What I’d really like to do is a game where you could travel from planet to planet — and there would be hundreds of planets — with full 3D action. You could go down and explore each planet in detail and interact with all sorts of live-action characters. Plus you could retool your ship with lots of different guns and engines.
The project would feature all the best elements of adventure and virtual reality, but with the same high production level of a Hollywood blockbuster. That means big-name stars and the look and quality of, say, Bladerunner. I guess my goal is to bring the superior production values of large Hollywood movies into the interactive realm — creating an environment that is really cool and fun and where you can spend hundreds of hours exploring a virtual universe that seems totally lifelike down to the smallest detail. Sort of a SimUniverse on steroids!
— Chris Roberts in early 1995, speaking from the department of The More Things Change…
One thing I believe I have learned during my 50-plus years on this planet is that flawed people are far more commonplace than genuinely, consciously bad ones. Given this, I try not to rush to attribute to malice aforethought that which can be explained by simple human weakness. I try to apply this rule when I weigh the surprising number of game developers who were well-nigh universally admired giants in their field during the twentieth century, only to become magnets for controversy in the 21st.
Thus I prefer to believe that Richard Garriott’s habit of lending his name to sketchy endeavors that never live up to expectations stems not from conscious grift but from a desire to still be seen as a gaming visionary, which is unfortunately accompanied by a reluctance to do the hard work that making really good games entails. Likewise, I think that Peter Molyneux’s habit of wildly over-promising stems not from his being “a pathological liar,” as journalist John Walker once infamously called him, but rather from a borderline pathological tendency to get high on his own supply. I’m prepared to come up with excuses for John Romero, for George Broussard, even for those two guys who have been trying to make a Space Quest successor — a dubiously necessary proposition in itself — for about fifteen years now. When you combine real but fairly venial character flaws with the eternal tendency of some fans to take their hobby just a little bit more seriously than it probably deserves, the result can be a toxic stew indeed.
Yet I must confess that one old warhorse from gaming’s younger days does give a degree of pause to my rationalizing. Few people have ever stretched so thin a thread of actual creative talent so far as has Chris Roberts. In the process, he’s amply demonstrated that his larger talents are for failing upward, and getting people to give him flabbergasting amounts of money while he’s at it. I’m not yet prepared to call him a conscious grifter, mind you, but I do think that there is a lot more plotting going on behind that seemingly guileless chipmunk smile of his than we might first suspect. Never fear: I’m not going to jump the chronology entirely to wade into the argument over whether Star Citizen, the most expensive game ever made even though it has not yet been made, was a giant scam from the start, a good-faith effort that later became a scam, or is still an honest endeavor thirteen years after its initial Kickstarter. What I do want to do is examine the period in Chris Roberts’s life between Wing Commander IV in 1996 and that first splashy Star Citizen Kickstarter of 2012. Who knows? Maybe doing so will help to explain some of what came later.
I have infinite respect for Chris Roberts, who wants to make interactive movies, but I can get a better cinematic experience by watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes than by playing Wing Commander IV.
— Warren Spector, March 1997
In the summer of 1996, after it had become clear that Wing Commander IV was going to struggle just to earn back its development budget of more than $10 million, the management of its publisher Origin Systems sat down with Chris Roberts, the Wing Commander series’s creator and mastermind, to discuss the future of what had been the most popular franchise in computer gaming just a few years earlier. With a heritage like that behind it, the inhabitants of Origin’s executive suites weren’t yet ready to give up on Wing Commander completely. Yet they made it clear to Roberts that the next installment would have to scale back the budget and place less emphasis on the interactive-movie side of the experience and more on the space-combat side, in order to address a mounting chorus of complaints that the latter had been allowed to grow stale and rote in the last couple of installments while Roberts poured all of his energy into the former. Roberts thought for a few days about whether he was willing to continue to make Wing Commander games under his managers’ new terms, then turned in his resignation. No one could possibly have imagined at the time that Chris Roberts, who was not yet 30 years old, would still be one of the most prominent game developers in the world 30 years later, even though he would never manage to complete and ship another game of his own during that span of time. Our world is a deeply strange place sometimes.
That October, Roberts filed the necessary paperwork to found a company of his own with two other former Origin people: his brother Erin Roberts, who had just produced the poorly received Wing Commander spinoff Privateer 2: The Darkening, and Tony Zurovec, the programmer and designer behind the reasonably successful action-adventures Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret. They called their new studio Digital Anvil. “I liked the idea of a name that could suggest Old World care and craftsmanship in the digital age,” said Roberts. “It’s like we’re hammering out fantastic experiences in our little forge.” By his account, their method of seeking funding was breathtaking in its naïveté. They got their hands on Bill Gates’s email address, and simply wrote him a letter. Incredibly, they received a call the next day from Ed Fries, who had been tasked with making Microsoft a major player in games, one of the few software markets the foremost ruthless mega-corporation of the era had yet to conquer. He had been given serious money to spend to make that initiative a reality. Digital Anvil, in other words, had been lucky enough to strike while the iron was hot.
On February 19, 1997, a press release announced that Microsoft had signed Digital Anvil to “a multi-title publishing deal” which entailed “a significant investment” on its part — in fact, an investment that made Microsoft the owner of just short of half of the new company. The trio of founders set up shop in rather lavish fashion in downtown Austin, Texas, not far from Origin’s offices. They hired an initial staff of about 35 people, who got to enjoy such Microsoft-funded perks as an onsite state-of-the-art movie theater with Dolby Sound and leather seats. On paper at least, the staff of Digital Anvil made for a diverse and impressive group. Hidden amidst a galaxy of bright and eager faces out of the nearby University of Texas could be glimpsed Chief Technology Officer John Miles, whose Miles Sound System had long been the standard for audio programming among game developers, and Robert Rodriguez, a young filmmaker who had recently directed Quentin Tarantino’s script of From Dusk Till Dawn and was now being talked about as the burgeoning Austin film scene’s next Richard Linklater. “The parameters of the film world are pretty set,” said Rodriguez. “You’ve got to work with a two-hour chunk of time and things like that. Some of the stories I want to tell don’t fit within those slots.”
Rodriguez’s presence was arguably the first sign of the muddled priorities that would become a fact of life at Digital Anvil. Chris Roberts told the magazine Texas Monthly in the summer of 1997 that the studio had four games in the works: a real-time-strategy game called Conquest, a Mad Max-inspired driving game called Highway Knight, a hyper-ambitious multiplayer space sim called Freelancer, and Rodriguez’s amorphous project, which was called Tribe. (“The idea is, he will write a movie, possibly direct it, and then write a game.”) Another game in the pipeline that went unmentioned was Erin Roberts’s Starlancer, which was to be a linear space sim with a set-piece story line, an even more obvious successor to Wing Commander than was Freelancer. (Students of the Robertses’ later careers will recognize a kinship between Freelancer and Starlancer on the one hand and Star Citizen and its single-player companion Squadron 42 on the other.) That’s five games in all: it was quite the agenda for such a small studio. And then the movies came calling.
If Robert Rodriguez was a filmmaker who was tempted by the possibilities of games, Chris Roberts was the opposite, a game maker who seemed for all the world like he really wanted to be making movies; if Wing Commander III and IV had shone a spotlight on nothing else, it was this. While still working for Origin Systems, he’d come up with an outline for a non-interactive Wing Commander movie. He gave it to Kevin Droney, a screenwriter who had earlier turned the Mortal Kombat games into a movie, to make a proper script out of it, then sent it to Hollywood on a wing and a prayer: “It was my passion project, my baby.” It finally reached a hard-bitten Svengali of a producer named Todd Moyer. He pronounced it “pretty bad” — “basically, it was a C-rate Star Wars ripoff” — but his ears perked up when the agent who had sent it to him explained that Wing Commander was a hit series of computer games. “I’m not very reverential toward videogame creators,” Moyer confesses. “Games just don’t get me excited.” Or rather, they didn’t do so as creative productions in their own right; as product lines, Moyer saw them as a largely untapped opportunity for franchising: “Once you own [the] intellectual property, you can carve out very different deals for the creators and for a lot of people.” Chris Roberts fell under Moyer’s spell from the first meeting, which came right in the middle of all of the work to build out Digital Anvil. For he had no fonder dream than that of making a real Hollywood movie, and he definitely wasn’t going to let the games studio he was building at the same time get in its way. Moyer was telling him precisely what he most wanted to hear.
