Happy New Year's Eve! (A Look Back at 2022)

If you can remember far back enough, the year actually began with a new official WC product release! The MT-32 Archival Edition of the WC1 soundtrack was published by The Fat Man and Team Fat. Also in early 2022, people started to receive their Malcolm McDowell autographs printed on WC3 Playstation adverts. Fan projects also started to deliver in January, including the custom WC Challenge Coins that ZOmegaZ commissioned. It was a great way to kick off the year!

Myth Busting The Price of Freedom

BREAKING NEWS: Wing Commander LP Inbound

AI Algorithm Enhances WC1 Characters

It's raining so I'm playing with Wing Commander 1 characters in #stablediffusion #AIart

Gemini Sector 'Schematic Map' Breaks Down Jump Lines

It's entirely possible (probable?) that this has been done in the past but a tiny amount of Googling didn't bring anything up and I enjoy this sort of tinkering, so I just went ahead with it. I got curious during a recent replay of Privateer about the "logical" structure of the game map. As in: if you detangled the mess of jump points without regard to their actual "physical" location on the map, would it be possible to draw the map on a 2D Euclidean plane without having any of the jump lines intersect?

In the end, it looks like there's a single unavoidable crossed-jump-line in the map. This could be arranged in a number of different ways, of course. In the layout I went with, it's the jump between XXN-1957 and 119CE which conflicts with the jump between New Constantinople and Newcastle.

I've attached the map to the post; you can also find it (and its source file) at: https://apocalyptech.com/games/privmap/

It was done in the Linux editor Dia, though, so the source file probably won't help most folks.

Anyway, enjoy!

So I'd expected to be done with this but couldn't escape the feeling that I maybe should've made an attempt to keep the systems closer to where they actually appear in-game. So, some more reworking today yields an alternate layout! Objectively speaking I think this is probably the better one by far: more compact, and the quadrant placements are kept much more intact. I still kind of prefer my original aesthetically (that golden-spirally thing from Rygannon to DN-N1912 is especially pleasing) but this one ain't bad either. Oxford / Shangri-La end up on the "wrong" side of Potter Quadrant, and I'm not fond of the way Varnus just sticks out at the bottom there, but what're ya gonna do?

New Preview Teases End Run Video

The past month has been an utter journey of making 3d scenes for the upcoming End Run video, and learning new skills for use in said video along the way.

Merry Christmas!

This year EmuMusicFan put together this wonderful sketch. There are a couple of inspirations behind it. The art style is reminiscent of the classic blue and white scheme from Claw Marks. It's also a spiritual successor to Denis Loubet's Christmas card from a few years back where Hobbes receives endless balls of gift wrapped yarn. This time he gets a (timely because of the World Cup?) soccer ball instead!

Wing Commander: The Perfect Last Minute Gift

Starfield Designer on Origin Influences

Time to talk about other (more) deserving folks. It's been impossible for me to work on Starfield for so long without constantly thinking about the devs and games that have served as so much personal inspiration, for so many reasons. Long, and long overdue post incoming.

Origin Systems' 1988 gem 2400 AD. My God, I lost an entire summer to this game. One of the first real sci-fi computer RPGs I ever played. It informed a lot of who I am as a designer.

Another Origin game, this time from 1989 - Space Rogue. So much Love. But, holy hell, in finding the images for this tweet, I learned it was designed by none other than Paul Neurath of Looking Glass. How did I not know this?! Hi Paul! And thank you! Wow.

Next, Origin's and Chris Roberts' 1993 Privateer. I was a Wing Commander fan because I had a PC and a pulse, but it was Privateer that truly captured my heart. Grayson Burrows was my perfect protagonist, a cool ginger badass. And that gameplay! Timeless.

Unreleased Crusader Pre-Alpha Revealed

Crusader 2 PSX Pre-Pre Alpha recovered and released

It’s a wonderful day for Crusader history, as I am proud to announce the recovery and preservation of a pre-pre-alpha build of Crusader 2 for the Sony Playstation. It has been uploaded online for all to enjoy.

Following the departure of Tony Zurovec from Origin Systems in late 1996, there was a bit of a scramble to keep Crusader going as both No Remorse and No Regret were financial successes for the company. You can peruse some of the design documents of this time. Ports of No Remorse to the Playstation and Saturn came out in December 1996, but nothing else ever did after that. The release today shows that there was at least some developmental effort during this period. Dated February 11, 1997, the pre-pre-alpha has interesting differences between both the original games and even the console version of No Remorse. It’s hard to say if this was intended to be No Regret on console, since the levels are iterations of No Remorse levels, or if it’s one of the undeveloped Crusader ideas.

I tested it via original hardware, DuckStation, and MiSTer FPGA, and all work wonderfully. Bear in mind it is a pre-pre-alpha and can easily break. Big hint: use L2 + R1 to switch weapons.

For other preservationists, I have dumped the disc according to Redump.org standards and will be submitting it to their database.

