New WC Easter Egg Revealed!

Hello fellow Wing Commander fans and happy 21st birthday to the Wing Commander CIC! Thank you everyone for continuing to make this a fun and thriving community to be apart of!

I'm continually amazed at the new creations made by fans or even finding new things in the original Wing Commander games. However, it isn't too often that a new easter egg presents itself, even after 25+ years. Today, in celebration of the CIC's birthday, I share an exciting new finding, a previously undiscovered easter egg in Wing Commander: The Secret Missions for SNES!

Below I will go over some of the highlights in discovering the easter egg, but if you just want to dive right in and see the easter egg yourself, you can watch the video provided or follow these instructions:

1- On the title screen, select "Continue Campaign"
2- Then enter "ACE" as the handle and "05HMY8?PVR" for the code

In addition, you can also use a SNES Game Genie and input the following code: DB68-C402. You can then start a new campaign, enter a handle of your choosing, and access the easter egg that way. You can then talk with Shotglass or go to the Briefing Room to enjoy some fun dialog. A quick note is that after the briefing is over, the ship launch sequence may glitch a bit and cause some graphics to quickly flash (please be warned for those sensitive to flashing lights!). You may also be taken to the TrainSim for a "fake" mission as there is no official mission for this easter egg.

As for the story behind discovering the easter egg, it is a long and technical one but a story I may share in more detail one day. For now, I will detail some of the highlights. I was one day looking through The Secret Missions' binary data and noticed something odd. There was a text string in the data, specifically referencing a "Town Meeting" that didn't seem to be from any Wing Commander game. The game's text pertaining to conversations with Shotglass, your fellow pilots, and mission briefings are encoded in the data thus making it more difficult to get some context behind this mysterious text. One idea I thought of is maybe this is a hidden series in the game. The Secret Missions game has 8 total series, 7 on the winning path and 1 on the losing path. I wondered to myself if this could possibly be a hidden "9th" series in the game. In addition, I came across some old Game Genie codes that allowed you to choose which series you started with. With the help of these Game Genie codes, I was able to create a new code, DB68-C402, that would start you at the 9th series. To my surprise, it actually worked and discovered this easter egg!

However, I wondered if there might be an easier way to get access to this secret as not everyone has access to a Game Genie (although emulation could be an option). I got some assistance from an anonymous source about how to get access another way. It was through this assistance that using the handle "ACE" and code "05HMY8?PVR" provided an alternate way to the easter egg. The wonderful thing about this is that no Game Genie code is required! My thanks to this source for their help!

Anyway, I hope you really enjoy this easter egg as much as I did! It just shows that there may be many more hidden discoveries to find in other games! Once again my thanks to this community and I look forward to new creations and discoveries in the years to come!

-Music_guru