Happy Birthday alt.games.wing-commander!

The CIC is has a happy anniversary to celebrate today! The old alt.games.wing-commander Usenet newsgroup turns 15 years old! We picked May 18 as its birthday many years ago, although the exact date varies due to how it propagated through various systems and got picked up by different service providers. Check out the charter document that initiated things on April 26, 1995. At its peak in 1998 and 1999, agwc typically saw several hundred Wing Commander-themed posts per day, and it's great to see how quite a few of the original posters are still kicking around today.

Many of our newer visitors will be unfamiliar with how a newsgroup worked. Before the world wide web and anything resembling a modern forum existed, Usenet represented a part of the internet where people could post messages and engage in discussion. There was no owner or moderator, and the participates rallied around their group subjects in an early ancestor of "social networks." Rules were built by consensus and posted at regular intervals in a FAQ. Many of the messages themselves have been archived here by Google, although the default formatting looks a little weird.

Happy Birthday agwc!

What is Wing Commander?

Wing Commander is a game from Origin that has revolutionized computer games with every release. It combines arcade-style action with flight simulation, and augments the usually -dimensional genre with a fully realised science fiction world and a plot.

What is this group for?

This group is for discussion of the Wing Commander universe. This includes but is not limited to:

• Installing and configuring the games (often as much of a challenge as playing them!)
• Playing the games
• overall strategy, how to win
• winning individual missions in games
• general piloting techniques
• Story, "meta" discussion of the world of Wing Commander, including fan fiction.