Very rare WCP promo item, circa 1997

NickScalan

Spaceman
Hello.

My name is Nick Scalan. I used to hang out in the chat room many years ago. I was also a QA tester for Origin in Austin during the development of Wing Commander Prophecy 1997 and worked tech support in 1998 until EA shut down the support groups at the various developers and moved it all to San Mateo.

Since then I went to work for Dell and have been there for 10+ years, got married to a beautiful woman and had a wonderful little boy, who just turned 5.

I was going through some boxes of old game stuff I had collected while at Origin and through other sources.

One thing I found were two old Wing Commander Prophecy bottled waters. Yes, you read that right, WCP bottled water. See the attached photos

These were bottles that the Origin/EA marketing people had a label printed up and they stuck on the bottles. I believe they passed them out at game/entertainment conference. After the conference the leftovers were brought back to Origin in Austin and just passed out to whoever wanted them. Some people just opened them and drank them, but I saved them and NEVER opened them

It was a carbonated flavored water and the carbonation has since leaked out and has made the walls of the bottle collapse in to give it that squared look you see. The bottles are about 6 inches(15 cm) tall and hold about 8 ounces(.24 liters) of water.

Since it has been over 10 years since Wing Commander Prophecy shipped, i'm trying to test the waters(no pun intended) to see if a rare item like this would be of interest to any die-hard collectors, if I were to put it up on ebay. I've never worked ebay on the selling end, only buying, and am looking for suggestions anyone may have.

Thanks,

Nick "Dorado/Marlin/No backup" Scalan
nickscalan@sbcglobal.net
 

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That could possibly be one of the most rarest WC memorabilia items ever. . . problem is that it lacks a certain sense of cool that actually makes an item memorable. Go figure.

-SK
 
Since then I went to work for Dell and have been there for 10+ years, got married to a beautiful woman and had a wonderful little boy, who just turned 5.


Marlin! It's great to hear from you! I always wondered what became of you -- this is all great news. Congratulations!

One thing I found were two old Wing Commander Prophecy bottled waters. Yes, you read that right, WCP bottled water. See the attached photos

Prophecy Water! I've been in love with it for years -- Captain Johnny showed us a picture back when it was new... it's just such an amazingly weird promotion, the sort of artifact you can't help but be interested in. I'm not much of a collector anymore, but I'd certainly bid on these. It's hard to guess what it's worth, but I'll say probably around $100. I'll get it that high myself, anyway. :)

There is a bottle of Prophecy water in Joe Garrity's Origin Museum, which came from Billy Cain's garage. Yours may be the last sealed ones, though!

Other guy:
How much would it take for someone to print out some labels and stick them to some water?

I'm going to say that it would take four things, each increasingly difficult to obtain.

- The label. You would need to know the paper type, the dimensions and to have print-resolution graphics of the three logos. Origin and Wing Commander Prophecy are easy enough, but the fancy spring water explosion probably requires some photoshoppery.

- The bottle. Wing Commander Prophecy watter bottles are weird looking. They're short and blue-tinted and aren't like the sort you would just go buy at Target. I'm sure there's a source for them, but the project would require some more serious water battle research (you also probably need to age it somehow, since all the Prophecy water I've seen is slightly crushed today).

- Motive. Why the heck would you do that in the first place? If you want the collectable for yourself then you'll know it's worthless... if you want to profit off of it then it's a pretty wacky scheme. The difficulty and the potential number of sales has got to be respectively vastly higher and lower than bootlegging autographs or software.

- Provenance. The real story here is that you're buying the Prophecy water from someone who was there and who has a story that goes with them, not that you're purchasing old water.
 
Speak for yourself.

Okay, okay, I've got to admit that if I somehow wound up with two bottles of ten year old flavored Prophecy water, I would probably open and drink one of them. The flavor was not reviewed favorably when they were new, IIRC. :)

(We'd probably have to bring back our live streaming video news report service for that, too.)
 
Yeah, I used to have one or two of these..

I want to say that they were made for one of the European trade shows..

I would also like to say that they taste AWFUL! Like, unsweetened-orange-flavored-mineral-water kind of awful..

I think they also may have been packaged with a tiny micro-black-hole in each bottle.. as every bottle I have ever seen looks like it has begun to slowly collapse in upon itself..

but perhaps that is just the effect of the incredibly sucky flavor and not a balck-hole?

Truely, I think the bottle of water and dirt I smuggled back from Loch Ness may taste better than these things..

Or I may be exaggerating a bit.. who knows..

-Capn :D
 
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