That said, it’s fair to ask who was really pulling the wool over whose eyes. For all that the movie industry had a well-earned reputation for all manner of financial trickery, it was expected to reveal as a matter of course and trade-union law how much each film had cost to make and how much it earned back in ticket sales. Meanwhile budgets and sales figures were regarded as trade secrets by game publishers, to be divulged only when doing so served their interests. It’s hard not to suspect that Chris Roberts benefited from this opacity, which required an insider’s perspective to begin to penetrate. Todd Moyer was no one’s idea of a babe in the wood; nor for that matter was Microsoft’s Ed Fries. Yet both were new to the games industry, and by all indications in a bigger hurry to sign deals than to do their due diligence. The culture of gaming moved fast in the 1990s. Describing Wing Commander as a “series of hit computer games” in 1997 wasn’t an outright lie, but it did neglect the salient fact that this series’s best days as a marketplace proposition were already well behind it, that the last couple of Wing Commander games hadn’t been hits at all. While the series certainly still had its fans, far more hardcore gamers in 1997 were excited about Quake and Warcraft II and Diablo than Wing Commander. In short, there was ample reason for the observant to question how much appetite there really was for a Wing Commander movie — or, now that we’re on the subject, for the new space sims that Digital Anvil proposed to craft in the image of Chris Roberts’s most famous creation.
Nevertheless, Todd Moyer took it upon himself to make the movie happen, just as Microsoft had agreed to fund the games. He sent Droney’s screenplay to some (uncredited) script doctors for some hasty revision. He judged the new version “only a little bit better” when it came back to him, but decided it was good enough for franchise work. He convinced a rather bemused-seeming Origin Systems to agree to license the Wing Commander name and characters in return for a small piece of any profits. He convinced 20th Century Fox — the house that built Star Wars, as Chris Roberts knew well — to agree to distribute the eventual film to theaters. He didn’t even blink when Roberts came to him with his one real demand: that he be allowed to direct the movie himself. “No one gave a shit about Chris Roberts as a director or not a director,” he says. “With these movies, at the right price, nobody cares who directs them.”
In the end, Moyer put together what journalist Jamie Russell describes as “a stunning deal — or rather series of deals — that jigsawed together money from all over. It began with a small domestic minimum guarantee from Fox and was followed by a Luxembourg tax incentive, some French investment, an Australian tax shelter, UK financing, and foreign sales.” The whole pot together came to almost $30 million — a relatively modest sum by Hollywood action-movie standards, but three times what Chris Roberts had had to hand when he shot the movie parts of Wing Commander IV.
Roberts and Moyer would have few kinds words to say about one another in later years. “While Todd was good at doing deals, he didn’t give a damn or even know much about the creative process,” said Roberts in 2012. “As a first-time director, I really could have used the support of a proper creative producer who understood film-making and being on the set, rather than an ex-agent who couldn’t tell you the difference between a single or a master shot.” And yet for all the rancor that would follow the Wing Commander film becoming a laughingstock, it seems pretty clear from his subsequent career that Roberts was watching with keen eyes as Moyer scraped together funding for the movie in all sorts of head-scratching ways.
Indeed, even at this early juncture, Roberts was savvy enough to put together one eyebrow-raising arrangement of his own: he “hired” Digital Anvil, his own company, to provide the movie’s visual effects, thus funneling some substantial portion of that $30 million budget into his and his colleagues’ own coffers long before the movie ever made it into theaters. With this windfall, Digital Anvil doubled in size and announced to the world that they were now a cinematic special-effects house as well as a games studio. Chris Roberts insisted publicly that the two halves of the company were “entirely unrelated, except for me,” but nobody believed him. Coincidentally or not, John Miles and Robert Rodriguez both left Digital Anvil soon after. (Rodriguez would go on to become the marquee Hollywood director that Roberts had always dreamed of becoming, turning out hits such as Spy Kids and Sin City.) Microsoft, which had made its “significant investment” in Digital Anvil in the expectation that the studio would exclusively make games exclusively for it, could hardly have been pleased by the pivot into conventional film-making, but it showed remarkable patience and forbearance on the whole. Knowing that his mega-corp’s reputation as a ruthless monopolist preceded it, Ed Fries was determined to present a different face to the games industry, to show that Microsoft could be a good, supportive partner to the studios it took under its wing. An ugly lawsuit against Digital Anvil — even a justified one — would not have forwarded that agenda. Once again, in other words, Chris Roberts got lucky.
The cast of the Wing Commander movie was brokered by Todd Moyer, in ways intended to protect the piebald interests of his many investors. In one of their first conversations, he had carefully explained to Chris Roberts that Mark Hamill, the star of the third and fourth Wing Commander games, was not adored by the general public for having once played Luke Skywalker in the same way that he was by the hardcore-gaming demographics. To John and Jane Doe, he was just a middle-aged curiosity for the “Where are they now?” file. The rewritten script offered up as the protagonist a fresh-faced space jockey who had just earned his wings, a perfect fit for a younger, up-and-coming actor. It turned out that Fox had just such an actor in mind: Freddie Prinze, Jr., a 21-year-old who had recently become regular cover fodder for the teen magazines, thanks to a star turn in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a slasher flick that earned $125 million at the box office in 1997. He would play an earlier incarnation of Christopher Blair, Mark Hamill’s old role. For his sidekick Todd “Maniac” Marshall, Fox proposed another product of the 1990s teen-horror craze: Matthew Lillard, who had played a serial killer in Scream. Other cast members were hand-picked to enhance the film’s appeal in foreign markets: David Suchet, known to a generation of British television viewers for his depiction of Agatha Christie’s fussy detective Hercule Poirot; Jürgen Prochnow, who had portrayed a U-Boat captain in the German classic Das Boot; Tchéky Karyo, a veteran French character actor whose CV included films like The Bear and La Femme Nikita. Betwixt and between all of the new faces, there was some talk of bringing back some of the supporting cast from Wing Commander III and IV — the most sustained discussions were held with Malcolm McDowell — but all of those negotiations ultimately fell through for one reason or another. When all was said and done, the cast for the movie overlapped not at all with the one from the games.
As a byproduct of the Luxembourg tax incentives that had helped to bring it into being, the entirety of the movie was shot on a sound stage there between February and April of 1998. The process was by most accounts a difficult one at times. Not only had Chris Roberts never received any formal training as a film director, but the cast and crew had three different mother tongues, with wildly varying levels of proficiency in the other two languages. Still, by no means was it a case of rank amateurs at every level. The set designer, for example, was Peter Lamont, who came in fresh off James Cameron’s Titanic, the biggest blockbuster in film history; the cinematographer was Thierry Arbogast, who had just performed that same task for the The Fifth Element.
Once the shoot was finished, Chris Roberts returned to Austin with his reels of raw footage, to begin the work of splicing it together with the outer-space scenes being generated at Digital Anvil and turning it all into a proper movie. By December of 1998, he had a rough cut ready to go. In keeping with time-tested Hollywood tradition, Fox arranged for a handful of preview showings to ordinary members of the public. The feedback that came in was enough to tell the Fox executives, even if their own critical faculties could not, that they had a potential boat anchor — or maybe an anvil? — on their hands. They were left pondering what to do with this less-than-stellar take on outer-space adventure.
After hearing that Fox was considering condemning the movie to the memory hole of a direct-to-videotape release, Todd Moyer tried to buy the film studio out so that he could shop Wing Commander elsewhere. But at the end of January of 1999, just when he thought the buy-out deal was done, he got a phone call from Tom Sherack, Fox’s head of distribution. As Moyer reported it to Jamie Russell decades later, their conversation went something like this:
“Todd, I’m not giving you the picture.”
“But we had a deal!”
“Good fucking luck. I’ll never sign the papers. I don’t give a shit. I’m not doing it. If you want to have a huge lawsuit, go ahead.”
