"Sorry boys, I'm just a tourist with a fried nav console."The legendary TARSUS from Wing Commander Privateer is the latest addition to my shipyard workshop. I hope you'll enjoy flying this beast!
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Crash (1996) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
The Wing Commander movie club is back from our vacation to Westworld and, well, there are still a few bugs to be worked out. The movie holds up very well, it's still tremendously fun. Objectively, you recognize that it isn't much of a story as over half the run time is devoted to setting up the world and explaining how the theme park works… but subjectively, that's the fun part and Michael Crichton made exactly the right choice focusing on what's actually most interesting here. And after so many somber British war movies, its breezy sub-90-minute run time was certainly a nice feature!
We already talked about Michael Crichton's star system in the intro post so there's not a lot more to say about Westworld's connection to Wing Commander! We did manage to find one almost-reference: hidden in Privateer 2's data is a list of ships for an earlier version of the booth database which is totally different from anything in the game... and it includes one seemingly named after Westworld's Gunslinger. Here's the complete list, which deserves further study; very few of these made it into the final game!
Adrilak
Airhead
Alpha
Aswan
Aurora
Baldesh
Bigfoot
Bikila
Blackdog
Blackfire
Blask
Borrealis
Brave
Canberra
Chaos
Cloc
Cygnus
Danrik
Defector
Dionysus
Dogstar
Doppelganger
Drakkar
Dreamstate
Duress
Eclipse
Eradicator
Excalibur
Eye Of The Storm
Faldari
Famagusta
Flipside
Freij
Funkbuster
Garios
Gazar
Geek
Geo
Glutino
Gunslinger
Headfirst
Helter Skelter
Heretic
Herima
Hyppolita
Icarus
Ilia
Iron horse
Isaoko
Jendevi
Jinter
Judar
Kabaka
Kalrechi
Kalthike
Karnene
Kassar
Ketra
Kitrum
Lady Of The Lake
Lazarus
Liberty
Lima
Lionheart
Lucitania
Masrada
Miguez
Ogan
Olura
Olympus
Omega
Papagos
Patriot
Police Ship Sweeney
Presto
Red Dragon
S.S. Amelia
S.S. Ballistic
S.S. Caroline
S.S. Manchester
S.S. Manhattan
Salvia
Scarecrow
Shadowcaster
Shaman
Skeces
Sledgehammer
Sundog
Tempest
Titania
Trigo
Trojan Horse
Vacuum Oasis
Varjner
Veldor
Velecia
Vetrece
Victor
Vindicator
Violator
White Lightning
Yabar
Yackard
Zeus
Zion
And you can come up with your own Wing Commander I joke for this one! (We just call him Maniac?)
Last month, we published an article cataloging the wings worn by Wing Commander's various fighter pilots. We failed to include one pretty important reference: Jazz's wings from Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi! You may remember that these wings played an important role in Wing Commander II's treason mystery and as a result got their own closeup shot! When Jazz shoots Specialist McGuffin for discovering his communications with the Kilrathi, McGuffin grabs his wings as he dies. Jazz then steals Stingray's wings and he is blamed for the murder (until Sparks provides an alibi). Of course, as we pointed out in the initial article there's not a clear place on the Wing Commander II duty uniforms where wings are worn! But the scene provides a great look at them:
In case you aren't familiar with the joke about this scene, Specialist McGuffin is named after the idea of a "MacGuffin" which is a word used by writers for something that motivates a story but isn't necessarily important to it in any other way. The joke being that he appears only for this scene, which moves Wing Commander II's story forward. The term was first used by screenwriter Angus MacPhail and was popularized by famed director Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The Wikipedia quotes his explanation from a 1939 lecture:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?" And the other answers, "Oh, that's a MacGuffin." The first one asks, "What's a MacGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers, "Well then, that's no MacGuffin!" So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.
A BlueSky user named revenant was recently noodling around with the SNES port of Wing Commander and made a pretty exciting discovery and a cool tool for taking a closer look at the game's assets! Revenant turned ROMs of the two surviving SNES ports into in flight object viewers that let you explore the in-game background layers, essentially letting you scroll through the different ships and objects stored in the game! Their first thread starts here.
