Web Mirrors

Welcome to the CIC's Web Mirror section.

Here is where we preserve the official Wing Commander websites that have gone offline.

wingcommanderprophecy.com

Origin's wingcommanderprophecy.com. RealMovie video interviews are missing, but navigation has been restored. In the news: August 11, 2007.

prophecygold.com

A single page from www.prophecygold.com.

Privateer Online intranet site, version 1

Origin's internal Privateer Online site used to pitch the game to executives.

Privateer Online intranet site, version 2

A different incarnation of Origin's internal Privateer Online website. This one borrows the ICIS layout from the official Wing Commander Prophecy website.

origin.ea.com WC4 section

Bits and pieces of Origin's pre-release website for Wing Commander IV have been recovered. See individual news updates for details. The Story So Far, Wrap party pictures, Guns and missiles data.

origin.ea.com/tech

Origin's excellent Tech Support site, covering Abuse to Wings of Glory.

wingcommander.gms.lu

The official Wing Commander Movie site from the Carousel Picture Company.

introspect.wa.net/wchs

The Wing Commander Home Sector is the CIC predecessor. Daily news, feature articles, fan developed content and more.

destinationsoftwareinc.com

Destination Software Inc's official ICIS-style website for the Prophecy Gameboy Advance port.

raylight.it

Raylight's official website for the Prophecy Gameboy Advance port.

www.wcnews.com

The left-most image shows the original layout we launched with on August 10, 1998 with a few elements added shortly thereafter. Similar to the menu design we employed previously at WCHS, we had a really cool javascript mouseover menu effect. We managed to recreate this in CSS today. In those early days, there was so much content to add and keep up with that we had an update ticker with a timestamp!

In these early days, the site sections that we had were rapidly evolving, and those little menu graphics weren't as easy to make as they would be today. So not long after we launched, we switched over to a simplified menu that had a nice header graphic and text links to the various sections.

Over the next year or so, we'd also added an Up and Coming space right above the news to highlight all the real world and fictional events that were approaching on the calendar. Below the first day's news we added an eBay ticker to highlight the next five auctions based on ending dates. Today there's all manner of calendar software and tracking apps that would easily allow people to customize and execute these types of functions, but that kind of stuff was still in its infancy here, so we were providing a useful service.

By late 2000, some WC game cancellations prompted us to add an inspirational quote (first from Tolwyn, then from Chris Roberts). We added a news search for the growing news archive as well as a login for the Crius.net email service we briefly provided. The staff list continued to grow, and this shot shows the funny melting snowman we featuring during the winter. This was also the last layout designed specifically to support 640x480 resolutions. By this time, 800x600 and 1024x768 were becoming more popular, but there was still a segment of the audience that was on the lower res. This is why so many old web designs appear to be pencil thin against a wide background today.

In 2001 we introduced the dual side menu layout. This is when we added the new forum post menu (which we still have today), although back then the forums were hosted at our Crius.net spinoff site since it was more practical to have several different domains/servers to balance the load back then. This general design persisted for more than a decade, so a lot of visitors grew very accustomed to it even as web standards changed and got flashier over the years.