Need something to play before Star Citizen ships? You’re in luck: Good Old Games has today made a piece of Cloud Imperium history available once again! Conquest: Frontier Wars, developed at Chris Roberts’ Digital Anvil studio and helmed by our own Eric “Wingman” Peterson is now available as a digital download for just $5.99. You [...]

With the big reveal just two days away, we thought it would be fun to look back to how the ORIGINAL space combat simulator was announced to the world. What follows is the text of Origin Systems’ 1990 press release for Wing Commander I, which was then called “Wingleader”: Groundbreaking 3-D Graphics Spatially Realistic Stereo [...]

Chris Roberts’ followup to Times of Lore was Bad Blood, developed in 1989 immediately before Wing Commander. Bad Blood is sort of a proto-Fallout which features a very similar post-atomic horror setting and even relies on a similar sense of humor. The biggest difference between Bad Blood and other games of its ilk is that [...]

For the last in our series of Wing Commander film sketches, please enjoy this early draft of the Kilrathi “ComCon” ship. Early on in the movie, Blair and Angel discover the concom while on patrol… and then towards the end of the film the Tiger Claw crew boards him to replenish their fuel supplies. In [...]

After Chris Roberts left Origin Systems in 1997, he founded Digital Anvil. “DA” was intended to fuse Hollywood movie production with video game development on a level beyond even what was being accomplished at Origin. Chris’ first projects were the Wing Commander film… and a game called Starlancer!   Starlancer was a military space sim [...]

Here’s another look at how the Wing Commander movie went from concept to finished film. This is the Tiger’s Claw’s rec room, made famous by the original game as where you interact with your fellow wingmen between missions. In the movie it was where Blair and Maniac first met the Tiger Claw’s complement and then [...]

It’s hard to believe, but the original Wing Commander I turns 22 years old today! On September 26, 1990, the original Wing Commander shipped to stores and started to show an unsuspecting public just how immersive a PC game could be. The “3-D Space Combat Simulator” spawned dozens of immitators and many acclaimed sequels and [...]

Before Freelancer, before Wing Commander and before even Times of Lore there was… King Kong! Chris Roberts sold this, his first game, when he was just thirteen years old! King Kong was what was known as a “type-in program,” meaning that the BASIC code for the game was printed in a magazine for home users [...]

In a letter included in the game’s manual, Chris Roberts famously called Strike Commander the “Apocalypse Now” of computer games. At the time, Strike Commander was far over budget and a year overdue. Getting the game out had been a Herculean task, taking far more blood, sweat and treasure than anyone had ever imagined. But [...]

Here we have a small behind-the-scenes look at the 1999 Wing Commander movie! On the left is the original sketch of the Kilrathi Ralari-class destroyer… and below is the finished model as it appeared in the movie!