I’m always looking for Crusader history to save. If you were involved with the game and–somehow–still haven’t heard from me, please reach out to keenan@echosector.com and I’ll make sure what you have is saved forever!

German WC Review Vids Go In Depth

Got MALF?

MALF! You know, the common human expression that exists in plenty of other contexts all the time, “malf”.

Back That Achilles Up

Rapiers Begin Their Attack Run

The Wing Commander End Run video is being pushed to January. It needs to be done right, which requires more time. In the meantime I will see about uploading something smaller to appease the Youtube algorithm for this month. So here's a still shot.

Matthew Lillard to Star in Video Game Movie Adaptation

The characters they are playing are not being specified. Production on the film is set to begin in February in New Orleans.

Lillard recently starred on the NBC hit Good Girls opposite Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman. He has appeared on great shows such as Bosch, Billions, Halt and Catch Fire, and many more. His previous movies are the iconic Scream and most recent reboot of He’s All That. He continues to voice ‘Shaggy’ for the Scooby Doo Franchise.

WC4 Set Revelation Comes to Light

Oh man I never noticed how obvious it was that the Axius corridors were the Lexington set relit.

The Meaning Behind Meaningless Pods

Wing Commander Speedrunners Get Even Faster

This submission is for the SNES version of Wing Commander, a space/flight sim about a war between the Terrans (humans) and Kilrathi (cats.) This showcases the fastest route through the SNES version while still getting the good ending which involves finishing only 5 out of 21 levels and immediately ejecting in the other 16.

GOG Winter Sale Discounts Wing Commander

The Story Behind Those Odd WC Connections

"Why not Confederation Day?" Joshua said slowly. "It'd be the logical time to really nail us. Half the crews will have the weekend off."

"Maybe, but I wonder if the Cats would be that crazy. Do that and it'd really get our blood up. It'd be an act sure to arouse our rage. That's the biggest holiday of the year outside of Christmas.'

Chris DID finish the test using props leftover from Wing Commander IV for the composite shots and it was used to shop the movie! It’s extra cool because it uses the original Rapier and Dralthi designs, imagining full CG ships for the film:

The Borst There Is

Today's update is one of those 'under our noses the whole time' events! It turns out that Wing Commander III and IV co-writers Terry Borst and Frank De Palma actually wrote and spoke quite a bit about the game at the time. Both gave lectures and provided interviews for academic books relating to interactive storytelling... and we've found three fascinating ones that were published in the wake of Wing Commander IV that go into detail we've never seen before about the process behind scripting the game!

The first and most detailed is Chapter 10 of a book called The Multimedia Scriptwriting Workshop (Douglas J. Varchol, Sybex, 1996). The book spends a full 50 (!) pages walking through the development of Wing Commander IV's script, complete with screenshots and script extracts. Even more shocking is the fact that it was published in January 1996... some six weeks before Wing Commander IV even came out! If only we'd been reading screenwriting self help books as teenagers. The book also reproduces the games credits as an appendix which surely wasn't at all a move to fill space. You can download the chapter and appendix as a PDF here here.

Next up is a comprehensive 1996 interview with Terry Borst which appears in a similar book called Interactive Writer's Handbook, Second Edition (Carronade Group, Jon Samsel and Darryl Wimberley, 1996). The book also prints a script page from the game! You can download the chapter as a PDF here here.

Finally, there's one straight out of the most obscure depths of academia: Euphoria and Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (Sarah Cook, Riverside Architectural Press / ABC Art Books Canada, 2020). It's a recent collection of archival material created over the past several decades for Canadian university Banff's media school. Of interest to us is a presentation about interactive media (and his experiences with Wing Commander) which was given by Mr. Borst in September 1998 as part of a lecture series called The Big Game Hunters (September 19-21, 1998). You can download the chapter as a PDF here here.

French Preview Teases Upcoming 'Wingleader'

New Preview Hints at Upcoming Operation Back Lash Overview

Confusing Carrier Confirmed!

In Wing Commander IV, the TCS Lexington's Officer's Lounge features a prominent image of a historical aircraft carrier at sea. The photograph, part of a framed presentation of some sort, is easily visible in the gameflow scene and in other passing shots. It then appears more closely during the cutscene where Captain Paulsen attempts to recruit you.

But what's the carrier? Conventional wisdom was that it must be the USS Lexington (CV-16); after all, the Wing Commander IV team had spent time aboard the Lexington doing research for the game and they'd named the TCS Lexington (CV-44) in her honor. But that didn't pass the visual test: the carrier in the lounge is a modern supercarrier rather than one that served in World War II. For a long time, the image was thought to be the USS Enterprise because of her unique conning tower which seemed to match the footage... but it turns out that was a false positive resulting from the low resolution of the picture.

