique frames have been saved as PCX files and exported as PNGs for the galleries seen below.

Take Your Fandom to Work Day

"The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance."

To help promote IT Security in the Federal Government (where I work), I took advantage of the Origin Museum's collections. This is one of the actual uniforms from Wing Commander IV. Thanks to the staff at Origin Systems, the legacy of Wing Commander lives on.

The Biggest Baddest WC3 Poster

Wing Commander III Footage Restored

The ESRB tape includes roughly one hour of Wing Commander III's FMV footage which was cut together so that the game could be content rated. The footage covers most of the game but does not include every branching path or optional decision. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is a voluntary video game content rating organization widely recognized by consumers in the United States. The ESRB was created in 1994 and launched its ratings system just two months before Wing Commander III was released for MS-DOS. The initial release of the game was not rated; the first port to carry an ESRB rating was the 3DO release which was published some seven months later (in June 1995) followed three months later by the Macintosh port.

You can download the full video here. (2.3 gb)

RPS Highlights Origin Fandom

Rock Paper Shotgun has run a neat article on longtime Origin collector Joe Garrity. There's a really interesting Q&A that delves into how Joe got started many years ago buying up spare copies of Ultima games and meeting with their creators. It also highlights some of the good work that fans have done to preserve historic material, such as our 2008 trip to archive Origin source documents at Mythic or the assistance Wingnuts gave Raylight to develop Prophecy for the Game Boy Advance. Check out the full article here.

RPS: We talked about how the museum got started, but what was your own first Origin game? What got you started on this kick?

Garrity: I’d bought Ultima IV for my C64 back in 1985, but didn’t play it much. The real breakthrough for me was my first PC in early 1991 – a 386 DX33 with four megs of RAM and a Soundblaster! I went to my local Walden Books – back then, games were sold in bookstores – to take a look around. The salesman asked me what type of system I had. When I described my beefy PC, he instantly put Wing Commander in my hands, and said, “This is the game you want.” It’s been a love affair ever since.

Ad Ben: Sound Commander

Here's a nickel's worth of free marketing advice: if it's 1991 and you are trying to sell a PC game it does not hurt to make sure it has the word 'Commander' in the name. The degree to which Wing Commander was a success means that an incomplete list from those years includes Air Commander, Flight Commander, Tank Commander, Air Force Commander, Robot Commander and many more. And the tie-ins didn't stop there: there were even a host of hardware peripherals that tried to ride Wing Commander's coattails. For example: today's sound card, the SOUND COMMANDER.

Developed by the Singapore-based MediaSonic, Inc. the Sound Commander premiered at COMDEX in 1991 to no particular acclaim. Like the Sound Runner, featured in our previous installment, the Sound Commander was an 8-bit 'generic' card promoted as a be-all, end-all solution that was actually an attempt to undercut the price of the quickly-establishing Creative Labs Sound Blaster. Unlike the Sound Runner, the Sound Commander at least had a chance: it included FM synthesis, meaning that it could play speech similar to the Sound Blaster (though the first models did not promise full Sound Blaster compatibility.) The Sound Commander actually lasted for several iterations, with the Sound Commander FX and the Sound Commander Gold following in 1992 (though their advertisement had no Wing Commander connection, for reasons we will see in a future installment of this series!)

Aside from the similar name, why does the Sound Commander appear in this space? Eagle-eyed viewers will note that there are two Wing Commander screenshots in the advertisement: a shot from the Hornet cockpit and one of the Tiger's Claw lounge from before Enyo 1. MediaSonic would have requested these stills from Origin (and the other developers represented) and then used them to promote the card. These advertisements (in two versions, with and without reference to Comdex) appeared in three issues of Computer Gaming World running from November 1991 through January 1992. You can find the entire issues in the Computer Gaming World Museum.

Why does it look so dark? That's because in 1991, advertisements were laid out by hand (along with anything else printed: game boxes, hint books, magazine articles) and there was no such thing as a readily compatible screen grabber. Instead, screenshots were captured with traditional film cameras that literally took a picture of the screen. In this case, the Hornet cockpit and the Tiger's Claw lounge are a publicity stills provided by Origin and then set up in the advertisement by MediaSonic or their ad agency. You may well recognize these same screenshot in other advertisements or in magazine reviews. Origin would create slides duplicates from a small selection of film negatives which they would provide to advertisers, reviewers and other interests (Joe Garrity has many of these source slides archived at the Origin Museum.)