“Tom, I’ve got to tell you…
“No! It’s coming out in six weeks, and it’s going to have the Phantom Menace trailer on it.”
The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’s feverishly anticipated first prequel to his classic Star Wars trilogy, was scheduled to hit theaters in May of 1999. At the last minute, Fox had had the clever idea of attaching a trailer for that movie to the start of Wing Commander, making the latter the first place where the Star Wars faithful could catch a glimpse of what awaited them later that spring. Wing Commander was promptly slated for release in March of 1999, giving George Lucas and company just enough time to put the trailer together. It left no time, on the other hand, to mount a proper advertising campaign for Wing Commander. Nor did it leave Chris Roberts and company much time to try to fix the many infelicities that had been pointed out by the preview audiences.
The official Wing Commander world premiere took place on March 12. It was less than a gala affair, being held in Austin rather than Hollywood, with none of the cast in attendance; the actors in question were still saying polite things about the movie when forced into it, but quite obviously preferred to talk about something else. (Freddie Prinze, Jr., would grow less polite in later years, calling Wing Commander “a piece of shit” that he couldn’t stand to see or even think back on.) It appeared on 1500 screens across the country that same weekend, complete with the Star Wars trailer that Fox hoped would prove its secret weapon.
Alas, even this potent last-minute triage wasn’t enough to save the patient. Wing Commander brought in $5 million the first weekend, good for seventh place in the box-office listings. The reviews that appeared at the start of the following week were savage. Every critic in the land piled on to see who could come up with the best zinger. (Cinemax: “Filmed in Luxembourg(!), this low-flying turkey is an international co-production between the U.S., France, England, Germany, and Ireland. That pretty much spreads the blame as Wing Commander, in any language, goes down in computer-generated flames.” Entertainment Weekly: “It’s enough to make you wonder if the geniuses at Fox deliberately decided to release a movie this lifeless. They may have figured that everyone who showed up to see the new Star Wars trailer would be so bored by the main feature that they’d exit the theater screaming for a science-fiction movie that was actually fun.” SF Gate: “Wing Commander is the latest exhibit in the case to prove that Star Wars has wrecked American cinema.”) Perhaps in response to the reviews, more likely just as a result of natural gravity — most of the hardcore fans of the computer games presumably went out to see it right away — the movie earned just $2.2 million the next weekend, dropping to eleventh place. The third weekend, it was in fifteenth place with earnings of $1.1 million, and then it was out of American theaters and off the charts forever. A planned panoply of Wing Commander action figures, toy spaceships, backpacks, lunchboxes, tee-shirts, and Halloween costumes either never reached stores at all or were pulled from the shelves in short order. Star Wars this movie was not, in all sorts of ways.
Origin flew the teenage proprietors of the biggest Wing Commander fan site down to Austin for the premiere. (Aren’t they adorable, by the way?) They saw the movie four times in a single weekend — not a fate I would wish on anyone, but more power to them.
Chris Roberts at the premiere. Another fan in attendance wrote that “he seemed to be stressing that if he had had more money and time to spend on the movie, he would have made some changes.”
Richard Garriott at the premiere.
The general public was somewhat less enthused than our friends who saw the movie four times. These signs started to appear in theaters after it became a trend for patrons to buy a ticket, go in to watch the Star Wars trailer, then walk out and ask for their money back.
In light of the critical drubbing to which it was subjected and its modern-day status as a cinematic punchline, I watched Wing Commander: The Movie for the first time recently with, shall we say, considerable trepidation. My first reaction might serve as an argument for the value of low expectations: in many ways, it actually wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.
The opening credits were snazzy and stylish, worthy of a far more respectable film. Even once the movie proper began, the production values and acting weren’t anywhere near as terrible as I had anticipated. This is not inexplicable: the belief shared by many fans that Wing Commander was an ultra-low-budget movie doesn’t hold water. As points of comparison, take the three vastly better received films which created and for a time cemented Freddie Prinze, Jr.’s standing as a teen heartthrob. I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and She’s All That all sported budgets well below that of Wing Commander; the last named, which was shot after Wing Commander but released before, had only one-third the budget of Chris Roberts’s film. Of course, none of these others were science-fiction films with a need for lots of fancy visual effects. Nonetheless, you don’t sign a heavyweight production designer like Peter Lamont, nor for that matter a potential star-in-the-making like Prinze, if you don’t have a certain level of connections and financial resources.
All of which is to say that, if you were to walk into a room where Wing Commander happened to be showing on the television, it wouldn’t jump out to you immediately as B-grade schlock in the way of, say, the notorious Plan 9 from Outer Space. The sets look good enough; the cinematography and sound design are perfectly professional; the acting doesn’t stand out for being awful either. In an ironic sort of way, all of this is a problem, for it means that Wing Commander manages to be just good enough to be merely boring and irritating rather than lovable in its sheer cluelessness.
My second big takeaway from watching the Wing Commander movie is closely related to my first: I was surprised at how similar it is to the computer games, after having heard legions of fans complain about just the opposite. There’s the same jarring bifurcation between the scenes of character interaction, which are shot like a conventional movie, and the ones depicting the action in outer space, which are completely computer-generated and, indeed, look very much like scenes from a game — a game, that is, made five to ten years after this movie was made. Likewise, there’s the same sense of a cast and crew of professionals doing their level best, knowing that what they’re creating is never going to be high art or even high entertainment, but feeling a craftsman’s responsibility to make the material come across as well as it possibly can. Nobody in film ever wants to be the weak link, even on a bad movie.
Rather than being awful on the face of it, then, Wing Commander is awful in a subtler way. Its problems all stem from the script, which doesn’t do the things that even popcorn-movie storytelling needs to do to be successful, and from its director’s baffling decisions about what parts of the script to leave in and leave out. A work of fiction — any work of fiction — is a clockwork mechanism beneath the surface. The author has to move her characters around in arbitrary ways to set up the plot beats her narrative requires. The art comes in making the mechanistic feel natural, even inevitable; at the risk of hopelessly muddling my metaphors, call it applying the flesh and sinew that are needed to conceal the bones of the story. In Wing Commander, said bones are poking out everywhere. The result feels so artificial that one is left looking for a stronger word than “contrived” to try to capture it.
Take the opening beats. The race of evil felines known as the Kilrathi attack a Terran Confederation flagship and secure — just to provide a note of contemporary relevance for those of us living in the third decade of the 21st century — an “AI” that can lead them to Earth, the location of which planet is for some reason unknown to them. This is an existential threat for the Terrans.
There’s just one ship that might be able to intercept the Kilrathi and report on their numbers and disposition before they make the jump to Earth: the outer-space aircraft carrier Tiger’s Claw. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for Terran High Command to tell this ship to do so because it is “beyond the reach of our communications.” (Presumably, the Tiger’s Claw’s radio will start working again before it’s time to send the report on the Kilrathi.) Luckily, a resupply vessel which can be reached is on its way out to the Tiger’s Claw. Even better, this resupply vessel is captained by one “Paladin,” some sort of special Terran “scout” who is only playing the role of the captain of an ordinary freighter. (What he or anyone else hopes to achieve by this deception is never explained.) Admiral Tolwyn, who stands at the head of the Terran High Command brain trust, such as it is, likes Paladin so much that he gave him his ring. (Isn’t that sweet?) Now, he needs only call up his favorite scout and tell him to tell the captain of the Tiger’s Claw to get a move on and intercept the Kilrathi.
Is this what he in fact does? No, reader, it is not. Instead Tolwyn remembers that the freighter happens to be ferrying a couple of young pilots fresh out of flight school over to the Tiger’s Claw. One of them is named Christopher Blair. Another Blair with whom he once served — now sadly deceased — was the kid’s father. “He was a good man,” Tolwyn says. On the basis of a zealous belief in eugenics, he elects not to convey the vital orders and intelligence to the grizzled special agent to whom he gave his ring but rather to the wet-behind-the-ears kid whom he’s never met.
It just goes on and on and on like this, with characters constantly making decisions that don’t make any sense. If you want your audience to become invested in your story, you have to provide them with a coherent internal logic that they can follow, no matter how outlandish your larger premise may be.
