Those of you who keep regular tabs on the Wing Commander CIC will recall that they have, over the years, managed to archive the source code for Wing Commander 1, Wing Commander 3, and Wing Commander 4 over the years.

What you may not know is that those efforts aren’t recent by any stretch; the CIC actually began the effort to preserve the series’ source code back in 2000. The Wing Commander Source Code Release Project (WCSCRP) took many years to bear fruit, but it did indeed bear fruit, and the code for at least three games from the series (I thought they had the code for Wing Commander 2 and Prophecy as well, but I may be imagining things again…) has now been archived for posterity. Or, you know, in case an EA studio wants to take a stab at porting one of the games to a new platform.

Anyhow…I know that Origin Systems didn’t have a great track record concerning the backup and archiving of source code for their games. I’m fully aware, and prepared to accept, that the code for most of the entries in the Ultima series has been lost to time, byte rot, the Recycle Bin, and/or landfills in and around Austin, Texas. So be it, if so.

Even so, it’s entirely possible that people who worked at Origin Systems over the years may have held on to copies of code they were working on. That’s my hope, at any rate…and it’s the reason that the Ultima Codex has launched the Ultima Source Code Offline Archive Project (USCOAP). The first step is getting the word out, after all.