Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
MESON BLASTERS! Now that I have your attention, let's talk about sex. The retro gaming community is a many-splendored thing, endlessly producing fascinating content covering games and history you've never heard of. Case in point, this hour-long retrospective on a 1997 adult FMV video game called Riana Rouge:
The title promises that it will be the craziest FMV game we've never heard of… and that title is accurate. Our own LeHah was watching this video when he noticed something… familiar not even a minute in. No, it wasn't the BDSM lizard. No, it wasn't the flower that kisses a woman and then rips her face off. It was this:
That's Riana Rouge and she's blasting away at something with a futuristic rifle. A very familiar futuristic rifle.
That's right, Ms. Rouge (and let's be clear: that's R-O-U-G-E like the color and not R-O-G-U-E like the… rogues) is blasting away at BDSM lizards and face-eating flowers with one of the prop rifles used in the making of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. I was fascinated and had to know more. What was this insane-looking game, released over a year after Wing Commander IV, and how did it get a meson blaster? And why didn't anyone ever notice?
Now, could this all be a coincidence? Plenty of the props in these kinds of productions were rentals or commonly available objects. We need look no further than Maniac's pornography in Wing Commander III, which came from a prop shop that provided the same material for countless TV shows and movies, or Seether's seemingly-distinctive knife in Wing Commander IV, which was a consumer knife available for purchase by anyone. However, we do know that the rifles used in WC4 were created by the production's prop shop because we have the original sketches that were used to design them preserved. So this is not a case of Ms. Rouge simply having the same prop, she has a prop that originated from Wing Commander IV's summer 1995 film shoot!
Our first step: learn more about the game itself. Much to my surprise, simply looking up Riana Rouge on MobyGames showed me that the meson blaster is ON THE FRONT OF THE BOX. I also learned that it was ported to the Macintosh and released in Japan! The Japanese version of Riana Rouge even has the rifle on both the front and the back of the box.
Searching for the game's marketing I also found a magazine ad and an unknown promo image that both prominently feature the Wing Commander IV rifle!
Fasciting! Question two: who's that girl? The answer to this one shocked me, too. The beautiful, scantily clad woman on the front of the box is NOT a hired actress. Her name is Gillian Bonner and she was, in fact, Riana Rouge's Chris Roberts: game designer, art director, executive producer and even head of the studio that made the game, Black Dragon Publishing. Riana Rouge was not some cheap adult game churned out as quickly as possible to take advantage of the full motion video craze… it was a passion project that was in development for several years headed by Riana herself! Searching gaming magazines, it seems like she was also a one woman promotional campaign for the game making endless appearances in interviews and at trade shows.
There's even a photo of her at E3 posing with a cool sci-fi bike… a real world version of exactly the trade show setup that Cameron Howe had on the television show Halt and Catch Fire!
Then there's the Playboy connection! Ms. Bonner was a Playboy employee who ended up posing for the magazine, becoming Miss April 1996. Further research revealed that she appeared in a number of issues and two videos for the company. And she used her Playmate pictorial to promote… her plans to make video games! We've left out the pictorial but you can see from the article (you're here to read the articles, right?) she has a pretty interesting story.
She must have remained friendly with the magazine because they continued to publish updates about her work and even advertised it! The April 1997 issue gives an update about her gaming company and in June 1998 they even plug the game… complete with a photo of the Wing Commander IV rifle! We've cropped the 1997 update to keep this page safe for work. The Internet Archive has a complete and uncensored set of 1990s Playboy scans.
At this point, this is completely fascinating to me. She seems like a creative person with a great sense of marketing and an unlikely passion! This made me want to learn more about the making of the game and so I visited several versions of her circa-1997 websites via the Internet Archive. There a found a host of 1997-resolution images of Ms. Bonner posing with the meson blaster…
... and two different trailers showing the game at different stages…
... and a 'making of' video in which the rifle appears!...
... and I even learned that there was a poster for sale at one point. I'd love to have one of these in my Wing Commander collection!
I also noticed a thumbnail of a very different looking box where she seems to be carrying a very different rifle. That prompted me to look further into the game's publishing history. What I learned was again, pretty crazy. Ms. Bonner's company, Black Dragon Publishing, had multiple deals with major publishers to put out Riana Rouge including Ubisoft and a particularly high profile, high profile deal with Eidos JUST as their initial Tomb Raider became a hit. But it seems like all of these fell through and when the game actually came out it was self-published in much smaller numbers. Copies are expensive today!