Another barrier to investment, likewise reflecting a bizarre lack of understanding of the fundamentals of this sort of fiction, is the yawning absence of a villain. Star Wars had Darth Vader; the best-ever Star Trek movie had Khan. Wing Commander has a few animatronic cats who spend less than five minutes onscreen and look absolutely appalling — and not in a good way — while they’re doing it; the Kilrathi are the one place where Wing Commander really does look like a B-movie through and through. To his credit, Chris Roberts was perceptive enough to see that it wouldn’t be a good idea to use the version of the Kilrathi from the games, actors in furry costumes who wound up looking more like cuddly department-store mascots or sports-team cheerleaders than a galaxy-enslaving force for evil. But what he was able to put in their place was not any better, as he also recognized. This explains why they got so little screen time: “The Kilrathi sucked and were basically cut out of the movie.”
A subtler, more aesthetically sensitive director might have spun our lack of eyes on the Kilrathi into a positive, turning their very mysteriousness into a sinister virtue in much the same way that the FreeSpace space sims did their evil aliens, the Shivans. Suffice to say that Chris Roberts was not such a director. The lack of an identifiable antagonist just emphasizes the sense of plot gears arbitrarily clanking around, oblivious to the requirements of compelling fiction. We see a lot of people fighting and dying, but we never know why or against whom or what. A popcorn movie without a villain just doesn’t work.
As for the heroes: this cast could have easily served the purpose if given a stronger script to work with. None of the young actors comes across as unlikable, but no actor could fully compensate for dialog as bad as this. “It takes balls — big balls, not ovaries — to keep track of four enemy fighters!” says Maniac, as the script desperately tries to interest us in a bantering will-they-or-won’t-they situation between him and one of the female pilots. Wing Commander is that guy at a party who thinks he’s hilarious and cool, whom everyone else just thinks is an annoying dweeb.
The image that springs to my mind now when I think back on Wing Commander: The Movie is one that nobody ever talks about. Early in the film, when he and Maniac are still aboard the tramp freighter, Blair has to plot a daredevil hyperspace jump because… Reasons. He does so, using what looks like a Casio calculator keyboard and some innate genetic talent that comes courtesy of his background as a “Pilgrim,” a whole other unnecessary and confusing thing in the script that I can’t be bothered to go into here. Anyway, he plots the jump, and just as it’s about to be made Maniac raises his hands above his head as if he’s riding a roller coaster. As he does so, you can see the most delicious expression on actor Matthew Lillard’s face: he looks all sorts of confused and bemused, as if wondering if this lame joke is really what he’s being asked to do here, even as he’s gamely trying to stay in character and look cocksure and pumped. He gets through the scene, the joke utterly fails to land… and Chris Roberts proceeds to put it in the final cut of his movie, no doubt sure that his audience will find it hilarious. It’s what the kids today call Cringe.
In a saner world, I would be able to end this article by telling you that all of the foregoing explains why Chris Roberts never got another sniff at a career in Hollywood. But he did, my friends… he did. Failing upwards is his superpower.
You might want to hold on tight, Maniac. It’s gonna be a rough ride.
Our principal cast of hot young pilots. From left to right, Saffron Burrows plays Lieutenant Commander “Angel” Deveraux; Ginny Holder Lieutenant Rosie “Sassy” Forbes; Mathew Lillard is Todd “Maniac” Marshall; Freddie Prinze, Jr., is Lieutenant Christopher “Maverick” Blair. (Is a case of Top Gun envy involved?) Of the four, Lillard makes the best of the bad situation and delivers the most energetic performance. Prinze mostly just stands around looking conflicted and earnest. “I tried to make him young and confused,” Prinze said when asked what he wanted to bring to the character. Exactly what every action-movie lead should aspire to be, right?
Devearux enforces discipline in her squadron by pulling out a gun and threatening to murder one of her pilots. None of her superiors aboard the Tiger’s Claw expresses any concern about this unhinged behavior. For all his obvious fascination with military culture, I’m not sure that Chris Roberts understands how it works.
Maniac and Sassy consummate their romantic relationship with a lot of clumsy thrashing about without ever actually taking off their clothes. Thank God for small mercies. I shudder to think what a real Chris Roberts-directed sex scene would be like.
Oddly, it’s the veteran David Suchet who delivers the worst performance of the cast, constantly swinging between equanimity and rage for no apparent reason. I’m not sure I’d put Hercule Poirot in charge of a starship anyway.
At one point, our World War II aircraft carrier in space suddenly turns into a submarine, complete with sonar pings and “Silence in the boat!” (never mind the soundless vacuum of space) and all the rest. Why? Because Chris Roberts thinks submarines are pretty cool too, that’s why. At least actor Jürgen Prochnow (left) had experience with this sort of thing…
Our space fighters, on the other hand, are decommissioned 1950s-era fighter jets when they’re at home in the hangar.
For the most part, the visual effects that were created by Digital Anvil while they were supposed to be making games for Microsoft aren’t terrible.
The special effects get themselves into serious trouble only when they’re blended with shots of the actors. Not coincidentally, videogames tended to have the same problem.
Do you prefer your Kilrathi plush, as in the games…
…or plastic, as in the movie? This is what is known as a Hobbes’s Choice. (There’s a dad joke in there for you old-school Wing Commander fans.)
There has to be someone else out there besides us. I hope they won’t be hostile, and I hope Earth is cool and doesn’t screw up first contact. No doubt our military will be there to greet them, defending the country. That’s not good. These aliens will come out, and they’re not going to be heavily armed because they’re not about that. We have to be mellow and peaceful. If that happens, it’ll be cool. But I don’t think it’ll happen that way. I think we’ll come hard, which is probably standard operating procedure. And that’s not a cool thing because we’ll probably get worked.
— Words of wisdom from Freddie Prinze, Jr., on the possibility of real extraterrestrial contact
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Sources: The book Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell. Next Generation of March 1997; Computer Gaming World of May 1995 and June 1998; Starlog of May 1999, Austin Business Journal of March 2 1997, Texas Monthly of September 1997.
Online sources include “Chris Roberts explains what went wrong on the Wing Commander film” by Ben Kuchera at Penny Arcade, a 1998 Games On Line interview with Chris Roberts, a 2012 Chris Roberts “Ask Me Anything” from Reddit, a Microsoft press release announcing the Digital Anvil investment, the 1999-vintage Dan’s Wing Commander: The Movie Page (including the proprietor’s story of attending the premiere), and a 2002 Wing Commander retrospective by the German website PC Player Forever. I made extensive use of the Wing Commander Combat Information Center, and especially its voluminous news archives that stretch all the way back to 1998.
My invaluable cheat sheet for this article was “The Chris Roberts Theory of Everything” by Nick Monroe from Gameranx.
John Witte
November 21, 2025 at 5:49 pm
Jimmy, good article, particularly with pointed commentary about Chris Robers. I noted some typos. Freddie Prinze Jr. is spelled “Prinze.” I noticed several places where the e was omitted. Also one of the screenshot captions you have Matthew Lillard’s name spelled “Linnard.”
Jimmy Maher
November 21, 2025 at 6:01 pm
Thanks!
Bret
November 21, 2025 at 6:18 pm
Hi Jimmy,
I’ve been reading and appreciating your site for over a decade, and I can’t recall reading another article that was contemptuous of a creator. You are wise to give people the benefit of the doubt, as you mention at the start, and you should have continued listening to that voice.
“Grift” means deliberately decieving others for personal gain. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that Chris Roberts was not earnest in his proposals, that he did not fully intend to create great ambitious work? Do you have any evidence that Chris Robert is *personally* wealthy as a result of deceptive practices?
You say Roberts “‘hired’ Digital Anvil, his own company, to provide the movie’s visual effects, thus funneling some substantial portion of that $30 million budget into his and his colleagues’ own pockets”. That sounds to me like he wanted to do that part of the project in-house; it’s no different than Lucas mixing his film at Skywalker Sound. What’s wrong with that? It is absolutely misleading to claim that $30M went into “his own pockets”, as if it was transferred to his personal bank account so he could buy a yacht. That’s not how project funding works.