We're happy to report that, at long last, the original image has been located! The carrier in the photo is actually the USS Nimitz (CVN-68), America's longest-serving nuclear powered aircraft carrier. The photograph is credited to International Stock Photography's Ronn Martea, himself a former Intruder pilot (and, later in life, the source of a great deal of stock photography used in textbooks, posters and other places). If it looks familiar to you it's because the photo was used as a popular poster in the late 1980s. Scandecor published it as "1718 Aircraft Carrier" and it was the sort of fun 'boys' poster that would've been sold to teenagers at book fairs and in head shops. We've found printings from both the United States and Germany dated 1987 and 1988.

This isn't the carrier's first appearance in science fiction: the USS Nimitz played a staring role in the 1980 film The Final Countdown, in which it travels back in time to the start of World War II! It's not clear why it's pictured in the lounge or what the rest of the presentation says... but that's a mystery for another day!

The Inside Story on Wing Commander III

We've got another vintage magazine review of Wing Commander III today... but this time, with a twist! This 'technical review' was printed in the June/July 1995 issue of Game Developer magazine, an industry publication which ran from the dawn of the multimedia age in 1994 all the way until 2013! This review doesn't just tell you how good the game is, it tells you how it works under the hood. And as an added bonus, it's actually written by Wayne Sikes, the man responsible for the beloved PREDIT Privateer editing tool.

The article also mentions an earlier feature on Pacific Strike's related file structure that had been printed in the December 1994 issue. This information is also likely of use to Wing Commander III modders and so we've reproduced it below:

Wing Commander Movie Gets on the Kill Board

Welcome to Carnage Counts, where we count and compare death in television shows and movies! Today we are covering Wing Commander!

Ultima VI Intro Provides Glimpse at TV Feature Proposed for WC2

The opening of Ultima VI prominently features a pixelized recreation of a Keith Berdak illustration of a zebra centaur pole dancer(?) as a late replacement for what was originally a Patrick Nagel painting they couldn't get cleared. (1990)

You can find an early script outine with all the Jerry Rivers sequences at this link. Jerry IS canon, Shotglass mentions watching him in Secret Missions 2 (and Bluehair tells him it'll rot his brain).

In what is probably a coincidence, Wing Commander IV uses the same device, having the characters watch an interview with Admiral Tolwyn to help move the story along. (Tolwyn does not punch Barbara Miles, though, he just acts like a smug jerk.)

Read About Ginger Lynn's Other Profession

Johnny: Speaking of sci-fi, you played Rachel Coriolis in several of the mid-90s "Wing Commander" games. What was your favorite part of those games?

Ginger: I loved playing Rachel Coriolis in the "Wing Commander" series. I got to be the weapons load-out officer, so when you're playing the game, any time that you go into battle, you have to come to me. We shot a lot of it, not everything, but most of it was on green screen. My favorite memory was my grandmother came down to the set one day, and we were shooting something with green screen. My grandmother walked in front of the camera not knowing, and the entire cast and crew was laughing at my grandmother because all you could see was the top half of her body walking around on set.

Malcolm McDowell was wonderful to work with, but very grabby with his hands. Mark Hamill... Not my favorite actor to work with. Tom Wilson was fabulous. The director, Chris Roberts, fantastic. I would work with him again in a heartbeat. The disappointment that I had working on "Wing Commander" was when they finally decided to make it into a Hollywood movie, they made the mistake of not hiring the original cast and crew. People who get attached and addicted to a game, they want to see the characters they're familiar with. They want to see Rachel Coriolis. They want to see Mark Hamill. They want to see John Rhys-Davies. They want to see all of the original characters, and instead they hired "Hollywood actors", which I think destroyed the popularity of the film.

WC3 Credited for '90s Graphical Fidelity

Today we've got a video about graphically impressive videos from the 1990s. It includes a pretty straightforwards clip from Wing Commander 3. While I never get tired of an opportunity to watch some WC footage, I think the interesting part here is seeing so many of its contemporaries side by side. There's some great and great looking games in this clip, but it also really makes you appreciate how Wing Commander was so ahead of its time! WC3 is the finale chapter at 15:30.

I thought I would spoil you guys with something bigger than usual - an impressive list, if I don't say so myself. A lot of research went to this. The editing was a pain in the rear, but ultimately I think you will find it informative.

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During the nineties pc gaming was king, pushing the boundaries of what we considered to be cutting-edge. MS-DOS was still the predominant operating system for gaming, only to be superseded by Windows 98 later in the decade.

Annual Call For Award Nominations

WC4 Polaroids: Hacker

This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.

You knew he was coming! Today's Polaroid is Border Worlds Pilot #2, Lester Barrie. Like Moose and Bob-O-Matte, Hacker appears briefly in the Peleus jammer introduction where his Banshee is shot down by a group of Excaliburs. His continuity Polaroid gives us a great look at a grey Border Worlds flight suit and a bit of a cheat the production used frequently: since Hacker was only ever seen from the shoulders up he doesn't have a full flight suit... just the top!