In the grand tradition of CIC Red (front page), CIC Blue (encyclopedia), CIC Teal (game guides) and CIC Green (ships) comes the newest CIC color - CIC Gray: the Wing Commander Archive. Our goal is to collect as much Wing Commander development and promotional resources as possible - scripts, design layouts, sketches, etc. And to start off the project, we've scanned more than three thousand pages of such documents - including the long awaited Wing Commander Bible and Prophecy Script! You can find it all here.
Like music? Then you may enjoy a grand total of 128 Wing Commander mp3s, many of which have never been heard before! We've got rare licensed tracks from the movie, rare Cobalt 60 promotional tracks... and best of all we've got the entire soundtrack to the original two games, extracted from the Redbook Audio tracks of the rare Japanese FM Towns ports (84 tracks in all)! If you want all these at once, you can get Wing Commander here and Wing Commander 2 here... or you can pick and choose at the new albums page (includes scans of all Wing Commander music CD materials)! We've also arranged all the lyrics to the crazy Prophecy techno music!
Want an idea of what we'll be working on over the next year? Look no further - we're going to be giving the Ships Section a much needed makeover! To show you what we're going for, we've gone ahead and revamped the entire Wing Commander 1 section. Click on to see the Confederation 2.0 and the Kilrathi 2.0 - now with writeups, accurate specifications and cool artwork!
Tolwyn of the Wing Commander Saga mod has digitized high resolution versions of both the original Wing Commander 3 trailer and the fantastic Wing Commander 3 Making of video! I remember standing outside a Babbages window staring at that trailer as it looped over and over... these videos came out really well - they certainly put our old Wing Commander 3 Making of RM to shame!
Wing Commander 3 Making Of (290mb)
Wing Commander 3 Trailer XXL (66mb)
Dedicated readers may remember several months back when I revealed the story of the Warrior King - possibly the strangest crossover in TV history (and the only one involving Wing Commander). Basically, Star Trek's Michael Dorn played a 'warrior king' who travelled between all four of USA's saturday morning cartoons... starting in Street Fighter and ending in Wing Commander Academy. In the past, we've only offered the Wing Commander portion of the story for download... but thanks to PAL DVDs and eBay dubs the entire crossover is now available to you!
Part One - Street Fighter ("The Warrior King") - here
Part Two - Savage Dragon ("Endgame") - here
Part Three - Mortal Kombat ("Resurrection") - here
And thanks to Killer for once again hosting high resolution Academy files! You're the best!
And as always, you can find Wing Commander Academy's Recreation episode (the conclusion to the crossover) here. Relive the entire epic (?) saga (?) yourself! All three episodes are encoded in DivX ;-) 5.11 and weigh in at about 200 megabytes each.
The long awaited Wing Commander Saga trailer is here! The video clocks in at 2:28 and shows off some pretty darned impressive ships and their environments - fans of the Wing Commander III designs and that game's style of CGI animation will not be disappointed (fans of Blackmane-style starbases, however, might not enjoy the opening sequence)! You can download it here (29mb). Good job, guys! Here's their official announcement:
The teaser trailer the WC Saga team did last year's CIC Birthday was met with good feedback,
but the biggest criticism was that there wasn't any plot to go with the FX, it was just a
bunch of gameplay footage. Well, that's going to change starting now.
This is the new Wing Commander Saga teaser trailer, with a strong emphasis on our flagship
campaign, set in the events of Wing Commander 3. We made cutscenes and dialogue in a style that was of the Wing Commander 3 teaser trailer from way back.
Stuff to say upfront: with the exception of the very last scene, everything is straight from
the in-game engine. All the voices have been recorded by Saga voice actors and not ripped
from Freespace 2. Music is just for trailer purposes only, it won't be in the actual game.
The Reckoning's Bob McDob checks in with an artsy reinterpretation of the final losing scene of Wing Commander III. He'd darned well better animate Pepper crushing someone's skull for next year!
Tolwyn has been busy in his video encoding lab: he's also made available new, higher resolution versions of many of the Wing Commander III 'lost scenes'! Here's the list:
Tolwyn of Wing Commander Saga has submitted a second video for your consideration - but this one doesn't involve the FreeSpace 2 conversion. Phoenix, of the cancelled Rebel Assault Project, made this cool video of Lance's attacking a Kilrathi starbase. It weighs in at 1:55 minutes... you can grab it here (3.86 megs).