You put contemptuous scare quotes around Luxembourg “tax incentives”, but plenty of countries and U.S. states offer incentives to attract filmmakers, to boost the local economy and P.R. Almost every film that is produced considers location incentives; it’s totally standard.
You say Roberts has “demonstrated that his larger talents are for failing upward, and getting people to give him flabbergasting amounts of money while he’s at it.” Nobody is giving *him* money; they are investing money into ambitious projects he’s proposed. If those projects fail, the investors don’t get a return — that’s just what a “bad investment” is. Investors are responsible for their investments. I don’t particularly feel sorry for them, and I don’t see why Roberts is to blame for using his funding to earnestly try to realize an ambitious vision.
Games “journalism” is full of terrible people crying “grift” who have never managed a creative project in their lives, and don’t seem to understand how funding works. Don’t be a terrible person, Jimmy.
LOAF
November 22, 2025 at 1:41 am
“You say Roberts “‘hired’ Digital Anvil, his own company, to provide the movie’s visual effects, thus funneling some substantial portion of that $30 million budget into his and his colleagues’ own pockets”. That sounds to me like he wanted to do that part of the project in-house; it’s no different than Lucas mixing his film at Skywalker Sound. What’s wrong with that? It is absolutely misleading to claim that $30M went into “his own pockets”, as if it was transferred to his personal bank account so he could buy a yacht. That’s not how project funding works.”
It is worth calling this one out. From the very start of the project the pitch was that they would keep costs down by doing the FX fully digitally and in house. That was part of the very earliest pitches at Universal (and it was actually part of Origin’s own Wing Commander movie pitch years earlier, that their movie would share art resources with the games!). The real issue was that that didn’t end up working in practice: much of that money ended up needing to go to the host of other SFX studios needed to get what was absolutely necessary done (with a great many shots needing to be cut).
John
November 22, 2025 at 2:45 am
Chris Roberts did hire Digital Anvil to do the visual effects. That is literally what happened. Roberts went looking for a visual effects company, carefully considered his options, and then decided that the best choice for his film was a brand new video game company with no prior film experience in which he just happened to have a financial interest. This is much sketchier than George Lucas having Lucasfilm or Skywalker Sound work on the Star Wars prequels because George Lucas was spending his own money. Roberts was spending other people’s money. He had a moral responsibility (and probably also a legal one, though I suppose it would have depended on the exact language of his contract) to spend it wisely and to avoid self-dealing. It is just barely possible that Digital Anvil really was the best choice Roberts could have made, but any reasonable person could have told him it would look bad.
Jimmy Maher
November 22, 2025 at 7:09 am
You’ve raised a few valid points. “Pockets” was indeed a poor choice of words, conveying the wrong impression. And I did overdue it with the scare quotes.
Overall, though, I have to stand by what I’ve written. Note that I explicitly rejected calling Chris Roberts a grifter and leaving it at that. I think he genuinely does want to create amazing things. But I also think that he isn’t very good at actually doing so unless he’s very carefully managed, which he hasn’t been in 30 years. And he isn’t very fussy about means and ends.
You asked whether I “have any evidence that Chris Robert is *personally* wealthy as a result of deceptive practices?” There is indeed considerable reason to believe that deceptive practices — or rather outright fraud — at least contributed to his wealth a little later in his career. But I’ll share that evidence in the next article, and you can make up your mind for yourself.
Thanks for your feedback!
StClair
November 24, 2025 at 9:25 am
Your second paragraph is, IMO, one of the fairest takes on Roberts and his tendencies (and flaws) I’ve seen. Some creators, still IMO, really do need editors and/or managers to keep them on task and on schedule, restrain their worst impulses, and generally tell them “no” or “this is awkward/dumb/a bad idea and should be cut.” Unfortunately, the first act of many who are fortunate enough to “make it big” is to dismiss anyone who might fill (or have previously filled) such a role and revel in their total freedom (to make potentially huge mistakes). I count both Roberts and his primary inspiration in this category.
Sniffnoy
November 21, 2025 at 8:25 pm
Sounds like a directing issue…
It sounds like there’s a lot derivative here, and I was going to point out one more thing, that hasn’t been much remarked on in your articles: That having humans fighting cat-aliens, whose name begins with a K even, sure sounds like it comes right out of Larry Niven’s stories of humans fighting the Kzin. I see that in the comments of this old article of yours, someone mentions that Roberts says this was actually coincidence and not a deliberate Niven reference. No source given though. Wondering if that’s ever been sorted out…
LOAF
November 22, 2025 at 1:33 am
It’s both true that Chris Roberts did not intend for the Kilrathi to be taken from the Kzinti and also that the Kilrathi are absolutely taken from the Kzinti. Chris is thinking of his original pitch for Wing Commander which calls for the bad guys to be ‘mutants’. His concept artist pitched a bunch of takes on that (bugs, lizards, apes, dogs and cats) and he went with cats which he would later say gave them the sense of being honorable warriors instead of monsters. But it’s also clear that the people doing the actual world building knew exactly where space cats came from. Aaron Allston even gave them exactly the same backstory: the “Iason incident” origin story from the Kilrathi is very obviously referencing the Angel’s Pencil story where Larry Niven introduced them. (I know Siobahn Beeman has specifically said that Known Space was one of the major references for early Wing Commander.)
I think the big mix up in all this is people thinking Wing Commander is some planned IP and that Chris Roberts was specifically planning it out its story the way George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry did. And that’s just not the case, Chris’ first genius was and is was for the technical aspect, the programming. He hired writers and artists he trusted to build the world and let them work. The fiction in Wing Commander I is the simplest gloss over the technically wonderful game, with no specific thought that it would ever be revisited… but also the fact that it was a giant hit meant that that wasn’t the story you could ever tell, because now you’re the great creator like George or Gene. (I also don’t think this is disconnected from the fact that Chris has endlessly tried to get the Kilrathi away from being Kzinti since WC3… without much success because it accidentally became a fundamental part of the accidental IP.)
People are also really keen to insist that Niven had a problem with this but he absolutely did not. He has always had a great sense of humor about it. The early Wing Commander writers were part of that SFF world and they remained on good terms; Ellen Guon named a star system after him in WC2! Niven’s best friend and writing partner Jerry Pournelle was probably the original Wing Commander’s biggest proselytizer, writing about the game in his Byte column. There’s even a BBC documentary where they’re playing Secret Missions 2 together while bragging about helping to win the cold war!
(And more importantly to Larry Niven, it was a case of a rising tide raising all ships… there are two dozen Man-Kzin Wars books today but there were just two when Wing Commander came out. Wing Commander took ‘cats in space’ but at the same time its success reshaped the Kzinti to what we know today. If you look at their appearances on Star Trek and in the Ringworld RPG and so on, they were a lot more alien, cat faces with distinct bat ears and rat tails… but after Wing Commander, they’re tigers in space armor!)
* – Wing Commander’s initial ‘stealing’ of the Kzinti is basically the very large idea of humans fighting space cats. In any detail but their physical appearance (and the little origin story) the early Kilrathi are fuzzy Klingons, they don’t really take any of the actual Kzinti lore at the time (screaming and leaping, being bad at wars, fighting to earn names, etc.)
Sniffnoy
November 22, 2025 at 7:44 pm
Interesting, thanks!
Jeff Sampson
November 21, 2025 at 10:54 pm
It’s selling Chris Roberts short to not mention Wing Commander: Privateer, it was way ahead of its time and proved to be more ground breaking than the dead end of FMV(unless we count pre-rendered clips and motion capture).
See if this sounds familiar: a wide open map with various activities, but unlike Elite, there’s hand-crafted locations and characters and dialog, and a main narrative you can pursue at your leisure through set-piece missions, but the game doesn’t end once you’re done with the story. It’s the model for how many games would balance freedom with story, including giving you flexibility in how to tackle the story missions, in the case of Privateer, what ship and loadout you bring to the party.
“Brownhair”, or Grayson Burrows, is even a proto-GTA anti-hero. To beat the story, you have to smuggle narcotics at one point, and later help a mob boss’s nephew skip town to avoid a murder rap. And you can attack any ship you want without a game over. Hilariously, you can make the Kilrathi friendly to you by blowing up enough Confed ships, and when they hail you over comms they’ll give you backhanded compliments for being a quisling. You can still land on Confederation territory, an incongruity needed to keep the game playable.
