Welcome to the Twenties! That feels so very weird to type. As we step into a whole new decade, we'll take one more look back today at all of the wonderful things that happened in the world of Wing Commander in 2019. It was another big year! First up, here's the recap of the news:
Right off the bat, it was a time of discovery as we learned new things. We finally figured out what the mystery fighter in Academy was intended to be and added a couple of the show's scripts to the archive. A tantalizing bit of phonetic script was discovered in the Secret Missions and a fun easter egg in SNES SM1. And shockingly, a new Wing Commander game was released in Japan! Wing Commander Arena finally debuted on the Xbox 360 in January after almost 12 years in limbo. In February, LOAF and Dundradal kicked off the first season of All Wings Considered, the CIC's weekly streaming variety show. The team produced over a hundred hours of content across 34 episodes and will be back soon for the second season! They also penned a new WC vs History on the subject of Broadswords, which was a welcome return of the feature.
In physical product news, Origin artist Denis Loubet 3D printed the Pewter Planet and we added some exotic Japanese SWC 3DO stickers to the collection. On the musical front, George Oldziey's WC Jazz Album shipped and WC music was once again performed by a Swedish orchestra. Wing Commander footage was also included in a new music video by GUNSHIP and even appeared in an advertisement for Progressive insurance. The Wing Commander Movie also started to make its way back into digital distribution on Redbox, Google Play, Fandango Now and VUDU after the rights transfer from FOX to Chris Roberts.
We heard from a lot of major industry professionals who reminisced about Wing Commander. The founder of Raylight Games, Massi Di Monda, wrote an article about how integral Prophecy was to the growth of their company. MMO luminary Starr Long mentioned that they haven't forgotten about the series and keep pinging EA now and then about access to the Wing Commander license. Ginger Lynn Allen dug up her Prophecy uniform and posted it for auction, and the founders of Moby Games talked about WC was the third game added to the site. The second Moongate Origin history book also successfully crowdfunded with a variety of WC perks.
It was a big year for anniversaries. The WC Movie turned 20, Armada turned 25 as did WC3. The CIC's own 21st Birthday was fully livestreamed for the first time with much of the CIC Staff in the same place. The Sony Playstation also turned 25.
This was a good time for tying up loose ends. LOAF finally found the source for all the German Wing Commander novel cover arts, and we found out about a new canceled WC3 port for the Jaguar. Similarly, we got word on what's up with the Wing Commander CCG boxed set that was never released. Multiple CCG artists also posted samples of their original card artwork. The CIC Head Museum got a huge facelift too! Sadly, we lost a few people who were influential to Wing Commander, including Owen Garriott and Sid Mead just this week.
Fan Projects were huge once again. This is just an extremely cursory review, since you could easily write a whole article on a dozen different projects in active operation right now. We'll cover them in slightly more depth soon when we kick off our annual contest. AircPirateNinsei's actual flying Hornet was an incredible example of physical WC arts, and RetroRat's awesome diorama was super cool too. These were followed by Maverick's nifty papercraft cruiser. Mav also put together a playable tabletop game, and the folks over at Gemini Sector had a lot of fun playing their RPG too.
Digital artists were working overtime with Defiance Industries pumping out no less than a dozen stellar models. Klavs was back with a Waterloo and Hornet, plus Dark Sentinel branched out into Kilrathi. So many of these awesome Wingnut creators help each other and work interdependently. Arne's Android Arts created a wide range of creative sketches that eventually inspired Howard Day's tremendous Wing Leader up-rez take on the WC1 engine. We're not sure how he found the time to work on that while pushing Rebel Galaxy Outlaw out the door at the same time! Many of Defiance's ships made it into a big Prophecy & Secret Ops Model Upgrade Pack release, which was itself bolstered by gr1mre4per's Prophecy Unlimited technical coding upgrades.
UnnamedCharacter made lots of technical discoveries in the WC1 engine, which supported improvements to Goliath's WC1 Sprite Refresh. Somehow L.I.F. manages to juggle multiple major project releases. He put out a big update to the Homeworld mod while creating and releasing an entire Freelancer mod on the side. The WC4 Fan Remake made great strides this year, and Centaurianmudpig got his shooter further off the ground. KrisV and the gang FINALLY fixed Prophecy multiplayer too. The series of original WC visual novels by SonataFanatica was also a favorite of mine.
Thank you all for another fantastic year. We can't wait to see what 2020 has in store!
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