#WingNut regular/talented artist (how's that for an epitaph?) Filler has made us some neat birthday wallpaper:
He also did the cool 'balloon' CIC logo you see at the top of this page! Thanks, Filler!
After taking a two year break to retool and refresh ourselves, the latest edition of the CIC Mail Bag has been released! You might not believe but, but each and every email is real. Visit here to see what's new.
Sorry for the very late publication of the Dragon*Con 2003 Gallery. The problem this year was with the number of pictures we had to sort through after the convention. In 2004 we will be fixing this by doing nightly full galleries, so we're be ready to go shortly after the convention ends. Because the 2003 pictures will soon be out of date, we've decided to publish as-is. This just means we have less comments than we'd like, but we've mostly purged the duplicate shots and blurry images. It's a lot of fun to see.
Viper61 has provided another exciting taste of the Wing Commander Saga mod for FreeSpace 2, with a sample of the fiction he's writing for the game! Here's what he has has to say about about it: "This is about a third of the fiction between two missions and was chosen for release as it has no relavance to the actual story line. This is just to wet appetites and to give people an idea of what to expect from Saga storyline-wise." You can download it in pdf form here (80k). For my money, it's very well done - thanks, Saga Team!
Poor Raptor wasn't able to make tonight's party, but he sent us through this little present: Holding The Line chapters 188 and 189!
Hey all, Raptor here
In honour of the CIC's birthday, we're presenting an HTL double header,
parts three and four of "Loud And Clear". As you've seen previously, a
combined strike by three Confederation carrier groups has taken out an enemy
dreadnaught and decimated its escorting battlegroup. The Nephilim are not
beaten yet however, and are more than capable of hitting back. As before,
these chapters are brought to you by the teamwork of Joe "Wraith" Guida of
the Yorktown battlegroup, the Auriga writing team, and Shaun Rashid of the
TCS Endeavour. Please send any and all comments Joe at
captpowell1@earthlink.net, and he'll pass them along to his fellow writers.
Part Three is at: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~theraj/archives/ch188.htm
Part Four is at: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~theraj/archives/ch189.htm
I also want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the good work done by
the CIC. It's been close to a decade since the last official WC product was
released, and by all rights the WC community should either be dead or
consist of a few people getting together to wax nostalgic about the "good
old days". Instead, we've got mods like Unknown Enemy, WC Saga and Standoff
(to name just a few) which are new WC games in all but name, we've got HTL
approaching novel trilogy length, we've got RPGs, websites and fan made
reference sources galore. And central to all that has been the CIC and its
staff, who have supported the community generously with time, knowledge and
resources. Happy birthday, and many happy returns.
Best, Raptor
Thought you'd heard the last of the Wing Commander Saga team tonight? Not by a longshot! They've also done this fantastic movie-intro inspired wallpaper to promote the release of their game. It's available in either 1280x960 or 1024x768 format!
Freelancer narrowly beat Freespace in our previous poll, each getting close to a third of the vote. If you combine the scores for Freelancer and Starlancer they win by a good margin.
This time we'd like to know how long you've been a Wing Commander fan. Previous polls can be found here. You can send any poll suggestions to news@wcnews.com.
Cyberion has made everyone some neat Confederation logo wallpaper in honor of the CIC's birthday. Thanks a lot! It really makes for a nice, simple, elegant windows background... and it makes me hungry for sponge cake for some reason. Grab it in 1280x960 and 1024x768 formats!
Thanks for playing our quick summer trivia game! It went fast, but many people worked very hard to squeeze out answers each week. Coordinator TC had this to say
I would like to thank all of you who participated in our shortened game. We had many knowledgeable fans, and some close scores, both of which made for an entertaining game. Congratulations to Black Joker, Bob McDob, Tolwyn, and Viper61, for answering every question correctly. Prizes for our four winners, and a number of other participants, were awarded during the birthday celebrations in #Wingnut. Details will be posted here, and in the news, shortly.
We're currently giving prizes to the winners in #Wingnut. Official listings will be posted soon.