Want a Sound Commander of your own? They are not especially sought after, but do regularly appear on eBay (a 'Sound Commander Pro' model is listed as of this writing.) Just remember, it doesn't actually do anything special in Wing Commander I... the only connection is that the game supports Ad Lib sound and the Game Commander is Ad Lib compatible.

Behind The Blue Screens Of The Scimitar Schematic

Origin was well known for the extras in the box, that drew players into the story-line, and Wing Commander was no exception. The first game in the series included 4 blueprints of the fighters the player would fly (and would double for the copy protection). This artifact is the master 'overlay' for the Scimitar medium fighter, used to make these blueprints. With graphics and specs meticulously pasted to a transparency, the item is another unique relic of a classic game.

Four Queens!!!

I sometimes stumble across some of the more insignificant items in the Origin Museum archives. Here we have a deck of Terran Confederation cards used in the production of "Wing Commander IV-The Price of Freedom". These are the actual cards you see being held by Maniac, aka, Tom Wilson. To those who are familiar with the storyline, Vagabond losing to Maniac in poker foreshadows his own death. Some folks may say that it's just a deck of cards. To game preservationists, it's a physical piece of gaming history!

Looking Back At The Heart Of The Tiger's Awesome Premiere Edition

One of the most elaborate packages in the Wing Commander series is the Premiere Edition of Wing Commander 3. In addition to the regular items that everyone got, it included a color version of Warbirds, a soundtrack CD, a 'Behind the Screens' CD with cool interviews & features, a t-shirt, a 1995 calendar, a VHS 'making of' tape, a folded poster and a copy of the Fleet Action novel in a film reel enclosure. There was a variant available at Sam's Club, but the primary way for fans to acquire this collector's item was to directly call and order from Electronic Arts - since this was years before online orders were a thing! Joe Garrity scanned in his receipt from 1994 so you can see the slip in all its dot matrix glory.

Art Assets Reveal Never Before Seen Cockpit

It's certainly not every day we get to see new Origin concept art or unused designs from the classic Wing Commander games, but we've got a birthday treat today! Joe Garrity recently uncovered an amazing set of cockpit art and animations from a fighter we've never seen before. The lock and autopilot lights are unmistakable, and there are vertical and horizontal bars that could definitely be for a gun capacity and afterburner fuel. However, there are some remarkable differences as well. There seem to be two radar displays, and the VDUs flip open and closed. There appear to be supplemental heads-up VDUs that overlay on the windscreen, as well as something that resembles a very large targeting crosshair in the center of the dashboard. It has a very cool illumination startup sequence as well.

So, what is the ship? And what's up the functional differences we don't see elsewhere? Joe uncovered these on a 5.25" floppy labeled "DISK 9 - PANEL X-LBM SCREENS.ANM" from artist Dan Bourbonnais. He had to get the proprietary "Deluxe Animator" software going to read the files properly. The still screenshots are dated April 22, 1991, while the animation has a December 11, 1992 date stamp, which could be artificially delayed due to backing up or disk transfer. The brown durasteel could imply a Kilrathi design, but it lacks overt alien markings that the Dralthi II and Jrathek art contained. It's also interesting that this concept dates back to the time Secret Missions 2 was released, but the animations are ahead of their time and the different dashboard elements (quadruple 5.25" floppy drives are a nice touch though!) raise more questions than answers. LOAF's thoughts on the subject are below. Do you have any theories about what this could be? Post them in the comments!

A potential Wing Commander mystery is afoot! Dashing game archaeologist Joe Garrity recovered it from an old Origin-internal diskette... it certainly looks like a Wing Commander cockpit, but it isn't one that ended up in any of the games (and it doesn't quite /work/ like other WC cockpits.) Any ideas? What we have here… is a good, old-fashioned mystery! To preface this: I don’t KNOW what it is, but I can make some educated guesses as to possibilities.

