My brother recently sent me a pretty fascinating question: is there a Wing Commander TCTG card in Starship Troopers (1997). He included an image where you can see cards stick to the wall to the left of the viewscreen in the camp barracks.
It does, indeed, look very similar to a Wing Commander card! Compare it, for instance, to this Hellcat V. Did the art department maybe take one and replace the fighter with a Heinlein-era rocket?
That's not the craziest connection to make, either. Troopers' lead, Casper Van Dien, was in fact good friends with Wing Commander's Mark Hamill and his family. That's why he had a cameo in the Wing Commander IV intro! Confed Redshirt #3:
The timeline works out, too. The Wing Commander TCTG was developed by a company called Mag Force 7 and released in August 1995. It's based mostly on WC3. Meanwhile, Starship Troopers' principal shoot was over the summer in 1996.
But it's not a WC card! I quickly realized that it's something even weirder: a STAR OF THE GUARDIANS card. Star of the Guardians is a completely original IP that started as a 1990 book trilogy by Margaret Weis.
It's so original that there was even a spinoff series about the group of weird looking bounty hunters that appear in one of them! (I actually love SotG, but the book packagers knew exactly what they were doing.)
And here's the WC connection: Ms. Weis founded Mag Force 7 to develop the SotG card game in 1994. Designers Jeff Grubb and Don Perrin developed the LANE-to-LANE Combat System for SotG… which was then used for their second game, Wing Commander!
There are actually two SotG cards visible in the Starship Troopers barracks if you're trying to recreate Camp Currie:
So why is it set dressing? Likely because the cards were extremely cheap! SotG scored massive preorders with retailers as the 'first' SF CCG to come in the wake of the Magic craze. Huge amounts of cards were printed.
But the combination of an IP no one knew and the quick arrival of games like Decipher's Star Trek meant there was very little interest. By the time they were shooting SST, packs were available everywhere for pennies apiece. They are, in fact, still readily available cheap today!
The massive overprinting of SotG inadvertently killed Wing Commander, too. Distributors were wary to order and the game ended up extremely hard to find. Mag Force 7 ended up running ads like this to try to let people know they could buy directly it.
Mag Force 7 was sold and sadly neither of their games were continued. The designers went on to adapt LANE-to-LANE for one more game, a largely forgotten Star Trek TOS game from Skybox (from the time when TOS and TNG were separate, competing card licenses).
Here's another shot where the cards are visible. I suspect the other similarly sized cards are also contemporary game shop overstock… but we'll need a nerd with a different hyperfixation if we want to identify them.
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