... thanks to CasperXJ, the CIC's Unofficial Baker! Here's this year's Wing Commander Combat Information Center Delicious Cake (WCCICDC):
Bob McDob has sent us five pretty screenshots from the Reckoning mod for Digital Anvil's Freelancer. They show off Perry, New Constantinople, Bearcats and more! Check them out:
The Wing Commander Saga mod has released these rendered screenshots of their new WC3-style corvette model - which they've named Kamrani-class in deference to the Unknown Enemy mod. That's some nice team work - and one hell of a model!
There's even more from Tolwyn of the Wing Commander Saga. He's updated Wing Commander 3D six new models. The models include two Arrow Vs (in regular and pirate varieties, an F-86 Hellcat V, a F-66 Thunderbolt VII, a Fralthi II cruiser and a H'var Kann-class dreadnought! Check them out!
I'd like to welcome everyone to the Wing Commander Combat Information Center's sixth birthday celebration. It's really hard for me to believe that we've been doing this for more than half a decade... or that it's been so long since we were eagerly anticipating Secret Ops and the movie. It's even more amazing to me that after all these years we've managed to hold on to a community. Not just hold on to, but we've built a community that's better and stronger than it has ever been before.
I know a lot of people will tell you that Wing Commander is dead -- but look around. It's been six years since Secret Ops came out, and we still get as many visitors each day at the CIC as we did back then. We still get as many posts to the chat zone each day. We still get as many new users impressed with the games. EA might not realize it yet - it might be years before they really get it again - but Wing Commander won't die.
So, lets take a moment to recognize the people out there keeping Wing Commander and Wing Commander fandom alive. The CIC is just a small part of all this - we're a skeleton that helps keep this together, but we wouldn't be anything without the efforts of literally hundreds and hundreds of people around the world.
Certainly, nothing is higher profile than the big Wing Commander mods - Standoff, Saga, Reckoning, Unknown Enemy, Fleet Action and all the others. I'll tip my glass to any one of them - you're consumate, dedicated professionals with a damned noble goal. Hell, any group of people who can make Freespace look good deserves all the fame in the world.
And thanks to all the communities out there! The alt.games.wing-commander newsgroup, the Ace's Club, #Wing-Commander on the DALnet, WC Revival, WingCenter and the CIC's own Chat Zone. Nothing makes us remember Wing Commander like getting together and making real friends out of love and respect for the games. I've met my best friends in the world because of online Wing Commander groups.
And to some of the unsung heroes: the guys out there volunteering their free time running tech support at the forums and elsewhere. Helping people run the games in modern Windows and fix their Prophecy sound acceleration problems is a tireless, thankless job that only a handfull of people are smart enough to do... but in my mind it keeps the games alive and shows the spirit of the community better than anything else. I'm in awe of the effort you guys put in - thanks.
I know it's been a hard year - Origin's office in Austin was a big symbol to everyone that a new Wing Commander project could appear at any time. It was a big loss for us and for gaming and culture in general for EA to close it. I asked Chris Roberts to comment on the situation, and this is the response he sent me:
Its really sad, but the writing was on the wall once both Richard and I had left as there really weren't any strong creative wills left to drive the company or the worlds that Richard and I had created. It is doubly sad as I still love the Wing Commander world and on more than one occasion have told EA that I would be willing to shepherd / create another Wing Commander for EA - especially given what could be done with the state of the current technology - It has advanced significantly where I think I could really push the story telling and immersion into the world of the Confederation and the Kilrathi to a level never seen before... The sticking point has always been one of control... I'm not willing to be an in-house employee of EA in order to make another WC. I have offered to create the game with a team of free-lancers as an outside developer, but I think EA are a little worried about investing a large amount (which another WC would take) into an outside developer that they didn't have full control of.
Who knows, EA may change their mind and I would be happy to put a team together to make one more WC for everybody, but in the meantime I'm pretty busy with all my film exploits that have being going pretty well.
Hope all is well with you and thanks again for everything you've (and your team at WCNEWS) have done for Wing Commander... It's very cool to see something that started out as a rough idea in my head at the end of 1988 / beginning of 1989 still stay with people 15 years later... Its why I started making games in the first place...
He's still out there - so are lots of other developers who love the series - and we're still here. Lets see what the next year brings.
Anyway, stick around, we've got some pretty neat prizes to give out and some big updates to the CIC that I hope you'll all enjoy!
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