First: I know that this immediately screams ‘Kilrathi cockpit’… but I would caution that I think that’s a bit of an anachronism. It is the same color as the Kilrathi cockpits we see later in the series, including the Jrathek and the ships in Wing Commander Armada… but in 1991, that color scheme had not yet been established. Wing Commander II (in development) was using the lighter tan color for the Kilrathi space camo… but it also used this same color for the cockpit of the human Rapier (as did Wing Commander I.) This would have also closely followed The Secret Missions 2, which showed the first Kilrathi cockpit… which was steel and purple. Finally, there’s no Kilrathi writing. At the time, Kilrathi text was a series of dots and dashes arranged vertically. The Dralthi Mk. II cockpit in Secret Missions 2 is full of them (and has human text on sticky notes added over them! Immersion!) while this cockpit has only English writing. [One other thing that makes it feel like a Kilrathi cockpit is the fact that the large, red central display immediately looks like the red Kilrathi armor indicators used in all five of their cockpits in Wing Commander Armada. It’s not the same graphic at all (and Armada was three years later, an eternity at the time), but it feels very similar at first glance!)

One thing I can say for certain is that it is NOT a ‘working’ (gameplay) Wing Commander cockpit. While the cockpits in Wing Commander I and II vary wildly in shape, color and overall design, they have several common elements that this lacks:

• Identical blank spaces for VDUs. These need to be the same size because the images the game overlays in real time are the same for all the ships. The mystery cockpit has two small black squares that imply the same VDU setup, but they’re proportionately much too small to function in the game. (After the ‘flip’ animation, there is more space… but the shape still isn’t right.)
• Similarly, Wing Commander ships have all have identical (across each game) circular radar displays. Again, this cockpit seems to have one (two, actually!) but they’re again much too small and when you look closely you’ll see they aren’t Wing Commander radars at all. The Wing Commander scanners divide space into four quadrants with an X, while this uses a cross +. That seems like a small thing, but it means the radar wouldn’t be functional in a WC game because it’s not showing you what’s in front of and behind you. (Credit to Toast for noticing this one!)
• There is no shield/armor indicator. These DID have a different style in each ship in the early games, but they were always distinct enough to be identified. I don’t see any equivalent here.
• There is no space for the set and actual speed indicators. (Though, one small point in favor of a Kilrathi ship is that the Dralthi didn’t have such indicators either and instead had a small computer ‘added’ by humans to display them.)

I will note that none of that excludes it from being concept art for a Wing Commander, and in fact many of the same failings this cockpit has are repeated in another bit of lost cockpit that we DO know is from Wing Commander from three years later (pictured right). This so-called mystery cockpit was used in advertising for Super Wing Commander, but does not match any of the art used in the finished game. It, too, lacks VDU spaces, reuses art from earlier Wing Commanders, is missing certain displays and so on!

It also has some elements that are distinctly not functional in Wing Commander II:

• The large, central ‘target’ area doesn’t match a function in the early Wing Commander games. It seems to be the focal point of the cockpit, but if this were a ship you fly there’d be no reason to ‘use’ it. (Which I believe suggests that this was for a cinematic; more on that theory later!)
• I can say from experience that it’s unlikely the 5.25” drives on either side of the cockpit would have made it past a Chris Roberts art review! :) (Though there did seem to be a pair of IBM M-Type keyboards in the Orion in Privateer…) In fact, I’d venture to say that having the ‘cute’ diskette drives there is much more the sort of nod you’d see in a Richard Garriott or Warren Spector project.
• No Wing Commander ship at this time had used a ‘glass cockpit’ where displays appear over the game area (as this does in the animation.)
• The fact that it has a ‘startup’ animation means that it doesn’t match any of the other Wing Commander cockpits at the time. There’s nothing in those games that has the cockpits turn on/off with resultant changes to the lighting.

On the other hand, it DOES include elements that ARE unquestionably from Wing Commander:

• The ‘LOCK’ and ‘AUTO’ lights are from Wing Commander II’s cockpits. I believe the specific buttons here match the Epee cockpit.
• The rectangles of green and red lights adjacent to the diskette drives are modified from similar panels on the Wing Commander Rapier artwork. They aren’t specific to Wing Commander II, though, they were originally created for the Rapier in the already-published Wing Commander I.