completely pointless activity of the week: hacking a Mode 7 object viewer into the janky SNES port of wing commander
(d-pad cycles objects/frames, start button exits)
right now this only shows the 'up close' frames for ingame objects (which are background layers rather than the sprites used for distant objects)
also the displayed names of objects come from the list of text strings which doesn't always match the actual object - i.e. unused Venture graphics are called Hornet, and some non-ship objects show names of expansion-only ships instead
These text strings, which include Spikeri and Snakeir (a corvette cut from the original game and the Kilrathi carrier from Secret Missions 2) seem to suggest that the SNES version at least started with the PC codebase! You can download the viewer ROMs below and explore them using your preferred SNES emulator:
These tools are, on their own, fascinating. I am so excited to get this small look into the SNES ports, which is something I'd love to see more of; wouldn't it be cool to explore Wing Commander Prophecy GBA or the Sega CD port of the original? Or more SNES material! And I had not realized how close to the bone some of the cuts were; for instance, capital ships in the SNES version have five angles each instead of 37! Compare the Lumbari across both versions of The Secret Missions:
But the viewers led to something even more interesting being revealed: a graphic logo labeled "The Edge of the Universe / No Flash Photos". Huh?! Luckily, revenant was able to discover exactly what it was for: if you travel to the very edge of displayable space, the game displays an 'edge' to the map! From the screenshot it looks like that edge is over 8 million klicks from your starting point... which means you'll need to fly in a straight line at top speed for well over five hours to see this.
But wait, there's more! Revenant checked the Secret Missions SNES and found that not only did it upgrade to a fancier 'edge of the universe' graphic but it included an unusual object: the face of a moustachioed man wearing a helmet labeled GRENO!
From there, they dug into the game to find out what was going on. And the answer was a pretty incredible Easter egg that you can activate on the original hardware if you have a second controller! Here's the original thread.
silly new discovery in the SNES version of Wing Commander: The Secret Missions
pressing L+R+Sel+Start on both controllers at once unlocks "The Really Really Secret Missions", adding a photo to the credits, replacing asteroids w/ former Mindscape CTO David "Greno" Grenewetzki...
...and after completing the game, you get an additional couple of scenes based on what I can only assume is a 100% true story
Wow! The cutscene part of this egg was uncovered several years ago by Music_Guru but his solution involved accessing it directly with an in-game password or Game Genie... so we never saw the asteroids or the alternate introduction! Hard to believe something like that could stay hidden for so long.
This also lets us get a great look at the famous 'green Salthi' Jalthi, so look forward to another update summarizing that story!
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The Wing Commander movie club had a good time with Westworld; it's a movie that spends most of its time just explaining its setup... but that's just fine because that setup is delightful. For this week we asked members to select a type of thriller (as defined by the Wikipedia) from our queue and the surprise winner was the 1996 erotic thriller Crash. It's a David Cronenberg movie about people that are sexually attracted to car crashes, so this should be an interesting one! (You know, Star Trek Discovery star David Cronenberg.) You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along. Please note and plan appropriately: Crash is rated NC-17 for "explicit sex scenes" (but not car crashes?).
Crash is another movie that was used to temp track the 1999 Wing Commander movie. A track from Howard Shore's score, Triton, was chosen to play from Blair's fight with Hunter through to his conversation with Angel in the hallway outside. Truly the definition of a weird pull! Here's the piece:
Where can I find a copy of the movie for the watch party?
Unfortunately, owing to its NC-17 rating Crash is not available for rent or purchase on the standard streaming services. A copy is available for download from the Internet Archive. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on UHD Blu-ray in 2020 and remains in print around the world. If you are not able to locate a copy please stop by the Discord and ping a CIC staff member before Friday's showing.
How do we watch the movie together?
It's pretty low tech! Simply join the Wing Commander CIC Discord on Friday and we will be chatting (in text) along with the film in the main channel. Everyone who wants to join in should bring their own copy and we will count down to play them together at 10 PM EST. Everyone is welcome and we encourage you to join in the conversation; sharing your thoughts helps make the experience better for everyone!
How can I help pick future movie club movies?
The movie club movies are voted on each week by the Wing Commander Discord. The poll is typically posted 24 hours before each week's screening and the next movie is announced at the end. The choices for the poll come from a master pool of Wing Commander-related movies. If you would like to suggest a film for inclusion in that pool you can post it to this thread.
