WC4 Polaroids: Miner

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

Last Thanksgiving, we wrote about a Polaroid of Moose and how the character represented three different people at once: the actor who played him in a cutscene, the member of the development team whose name and photograph were used for his wingman selection screen and finally the member of the Playstation team whose name replaced them in that port. Now, we've found a polaroid that represents FOUR different people! Meet Miner.

Unraveling the Polaroid meant once again dealing with a small problem: Miner is in full Confederation fighter pilot costume (next to the nose of the famous Confederation shuttle set!) and so his face isn't very visible. Luckily, the "Mike" and "Confed Pilot" scribbled at the bottom were enough to move the needle: the game's printed credits do indeed credit a Confed Pilot... MICHAEL Wachtel! From there, we learned that like most of the others we've learned about he was a young actor just starting out when Wing Commander IV was being shot. He worked a variety of extra jobs hoping for bigger roles. In the final game, he appears in three of the 'transition' scenes aboard the TCS Lexington; whatever flight deck shot he was dressed in gloves and a helmet for must have wound up on the cutting room floor!

Michael Wachtel ultimately had only one other credited featured role: as Marine #1 in an episode of Wing Commander's nearest cousin, Space Above and Beyond. The episode, "Dear Earth", aired just three weeks after Wing Commander IV shipped! Mr. Wachtel's career in front of the camera may have been short but he didn't leave the industry! He went on to found a company called Production Security Services which continues to provide... well, security services, to this day!

Who is Miner the character? Blink-and-you'll-miss-him but Miner appears in the very first mission of Wing Commander IV: he (along with wingman Quality) are providing CAP for Bluepoint station when you and Maniac arrive. Like a number of other Confederation pilots, he doesn't appear on the Lexington's killboard until the Tyr series. This was to prevent recording too many sets of mission-specific comms for the talk-heavy Hellespont series. But you still don't actually get to fly with him - he'll show as being in sickbay every time! He finally appears again during the defection mission where you'll either have to shoot down him or Vagabond. Like Moose, Miner uses the 'generic' wingman VDU that does not show his callsign. While the game's files include text that allows Miner to appear in various other missions (like the discovery of the flashpacked transport) there are no audio files and he can't actually be selected as a wingman.

Miner gave up on being a "people person" before he hit his teenage years. His home sector has a very dark sun, and he comes from the farthest planet out. The icy and inhospitible conditions didn't allow for very much people interaction. He's an audience - a people watcher. Most people feel he is cold and calculating, never realizing that he has a much clearer idea of events than nearly anyone else onboard.

Like the previously profiled Moose (and every other Wing Commander IV redshirt who appears in cutscenes), Miner is represented in the game by a face and name that do not match the actor playing him. When you select him as a wingman you see that he's "Chris Douglas". Now Chris Douglas is a name every Wing Commander fan should know: his contributions across most of the series were incredibly important, from his modeling and texturing ships in Wing Commander II to acting as one of the first modern game art directors on Wing Commander III and IV. From knife-like Kilrathi spaceships to a Confederation fleet that would've looked at home on a modern aircraft carrier, his influence on Wing Commander was enormous. He's even credited with originally breaking the Wing Commander IV story!

But wait, who's this? Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander IV has a completely different name and picture for Miner! Shown here is Rodney "Miner" Brunet, again an Origin Systems employee. At first we assumed this was a case of an unexpected change being made to the game late in development after the official guide had already signed off (a necessity in order for it to be printed and on store shelves). But then I started another run through Wing Commander IV and found... this time, Miner (in-game) had switched to Rodney Brunet! Same copy of the game, no differences at all in settings. We knew we could be pretty sure this was NOT a case of removing a fired employee; Mr. Brunet would go on to work for Chris Roberts at Digital Anvil, animating sequences for the Wing Commander movie. After several play through's of the game's first five missions we discovered it's the result of possibly an ancient Easter egg: if you choose to help the drunk in the intro then Miner is Chris Douglas and if you don't he's Rodney Brunet! Why? The reasoning may be lost to time, but enabling this meant including two separate sets of pilot names in three languages each in LANGUAGES.TRE! Mr. Brunet has been a prolific artist throughout the industry since Digital Anvil. In fact, his career seems to represent the exact dream behind that studio: countless game projects for Microsoft alongside film work for Robert Rodriguez on projects like Planet Terror and Machete. He maintains a website with lots of fascinating work from his career!

Finally, the name (but NOT the picture!) was changed in the PlayStation port of Wing Commander IV. Chris Douglas became Kevin Armstrong... but unlike other PlayStation name changes there's no Kevin Armstrong in the credits! We know that Kevin Armstrong was a QA tester for Origin Systems in 1993 when he worked on Ultima VII Part 2. He would go on to join Lion Entertainment, the Austin-based company responsible for several major Macintosh and PlayStation conversions. He's credited as a programmer on Lion's port of Quake but while the company did much of the work on Wing Commander IV he isn't listed when the credits roll. Of course we couldn't let the story end on a question mark so with some heavy digging through the Usenet we discovered a 1997 post from Mr. Armstrong that specifically says he's working on WCIV PSX (source!). It's not uncommon for developers not to be credited for their work so it's pretty neat that we can end this story with one more name on Wing Commander IV's roll of honor.