So, what games COULD it be from? To narrow down the options, I went back to the Point of Origin (Origin’s internal company newsletter) archive and found that the very first issue was published just under a month after the date on these files. At that time, Origin had five product development groups working on four original games:

• Martian Dreams (Scheduled for May, shipped on time)
• Wing Commander II (Scheduled for Summer, shipped in September)
• Ultima VII: The Black Gate (Scheduled for Christmas, shipped April 1992)
• “Air Command” (Scheduled for Christmas, likely shipped April 1993)
• (The fifth group was working on the CD-ROM conversion of Ultima VI for the FM Towns. I strongly suspect that ‘Air Command’ was a working title for Strike Commander rather than a cancelled project, as it vanishes the next month and mentions of Strike begin.)

I include the scheduled release dates because it tells us where each game was at the time. Martian Dreams went to beta about a month after these images were finished, which suggests that it was getting close to wrapping up. Wing Commander II would have been midway through development, making it the most likely to be having new art created at that specific time. Ultima VII and Strike Commander were very early in the process, but demos of both were being created to show at Summer CES around this same time. (It also lets us rule out a few other projects that might have been tempting options: Wing Commander Academy, which DOES feature a similarly-colored Kilrathi cockpit, and Privateer weren’t on the table yet.)

With all that analysis, I’ve come up with several possible theories. I suspect Strike Commander and Ultima VII are not likely (while Ultima VII had a Kilrathi ship, it wouldn’t have been the focus at this point in development!), which leaves Martian Dreams and Wing Commander II. I believe it could fit into either game:

• It could be a cutscene from Martian Dreams. Martian Dreams does end with a cutscene in which the characters return to Earth aboard Jules Verne’s spaceship (you see the ship take off and then in the next shot landed.) It’s possible this was created for that sequence and then cut to save disk space. In that case, the Wing Commander elements (and the disk drives!) would be intentional nods of the sort Origin was often fond. The startup animation would then be where you see it take off and rocket out of the Martian atmosphere into space.
• It could be a cutscene from Wing Commander II. We have hard proof (from the box itself!) that backgrounds and faces were cut from Wing Commander II, including a younger Blair head and courtroom backgrounds. The intro was rewritten late in the process to cut down on disk usage (and so instead of seeing young Blair at a trial, you have old Blair talking to Admiral Tolwyn in his same office set used for the rest of the game.) The place I can imagine this is the attack on the Tiger’s Claw: if it’s a Kilrathi cockpit (as noted, not a given!) then I could see an alternate version of the shot where you see the action from inside one of the stealth fighters. This would also explain why it doesn’t have parts needed to function, why there’s a startup animation (as it’s decloaking) and then large central ‘target’ area, since the point of the cockpit would be to see it lock and fire a torpedo at the ‘Claw.
• It could be for a totally unknown sales demo or a failed product pitch. Origin’s sales team was aggressively pursuing distributors at this time, and we know they showed demos of all these games at CES in 1991. It’s likely the Wing Commander II demo was the version which currently survives (featuring an alternate version of the first part of the intro)… but there may have been some other, unspecified behind-closed-doors tease this was done for. As for failed pitches, ‘Wing Commander but you’re a Kilrathi!’ was certainly discussed from the day Wing Commander I came out (and unexpectedly eventually became System Shock!)… it could be lookdev for that sort of project pitch.

More Prerelease Art Reveals SWC Differences

It's been a good season for Joe Garrity and undiscovered cockpits! He found a second interesting artifact, but this one is a little more familiar than the one above. The first photo below comes from a disk labeled "1994 WINTER CES SWC." It shows an early version of the Super Wing Commander Hornet cockpit with an actual DOS-era Hornet targeting outline on the right VDU. The displays and readouts in the upper structure are also different than the final layout, which is pictured second. Joe also found a fun sample of the fight pictured on the SWC box. It comes unobscured by the cockpit structure superimposed in the final art. Pretty neat!

