Read The Original WC Fan Fiction Novel

Veterans of the alt.games.wing-commander newsgroup will remember Gary Hladik's fan fiction known as Wing Commander 4.123106: The Price of Entertainment. The thirty four instalments were posted to the newsgroup between the dates of August 18, 1996 and August 29, 1997 and parodied the story from the WC4 game whilst adding some of its own twists. If you have never read the story before, it is well worth a look.

If Wing Commander IV were approached from a somewhat less reverent point of view, I wondered, what kind of humor could be extracted from it? My own answer to that question is found in the fanfic story "Wing Commander 4.123106: The Price of Entertainment," which debuts next week on alt.games.wing-commander.

While not exactly a comedy, this rewrite of the Wing Commander IV story tries to be considerably more lighthearted and uninhibited than the original. It follows the same general storyline, but I've rewritten every existing cut-scene and added many new ones. I've kept the same Wing 4 characters (although Pliers has a new job), added many new ones, and brought back a few more of the Wing 3 cast (guess who!). The story is told in the first person by none other than the Heart of the Tiger himself, which means of course that the story omits all cutscenes in which Blair is not present, e.g. the opening sequence of the attack on the transport Amadeus.