It’s obviously limited by the constraints of floppy disks, and I’m not sure how many developers played it, but it laid down the basic blueprint years ahead of others. As pointed out, Roberts is still trying to recreate the one-two punch of Wing Commander and Privateer, after already trying with Starlancer and Freelancer. Sadly, Freelancer was no longer novel or hip by the time it shipped, and probably became a step-child at Microsoft in the post Xbox/Halo world.
Strike Commander was not as revolutionary, unfortunately. Though it was daring to put a story in a flight-sim, not exactly a genre known for soap opera or intrigue, and the fact that it wasn’t a total sales disaster showed players like context for why they’re blowing up stuff, even if it’s a bad story. For some reason the hero of Strike Commander has almost the same look and jacket as the star of Privateer, and it has the same mechanic of meetings fixers in a bar for mercenary work and doing a hand-shake to accept deals.
David Warner was also in Privateer 2, although calling that a Wing Commander game is a stretch: https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/15819.
Also, Ben Kuchera wrote the Penny Arcade article, Dabe Alan is credited for the photo in the header.
John
November 22, 2025 at 1:55 am
My understanding was that Chris Roberts had relatively little to do with Privateer, as he was working on Wing Commander III while another team made Privateer in the older Wing Commander II engine. Freelancer and arguably even Star Citizen are, however, Privateer writ large, so clearly the concept resonates with Roberts. In any case, I’m not convinced that it’s entirely fair to call Privateer, ahead of its time, not when it’s so clearly an Elite-like. On the other hand, I did recently play and enjoy a modern Privateer clone, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, so maybe you’re right.
Privateer 2 is in certain respects better than Privateer 1. It’s got a proper 3D engine and actual, talented actors as opposed to whomever happened to be in the office at Origin when it was time to record dialogue. Nevertheless, the thing I remember most vividly about Privateer 2 is not the performances of such notable actors as Clive Owen, John Hurt, and Chris Roberts but the tendency of enemy pilots to fly directly into the player ship. It was an unfortunately underwhelming game.
John
November 22, 2025 at 1:57 am
Why did I call Chris Roberts a notable actor? I meant to say Christopher Walken!
LOAF
November 22, 2025 at 2:21 am
Joel Manners deserves the most credit for Privateer but Chris’ executive producer title isn’t one of those because-he-ran-the-product-group credits. He developed the initial design, built the ‘trade commander’ economy prototype and reviewed throughout. Manners credits him with figuring out how to save the idea when the focus on trade ended up being boring (and it was the team he built, most everyone below the line was doing double duty on Strike Commander for the whole project!).
Chris’ only involvement with Privateer 2 (beyond infamously intervening to rename it Privateer 2 very late in the game) was an uncredited pass at the film edit.
Jeff Sampson
November 22, 2025 at 2:45 am
Roberts worked on the initial design and is listed as Executive Producer, and I think it’s fair to say without him Privateer would not have been greenlit, so I think he deserves credit for its existence. Elite also has nothing resembling a story in-game, so Privateer gave more structure to the open ended action game.
Clive Owen is also the only actor in an FMV game I can think of who went on to bigger things, as opposed to someone whose heyday was behind him.
Jimmy Maher
November 22, 2025 at 7:16 am
Thanks!
Privateer was a few years before the point where this article begins. Plus I had thought that Chris Roberts’s involvement with it was limited, although I’ve never really dug into it. I am aware that I should have given it more attention than I did back in the day, however. At some point, I might do a piece on Privateer and Freelancer together. It’s my understanding that the latter actually turned out surprisingly well once it was finally released. And I do like the idea of a space sim that tones down the complexity a bit. The most fun I ever had with a Wing Commander was with the first game…
Martin
November 24, 2025 at 9:35 pm
I don’t know about the reviews back then, but I did quite enjoy Freelancer. More than Starlancer, in any case, and both were my only foray into space. Maybe I was the target group for Freelancer exactly because my usual gaming preferences did not include space sims. In hindsight, it was quite a bit like an RPG in space, where your weapons and armour were the ship you were flying.
Jeff Sampson
November 26, 2025 at 4:00 am
You could do a triple bill with Privateer, Privateer 2, and GTA III: “The Bad Boys Of Open World Gaming”. Play as Grayson Burrows, then play as Clive Owen, then play as “Claude”… nah, Privateer and Freelancer would be better. They’re almost a decade apart, so it would be fun to see ten years’ worth of evolution. As for Privateer 2… uh, maybe there’s a good play through on Youtube, or just a compilation of the movie parts? I would like to know the story behind how they came up with “Privateer 2: The Darkening”, were they trying to compete with Highlander II: The Quickening in the wacky subtitle contest?
The best version of Privateer is the floppy disk versions of the base game, the expansion, and the speech pack. The GOG version is the CD-ROM bundle, which has two drawbacks. First, they replaced the hero’s voice in the intro movie with a terrible voice actor. Two, they added voice acting for the non-flight portion of the game, but you can’t read subtitles during conversations and quickly click through them if sound/fx is enabled, you have to listen to the actors speak their entire lines, including the awful guy they got to play the hero. You can work around this by hitting Alt-O and disabling sound before clicking on characters outside of flight mode, so that it will fall back to the original subtitles, but that’s annoying.
No one would accuse Privateer of being too complicated though, and there’s a very optimal path through the game, I don’t know if I should ruin it. There’s also a short story in the manual that never gets referenced in-game, but like Ultima IV it has a thematically appropriate line: “There I knew I’d find a new beginning, a chance to be the
explorer I had admired in Mack Christiensen and the master of his own fate I had admired in Geof Kane.”
Ishkur
November 22, 2025 at 12:57 am
Funny thing about the Hobbes comment:
In the games the Kilrathi defector Hobbes was an academic and intellectual in the mold of X-Men’s Hank McCoy/Beast, and so was named after his favorite human philosopher Thomas Hobbes and not because he resembled the stuffed tiger from the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes.
Then a year year later Bill Watterson came out with his Calvin & Hobbes 10th Anniversary anthology, where he admitted that Hobbes was named after the philosopher (while Calvin was named after 16th century theologian John Calvin).
(the subtext is that Hobbes had a very dim view of humanity, which any anthropomorphic animal would probably hold)
Jeff Sampson
November 22, 2025 at 3:07 am
What if Calvin and Hobbes is still popular in the 27th century, and the other fighter jocks lied to Hobbes about how he got his handle, and snicker about it behind his back? Real life call signs are chosen by other pilots, not the pilot himself, and there’s usually an element of playful mockery involved.
Speaking of call signs, the first game had a pilot with the call sign Iceman. Gee, I wonder where they got inspiration for that? He was even broodier than Val Kilmer. In Wing Commander Prophecy, you play his son. He gets chewed out by the squadron commander in the opening, a first lieutenant(???), and is told he shouldn’t expect any goodwill because of his dad’s legacy. He replies that he’s there on his own merits.
Right after that the player gets to enter his call sign. I went with “Iceman”. My friend thought that was funny, coming right after the hero says he’s not counting on any nepotism.
LOAF
November 22, 2025 at 6:27 pm
“What if Calvin and Hobbes is still popular in the 27th century, and the other fighter jocks lied to Hobbes about how he got his handle, and snicker about it behind his back? Real life call signs are chosen by other pilots, not the pilot himself, and there’s usually an element of playful mockery involved.” – this is exactly the joke when this comes up in Wing Commander II; Hobbes earnestly explains that his first human friend named him after the philosopher but it’s obvious to everyone else it’s because he’s a tiger man.
Ishkur
November 22, 2025 at 1:07 am
The one thing I remember hating about the Wing Commander movie is the plot point where deceased pilots are not remembered. In fact, they go one further and pretend that the dead don’t even exist. If you bring up a colleague who died in a mission last week, the response is “they do not exist”.