WC3 Test Footage Gives Early Glimpse At Heart Of The Tiger

LOAF recently happened upon some old VHS tapes with test footage of Wing Commander 3. These appear to be placement shots to explore the feasibility of the futuristic sets, camera angles and costumes. Since this predates actual filming, Eisen is portrayed by a Joe Garrity-lookalike stand in, and the other crew member is "Dallas." I like that background - it reminds me of the WC4's CIC!

Wing Commander 3 test footage! Fake Captain Eisen? Information Officer Dallas? Blue hats? They're all here!

Joe Gets A Head Start On Digital Preservation Series

A few of my friends from Wing Commander III

Wide-Ranging Interview Covers Two Decades Of WC Fandom

If you missed last month's Big Box PC Game Collectors' livestream event, the recording is now available online. The group spends an hour interviewing Ben "Bandit" (LOAF) Lesnick about Wing Commander, working with Chris Roberts and making Star Citizen. There's a very helpful index in the YouTube description with quick jumps to subjects like the founding of the CIC, the least/most collectible WC artifacts and how the Academy show on DVD came to be. Joe Garrity from the Origin Museum is also there to add some color to subjects like the creation of Star*Soldier and the WC Movie Action Figures. It's a great discussion - check it out below!

Ben Lesnick is the world’s biggest Wing Commander fan. He founded WCNews, which is the premiere Wing Commander news site. Currently he is Director of Community Engagement and Content Strategy at Cloud Imperium Games, whose current project is the much anticipated Star Citizen.

Indiana Joe: Raider Of The Lost Archive

...this is the *only* scene. I created it as a promotion and an intro for a new web series I'm starting. While my upcoming videos will be (hopefully) interesting and fun, they won't be nearly as dramatic as this. :)

DMCA To Get Exemptions For Preservationists

Wired has a report on some new exemptions that will be added to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If you own game that needs to talk to a defunct authentication server in order for (offline) single player to function, you will be allowed to circumvent that mechanism. In addition, libraries and museums will be allowed to jailbreak consoles if doing so is necessary to get a game up and running on ancient hardware. The author reached out to Origin Museum curator Joe Garrity to get his take on the changes:

Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum -- a private collection dedicated to preserving the history of Origin Systems Inc. games such as Ultima and Wing Commander -- told WIRED that the ruling was "more about what gamers cannot do, rather than what they can do."

"The DMCA does not allow people to copy games. It does not allow gamers to play shut down MMOs. This is simply a ruling that allows an exemption to copyright law for the specific use of preservation by libraries and museums. While yes, a gamer can now legally back up their old games, they have to have a physical copy of that game, and they can only back it up for their own personal use. Anyone who thinks that they can now run free [Ultima Online] shards legally is mistaken".

Anniversary Livestream Posted; Jump To Special Features

The Cloud Imperium Games team has posted this weekend's amazing 25th Anniversary Livestream to Youtube in its full 9-hour glory. The recording was previously available on Twitch, but many find the Youtube interface more user friendly. There's also a helpful index below that shows where to jump to in order to see certain key segments of the show. One unlisted - but incredible - milestone occurs at 6:44:00 when LOAF takes on Kurasawa 2... and nails it on his first try! It's a textbook perfect execution of the mission to save the Ralari.

Hosts Ben Lesnick & Jared Huckaby (with Special Guests including creator CHRIS ROBERTS) as they play Wing Commander from beginning to end for it's 25th Anniversary, and learn about the history of the game in the process!
----------------------------------------­--------------
00:00:00 - Pre-Show
00:17:10 - Livestream Begins, Introduction and History
00:59:00 - Gameplay
01:13:00 - Interview with Denis Loubet, Artist for Wing Commander
01:38:30 - Gameplay
02:10:35 - Interview with Joe Garrity, Creator of the Origin Museum
02:31:25 - Gameplay
03:10:23 - Book, Manual, and Strategy Guide Retrospective
03:20:00 - Interview with Chris Reid of WCNews.com
03:40:00 - Chris Roberts, Creator of Wing Commander Arrives
04:00:15 - Chris Roberts Plays the Game for the First Time in 25 Years
04:13:00 - Gameplay
04:31:00 - Lunch Break
04:47:30 - Gameplay
06:21:30 - History of Ports to Other Systems
06:47:20 - Gameplay Through to the Finish