Six Legs Were Made For Walking

Here's the Prophecy segment from Syd Mead's Sentury... with a lot of information on the physiology of the Nephilim!

The Electronic Game production environment exploits advances in computing power to achieve 'cinematic' onscreen action and scneic reality. ORIGIN, since absorbed into Electronic Arts, was at the forefront of the game industry with the WING COMMANDER series. Combining excellent graphics, character design and adroit code scripting, the epic series became a stylistic and technical target for the entire electronic game world. I was asked to cooperate with the WCV staff in Austin, Texas in creating some of the fighting ships and characters for the alien 'enemy world. The Aliens, I thought, should incorporate a queasy level of organic growth detail which would look appropriately weird and also indicate an exotic method of manufacture. On the facing page is a fighter ship. The cross section is axially hexagonal. The 'capital ship,' above is immense in story scale, measuring avout fifty kilometers in length. The command level is at the top. The spherical front end opens in an iris-like maw that can spew out hundreds of bio-mechanical fighter ships to form a frightening attack.

Creating the alien characters for WING COMMANDER V was a challenging exercise in combining several morphologies, something I have been doing since childhood. I have always beeen fascinated, for instance, with the mythical horseman creature known as a centaur. The ALien character set had to reflect a hierarchical social and command structure. WHat more natural 'fascistic' model than the colony-mind genetic imperative so elegantly exemplified by ants, bees and wasps. The bottom social order were the solder ALiens following the 'worker bee' and the 'drone' example. A picture of the drone character is on the introduction page (135) of this section. I decided on a six-legged physiology, using the rear set as the primary weight and mobility support. Having thus established a kind of bipedal locomotion, the middle pair of legs became an additional mobility assist when rapid turning or climbing was required. The foreward set became the 'arms' with a kind of hand gesture and grasping function. THe middle hirarchy were the Lieutenants. This level had a vestigial 'royal' carapace growth at the junction of head to thorax. And the 'queen' commander class had an elaborate carapace with distinctive silhouette 'points' on either side of the carapace. To further distinguish these royal variations, only the queens had the additional identifying characteristic of carrying weaponry mounted into the carapace plate. The Wing Commander Series was a DOS/PC game. Since I prefer the technical elemegance of the MacIntosh platform, I have never seen my designs onscreen, nor did I ever recieve any feedback from the Origin group that produced the game.