It’s such a staggering mis-comprehension of military protocol, duty, and respect for the fallen. It took me right out of the movie to think that this Orwellian doublethink is how they get through the day — to not just not think of death, but to deny it’s even a thing. No one dies if they never existed in the first place.
It’s such a stupid thing to put in your movie, especially when the games have cut scenes for fallen comrades, complete with 21 gun salutes, caskets drifting off to space, solemn words of remembrance or thanks, and your PC Soundblaster playing Taps.
Davoise
November 22, 2025 at 2:39 am
Then there’s the whole Pilgrim thing, which Jimmy wisely passed over in his review. (Basically, they’re a group of genetically engineered super pilots, much loathed and feared by the standard humans, including Prochnow’s character.) This was invented out of whole cloth for the movie – whether by Roberts or Droney, I’m not sure – and it makes an utter mockery of trying to shoehorn the games and movie into the same universe.
While I agree with Jimmy that, on a structural and, for want of a better word, thematic level, the movie and games have more in common than many give them credit for, the surface level differences are often so jarring that it’s difficult to accept that it’s the same writer-director behind both.
So we have a Paladin who isn’t Scottish, an Angel who isn’t Belgian (ironic, given Suchet’s presence), a “dead pilots never existed” subplot when one of the selling points of the games was holding elaborate funerals for deceased wingmen, and Kilrathi who look like turtles hanging out in a sauna.
To me, the image that sums the movie up isn’t Maniac and his roller coaster hyperspace jump, it’s the comms screen that loudly and proudly spells it “TOWLYN”. Shoddy, lacking attention to detail, and just plain off in ways both obvious and non-obvious. I’m not sure how the gentleman from the CIC who saw it four times on opening weekend can still call it his favourite movie 26 years hence, unless I’m not giving enough credit to the term “sunk cost fallacy”.
(One last point. Between the Pilgrim’s super power being explicitly “not faith! It’s genetics!” despite the fact that the Pilgrims follow a religion of their own based on their hyperspace-navigating abilities, and the emergence of midi-chlorians into the public consciousness a few months after Wing Commander, 1999 sci-fi was of a decidedly reductionist bent. The Force was clearly not with it.)
Davoise
November 22, 2025 at 3:39 am
On reflection, I should say that I don’t intend to be critical of the fans themselves who claim Wing Commander as their favourite movie; my stance is that those fans, myself (a Wing Commander fan also), and indeed everyone deserved a better Wing Commander movie than what we got.
DEREK SMART DEREK SMART DEREK SMART
November 23, 2025 at 10:35 pm
The gentleman from CIC, “LOAF” or Ben Lesnick, is in these very comments defending Chris Roberts’ honor! So, sunk cost fallacy is really probably it.
Commentman
November 24, 2025 at 8:20 pm
Reached this blog the SC Wars have… .
Uh-oh, the people attacking and defending CR/SC across the net have landed in the comments section of Jimmy’s blog which so far has been one of the remaining places for mostly peaceful informed and civilized discussion.
Well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later, but later would have been better.
Benjamin Lesnick
November 22, 2025 at 1:52 am
I don’t think this follows the origin of the Wing Commander movie very fairly. It wasn’t something Chris Roberts decided to pivot to after he started Digital Anvil… it was a project he took with him from Origin. The Wing Commander movie and Chris Roberts’ road to Hollywood starts in 1995 with Jeff Segal at Universal who developed the cartoon and (after being impressed by Chris Roberts) paid for the initial pitch that became the first script.
Jimmy Maher
November 22, 2025 at 7:38 am
Yes, I see that this started earlier. Thanks!
WellTemperedClavier
November 22, 2025 at 5:13 am
Count me as one of those naive young Wing Commander fans who stood in line to see this on… opening night, I think. It felt ominous when about a third of the theater filed out and left once the Star Wars preview was over. Things only got worse from there.
At the time, I thought it was a terrible letdown from the game’s writing. As an adult, I can now see that the game’s writing was never better than cheesy and that the biggest flaws come from Chris Roberts not knowing how to direct a film. As you say, it’s bad in some rather odd ways.
I still don’t get the whole Pilgrim angle though. Even now it doesn’t seem to fit in thematically with the setting.
Interestingly, my dad (who had never played Wing Commander but only knew about it through me) caught the film on TV and thought it was an adequate SF B-movie riff on old WW2 movies. Which I actually suspect Roberts intended at least a little bit, since film’s fighters look much more like turboprop planes than anything from the games.
Thanks for the article, Jimmy! I appreciate getting to learn more about the tawdry and convoluted background for one of my adolescent disappointments.
Sebastian Gerstl
November 22, 2025 at 7:45 am
Wow, can’t remember you ever ripping that hard into a developer. Then again I can *kinda* understand where you’re coming from, Roberts has really worked hard to squander whatever goodwill used to be coming his way over the last three decades…
As a fan of both the Wing Commander games and Mystery Science Theater 3000/Rifftrax, I actually find a lot to enjoy about this movie, most of all the baffling direction choices. I honestly laughed out loud at the scenes where they were essentially copying “Das Boot, but in space”, with Jürgen Prochnow at the helm no less, or when the space cruisers pull alongside to fire broadsides at one another. Also the myriad of other “space does not work this way” moments, my favorite being when they push a crashed fighter out of the launch pad into the weightlessness of space and it just *falls down*. The Pilgrim plot comes and goes whenever it darn pleases, some scenes feel like they were shuffled completely out of order…yeah, the movie is a mess.
I also have to point out that you probably felt the movie feeling rather close to the games because you admittedly never were a fan of the games to begin with. To a fan however the incongruences stick out, most of all the complete disregard of the military structure (the highlight being this incredibly stupid “not mourning dead pilots” moment…ah yes, and that’s why you keep the fighter of said dead pilot standing around in the hangar with his call sign still on, yes? Why is a fighters call sign printed on the outside of the fighter anyway? And how did he die if his fighter is still there…? Etc). Someone with no stakes in the universe of Wing Commander looks at these scenes and might be able to suspend their disbelief as it just being hallmarks of a cheap sci fi setting. But to fans, scenes like that is much harder to ignore, and once you start seeing them, you notice them popping up everywhere throughout the film.
And frankly I felt that most actors were just dull and workmanlike, going through their paces and not being invested at all in what is going on or what character they protest. Which is also a sign of bad direction. Mathew Lillard at least seems like he’s having fun with what he’s doing…at least he *emotes*. Too bad this version of Maniac is annoying for all the wrong reasons. (In WC III he has supposed to be unlikable and in WC IV he even has sort of a character arc, not in the movie we’re apparently supposed to root for the guy…etc)
Ah well. But overall I think I can’t disagree with what you’re writing. I’m curious what you’ll write about in the next Installments. For what it’s worth, at least I kinda enjoyed the movies “Lord of War” and “Outlander” where Roberts served as a producer, though I understand that your mileage may vary there ..
StClair
November 22, 2025 at 8:16 am
I count myself a big fan of this series, but for many years, I’ve said that “Chris Roberts wanted to be George Lucas in the worst way… and with the WC theatrical movie, he finally succeeded in doing exactly that.” (And then Lucas himself proceeded to lap him with the prequels.)
Also, a bit of redundancy you might want to trim:
Microsoft, which had made its “significant investment” in Digital Anvil in the expectation that the studio would exclusively make games exclusively for it,
Jimmy Maher
November 22, 2025 at 9:35 am
I was trying to be a bit playful there, but maybe I got too cute. I wanted to say that Digital Anvil would only make games — i.e., no movies — and only make them for Microsoft.
StClair
November 24, 2025 at 9:28 am
Read that way, it does make sense. Thanks for the clarification.
Alex
November 22, 2025 at 9:59 am
While I´ve never seen this movie or played any of the games, I´m really glad you chose the “Benefit of a doubt and open minded”-approach. I won´t go into detail here since we all know the problems with contemporary online culture, but I will say that I´ve seen quite a few video games adaptions and the majority of them were not so bad at all. In fact, I still think that the first Mortal Kombat movie is quite good when you are into this kind of movies.
