We may have taken our time to get here this year, but Wingnuts have cast their votes and we now have the winners of our annual fan project contest! We once again had an excellent slate of nominees but a handful of undertakings rose above the rest. Sometimes we also have so many high achieving projects that it's not clear we have one winner, so we end up with multiple top selections. This year is one of those cases! So without further ado:
Our first winner for Fan Project of the Year 2024 is WC4 Remastered! Excitement remains high for the fan remake of The Price of Freedom, and the steady drumbeat of comprehensive updates gives Wingnuts high confidence that their patience will be rewarded (in about a year)!
Our second top spot is taken by the combination of AllTinker's two contenders: Originator and Confederation! The Originator tool is a phenomenal program used far and wide to hack into WC code to learn its secrets and extract assets for modern projects. The Confederation endeavor is quasi-related undertaking that leverages this kind of knowledge to enhance Wing Commander 1 with modern updates while retaining the original charm.
We try not to overload the winners' circle, but there were two compelling nominees that were neck and neck here as well. First up is Mash's WC3 Enhancement Patch! If you haven't tried this yet, you're missing out! After 30 years, Mash finally cracked the code to get The Heart of the Tiger playing in modern high resolutions with the addition of ODVS' high quality movies. Don't miss it!
Finally, Mac's Lore Videos/Art had a very strong showing this year as well! Wingnuts love his comprehensive WC videos, but there's also plenty of wallpapers and other treats sprinkled between the longer form content to keep people excited.
Congratulations to all! And 2025 is already off to a great start, so we can't wait to see what the rest of the year brings!
But wait, there's more! For the first time, we also asked fans to vote this year for the greatest fan projects of all time. We reached back into nearly thirty years of community history to come up with five worthy contenders. This was a very interesting experiment in nostalgia and recognition, and while every nominee was evocative in its own way, the results speak for themselves:
Perhaps with little surprise, we are happy to announce our Hall of Fame winner is Klavs! It's been not quite a year since Adam Burch's passing, although we can say definitely that this untimely shock was not the reason for his boost in the polls. Rather, his decades of dedicated service to the community and legacy of assets left to the fans make him a clear winner. Once again, Klavs, we salute you.
We weren't aiming to give a runner up for this, but through the vote tallies and discussions with the community, it became clear that we did have a strong second place award to give. HCl is our runner up Hall of Famer! Mario Brito is also a legendary contributor whose programming exploits formed the backbone of the Wing Commander modding and patching scene in the late '90s and 2000s. Projects to this day continue to build on the work he's done. Well deserved here as well!
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