Here's a great story from Privateer 2: The Darkening screenwriter Diane Duane. She posted the entry below as a reply on her Tumblr back in 2013 in response to a social media post about a man being obnoxious about women that play video games. If you aren't familiar with Diane Duane's incredible body of work, she's written for properties ranging from Star Trek (extensively!) to Marvel, Doctor Who, My Little Pony, Gargoyles, X-COM, seaQuest DSV and many others... all in addition to her own original properties like the ongoing Young Wizards. There's a good bet you have something she worked on in your collection right now! Her story has a timeless message and it manages to share some interesting behind-the-screens trivia about our favorite Privateer sequel:
I had to do this once with Privateer II: The Darkening. It gained a bit when he said "I bet you didn't play it through, I bet somebody just told you how..." and I was able to smile gently and say "God, possibly, since I wrote the game." And plainly the Deity was with me that day, as I happened to be carrying docs from my UK agent (who'd done the deal) that showed not only that I was the writer, but the five-figure sum I had been paid. ...It was a happy day for me. Not so much for him. I'd never had a referent for the word "slink" for a full grown male before. As in "slink away in utter dejection." I smiled for at least three days without stopping. And am smiling now...
What's funny is that until reminded just now, that moment had slipped my mind. I don't take any particular pride in smacking down fools. But when the Universe drops them so blatantly in front of me -- it being, as any Sherlock fan knows, rare for it to be so lazy as to stoop to coincidence -- it's the least I can do to cooperate.
...You have to understand that I felt, and still feel, very possessive about that game. It wasn't my first [Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative was] but it was the first time I worked with a really big team [all of whom I liked] and it gave me the opportunity to write for the most amazing cast: Clive Owen, David Warner, John Hurt, Brian Blessed, many other lovely people. [Try getting them all in a movie now.] For this work, though, I got to suffer the pains of Hell in that I spent nearly six weeks [in a couple of tranches] away from Peter, immured near EA UK in a Holiday Inn in Slough. ["OH LOVELY BOMBS COME FALL ON SLOUGH", etc.] It was fun and happy work, but I missed Peter like oxygen. (There were minor compensations, though. On the days when I was in-house at EA, my temp desk was around the corner from Erin Roberts', and the "alert" sound he had running in his computer at that point was the anguished cry of "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man!" from William Shatner's pop-music album of years before, and now I can't ever hear that song without thinking of EA.)
But then after all that work, and the game itself released to not-so-bad reviews (though everybody raved about the footage, the game engine was said forever after to have been a bit buggy, but that wasn't my fault)... then, that afternoon in Oriel (it was a nice bar/restaurant in Sloane Square, gone now alas), remembering the pains that work had cost me -- to have some snotnosed baby-boy gamer in a shiny suit and a cheap tie come try to tell me that I did not understand the game structure that I can still remember whiteboarding for Erin Roberts and the rest of the team...?
I. Think. Not.
#boys #don't own #gaming #now #or ever
It seems like the only way to end this post... is with William Shatner's cover of Mr. Tambourine Man!
Cpt. Streets is back to kick off another cool Wing Commander 3D print project... and this time it's everyone's favorite heavy gun slug, the CF-105 Scimitar! The model is 11.5cm (4.52") long and Streets promises to share more as painting and detailing happens. We're looking forward to it! You can also see their impressive Hornet here.
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Westworld (1973) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
Zulu was a more interesting film than we expected; certainly closer to Lawrence of Arabia than The Dambusters. The production values are spectacular, the story isn't a familiar one to Americans in 2025 and the acting is great. It's a big, bold movie that suffers less because it's a boring war movie and more because it's about the sort of war we no longer find familiar. Wing Commander movie club member bob was the person that found the Zulu reference in Action Stations in the first place and he noted that it's one of his favorite movies. We asked him if he wanted to say a few words about the film... and here they are!:
It's fitting that the line "because we're here" was the impetus to watch Zulu: it sums up the entirety of the film. William Forstchen may have reused it but the contexts could not have been more different. The pilots in Action Stations are fighting for not only their own lives but those of their families and country. The men of the 24th Regiment of Foot have no such noble motives: they're explicitly fighting for themselves and nothing else. They know nobody in this country and they give little thought to their own, except for the Welsh who we possibly learn more about than the Zulus. As for their cause, we can't judge it because the reasons why the war broke out are never explained. No appeals to Empire and the Queen here, or even any mention of them.
And yet despite, or perhaps because of, all this, there's a somber poignancy in the film's final moments. Michael Caine's character, Gonville Bromhead, is an aristocrat from a family of soldiers. At Caine's urging, he was rewritten from the pompous twit he starts out as to a more introspective character, who wishes, as the Zulus first attack, that he was not an officer and a gentleman, but a "damn drinker". And at the very end, surveying the battlefield after the British victory, he chokes out that he feels "sick" and "ashamed". It's not a sentiment that appears much in Forstchen's writing, nor in Wing Commander in general, with the notable exception of Academy.
And here's the scene that Action Stations... borrows...:
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