Gnoman
November 22, 2025 at 5:55 pm
Part of the trouble with video game movies has long been an unwillingness to actually accept the source material as it is. For a long time, the adaptation insists on making a bunch of changes either for no apparent reason or for profoundly stupid ones (the first Silent Hill movie deciding that Harry in the games was filling a “womanly” role, so they replaced him with a woman and rewrote the entire plot to revolve around maternal themes). This sometimes resulted in perfectly decent movies (the maternal theme in the first Silent Hill did actually work out, even if it was completely untrue to the game), some of which were pretty decent hits (there’s an entire franchise of Resident Evil movies, even if they increasingly have nothing to do with the games), but there were always flaws deriving from the half-hearted adaptation.
Only in the last few years have game-to-movie adaptations really decided to lean into and embrace the source material. It what is surely total coincidence, this is also when they shifted from being jokes to being blockbuster successes.
fform
November 23, 2025 at 12:13 am
Having lived through this progression, I think one of the main points of change over time has been how game writing has improved. It hasn’t become amazing, but to be honest sending a Wing Commander movie straight to VHS is really about the quality of writing it had achieved at that point and at the time gamers were just as defensive about their beloved franchises (with the massive inferiority complex we still see to this day). In my opinion the apotheosis of this movie/game crossover period in the 90s really hit with the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within movie a few years later, which was an incredibly expensive turkey of a movie that nobody wants back.
I’m not going to defend the state of modern AAA game writing by any means, but auteur and indie games have really come along and there’s been enough influence that you have crossovers between movies, tv, animation and games that stylistically influence each other in ways you just didn’t really have thirty years ago. There was a whole period in action movies about twenty years ago that felt like they just wanted to do video games without player interaction, like the Underworld series or Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider movies.
Gnoman
November 24, 2025 at 6:09 am
“Game writing has improved, so video game movies don’t suck anymore” is a flawed argument on at least three fronts.
The biggest flaw is that a good adaptation is never “just take big chunks of it and throw it on the screen verbatim”, because that’s a recipe for disaster. Many of the best book-to-movie adaptations ever made threw out half the original book and rewrote the other half, focusing on getting the core plot, characters, and themes across. Weak writing in the source material simply isn’t that difficult a problem to solve if you’re actually putting in effort. The original Mario movie wasn’t bad because it was adapting a thin story, and the newer one wasn’t good because it was adapting a better story – both were drawing on essentially the same source material. The difference was that the latter embraced it and focused on doing it well, while the 1993 film writers decided that they “had” to do something clever and subversive with it.
The second flaw with the argument is that the standards for movie writing in that era (any era, really) were not so far above the standard game writing as to support it. There were plenty of action shoot-em-ups with barely more plot than the bare-bones standard of Doom (or, perhaps more relevantly, Contra), many of which are considered classic films. Those films (Predator (1987) is the standout that comes to mind) had character dialogue and interactions that the games lacked, but creating that is a function of any adaptation. Meanwhile on the far end of the gaming spectrum, mid-90s RPGs often had far too much plot and writing to fit in a film and would require extensive trimming to make an Ultima or Final Fantasy movie work. That’s one of the big downfalls (the others were that the CGI was not only very expensive but deep in the Uncanny Valley) of the Spirits Within film – they tried to fit a fairly standard Final Fantasy plot into a two hour film instead of a thirty hour game and failed miserably.
The third flaw in the argument is that game adaptations were doing very well throughout that period – just not from Hollywood. Tons of games got anime adaptations that did well – an obscure cartoon series called Pokemon is a good example of this, you may have heard of it – but those never had the same cultural impact in the Anglosphere as a Hollywood Movie does even when they made it out of Japan in the first place. Their existence, however, strongly supports the idea that the issue was the adaptation process, not the source material.
Fundamentally, I’m convinced that the root cause of “Video Game Movies Suck” was that most of the people involved didn’t really care that much about the quality. The game people just cared that the licensing checks cleared, the movie studios just assumed that the legions of game fans would pack in to see it (remember that this is mostly an era without internet reviews, and one where most print reviewers would give condescending dismissal to a game movie by default if they bothered to review it at all), and the writers/actors only cared that their checks cleared. The (in)famous Street Fighter movie is a pretty good example of this, where the only bit of it anyone remembers nowadays just happened to be the only actor (Raul Julia, who was dying of cancer at the time and used it as a way of bonding with younger family members) who wasn’t phoning it in.
xxx
November 23, 2025 at 12:07 am
For those who are complaining about the hit-piece tone of this article, maybe step back and consider: How much of a fuck-up do you have to be to get the most even-handed, thorough, and thoughtful writer in this space to devote not just one article, but a series to how much you suck? This isn’t the sort of blog that engages in clickbait controversy, so if Jimmy has things that he needs to say about this guy, I’m looking forward to hearing them.
fform
November 23, 2025 at 12:16 am
I am shocked by the defenses of Roberts tbh, I kept up with the first few years of the kickstarter fiasco and the insane waste. Selling in-game items for a game that doesn’t exist is appalling. That the game Still doesn’t exist after tens of millions have been burned on conventions and parties should lose him all credibility.
Brent
November 23, 2025 at 1:59 pm
I mean, anyone that’s spent hundreds to thousands of dollars on Star Citizen has to defend Chris Roberts or risk a potentially-fatal case of cognitive dissonance.
RandomGamer
November 23, 2025 at 9:28 pm
Selling exclusive in-game stuff and rights to use your name is exactly how Kickstarter campaigns justified 10k donations. I don’t see any crime in just doing so.
Alex
November 23, 2025 at 6:28 am
Regarding the progression of writing in video games and crossovers: I think it is telling that the best games I have ever played story-wise are relatively new and are rooted in different source materials (The Witcher Series, The Walking Dead Telltale Game, The Batman Arkham Games, Cyberpunk 2077).
RandomGamer
November 23, 2025 at 10:17 pm
Think about it this way: Chris Roberts did Gattaca box office on Gattaca budget with a much prettier picture to show for it.
As people say, unless his project was either radically different from what was promised (it doesn’t seem it was), or was radically over budget (it doesn’t seem it was), whether such flops sink one’s career is a toss-up. Going over differences with Wing Commander games is largely nitpicking.
Admiral Horse
November 24, 2025 at 9:21 pm
“Chris Roberts did Gattaca box office on Gattaca budget with a much prettier picture to show for it.”
If it’s as well-written or acted as Gattaca then maybe I need to put it on my must-watch list…
M. Casey
November 25, 2025 at 2:57 am
> Chris Roberts did Gattaca box office on Gattaca budget with a much prettier picture to show for it.
I know trolling can be fun, but come on now.
Will Hyde
November 26, 2025 at 4:44 am
Gattaca is quite a nice looking movie in addition to having great writing, performances, and themes. Wing Commander isn’t bad because it bombed, it’s bad because… well because it sucks.
Paulo Vicente
November 25, 2025 at 12:02 am
A very interesting article but this bit felt a bit odd:
“Whereas the movie industry revealed as a matter of course and trade-union law how much each film had cost to make and how much it earned back in ticket sales, budgets and sales figures were regarded as trade secrets by game publishers”
Hollywood might publish budgets and such but their accounting is infamous for a reason, it’s hard to imagine any other industry being a match for their financial trickery.
Meanwhile I had a kick look at Star Citizen’s reddit and the thing still alive, and apparently in development, it looks like Robert’s story is still far from over. It might be interesting to follow it’s course up until the present day and see how Star Citizen ended up and what might become in the future.
About the fuzzy vs movie Kilrathi, I will take the fuzzy anytime, the movie version has a higher budget but no budget in the world could save that design. I guess that in the end the lesson here is that even glitz and hype can fail, the movie could have been a serviceable sci-fi flick with better planning and direction instead of all the hype, likewise if the games could have been more successful by leaning more on the game side instead of the FMV hype. A modest budget well applied can be as successful or better than a hyped production, I guess.
Oh well, I see that someone tried to summon Derek Smart? Well, why not, his story is going to be quite interesting, to say the least.
DEREK SMART
DEREK SMART
DEREK SMART
Jimmy Maher
November 25, 2025 at 1:43 pm
Yeah, you have a point, especially given that much of the next article will deal more directly with Hollywood accounting. I added a qualifier. Thanks!