Then why don't we remember Riana Rouge today? Is it because it didn't have a major publisher? It seems like what happened is that the game was poorly reviewed and simply forgotten. The theme seems to be that it had too much game for the porn fans and too much porn for the game fans. The Black Dragon website had posted plans for Riana Rouge 2 but they sadly never came to be. Here are two contemporary reviews from Computer Games Strategy Plus (April 1998) and PC Games (June 1998):
But bad reviews don't necessarily mean the game wasn't worthwhile or interesting or that it wasn't special; 1997-8 was the tail end of the 'FMV craze' and everyone was sick of endless slop trying to take advantage of games like Wing Commander. It's likely no one even gave this one a second look. And of course I had to know both how the game was and I needed to catalog how (or even if?! - could the real game have the earlier rifle and the WC4 one just have been used in promo photos?) the rifle appears… so I gave it a second look myself!
And, well, it's pretty neat. I should stress that it's neat in a "this is a bizarre creative explosion unlike anything I've ever seen" sense rather than a "this is a wonderful video game that plays perfectly" sense. But it's basically an adventure game consisting of very competently made full motion video sequences that are also incredibly weird and interesting. It's divided into several "worlds" and each one tells a different story, with gameplay mostly consisting of branching videos a bit like Wing Commander III. It's maybe more art piece than it is video game and it's totally understandable how that wouldn't be appreciated in 1998… but today it's the kind of thing that should absolutely be a cult classic.
But what about the sex? Well, here's the weird thing: yes, it does have sex scenes with nudity… but there are only two of them and they are very, very few and far between. It comes off as a game that thought it could only sell itself with a little bit of pornography but that is also much more interesting in being sexy than it is actually slinging sex. And its sense of sexy is very, very odd… odd in a way that you appreciate seeing but maybe not at all in a way that buyers of adult video games would ever actually want.
The Wing Commander IV rifles appear in a section called 'Prison World'. There, Riana (now with a cool goth look, she changes appearances based on the environment) is locked in some kind of space jail. She escapes and goes on to pick up the rifle and fight robots until the reaches a mysterious being that must be freed from a space pod. Looking through the files, the rifle shows up in a grand total of 25 videos! We've put them all together in one video on YouTube:
The 'game over' screen is also a FAX that displays Riana with the rifle!
And there's a cool splash screen with the Macintosh version's installer!
Now, what about the big mystery? I DID ultimately find an answer as to how this game was connected to Wing Commander IV! And I found it… by reading the credits in the manual. They revealed that the game had TWO shoots, one in Florida and one in Los Angeles… which likely explains why the rifle changed from the earlier shots. And there in the Los Angeles credits was a familiar name: Bob Kertesz - Bluescreen Compositing.
That's Bob-O-Matte! Bob Kertesz was a beloved figure on the Wing Commander III, IV and Prophecy shoots. He was the owner and operator of a company called BlueScreen LLC which was responsible for the green screen matte shots that were a huge part of all three of those productions. Looks like he went on to provide the same service for Riana Rouge… and maybe brought an extra rifle with him in the process! Wing Commander fans know Bob-O-Matte for his cameos in each game. He shows up at the funerals in WC3, is killed by the jammer in WC4 and is the man playing with tarot cards in WCP!
So that leaves one final question: what became of Gillian Bonner? While researching this story I did manage to track her down and can confirm from her social media that she seems to be alive and well. She runs an impressive company but does not work in game development; which, honestly, after seeing all this is a shame! My takeaway from her story as best I can understand it is that she really did have something unique to offer the world from a creative standpoint. I reached out to see if she remembered the rifle but did not get a response; I won't post any of her current details so as not to 'doxx' her. But I certainly wish her the best and greatly appreciate this amazing little part she has added to the Wing Commander story!
If you're interested in playing around with some of this, I've uploaded all of the individual videos in their original formats as well as the trailers and the making of clip here. ISOs of either version of the game are easy to find on the Internet Archive if you want to play yourself.
I want to end by giving a personal special thank you to my friend LeHah who probably doesn't even know what he did. When he discovered the Wing Commander IV rifle in the video my mom had just had another stroke and we were desperately waiting for word of how she was doing. Looking into this was the perfect distraction at a time when my worry was absolutely consuming me. That was about three months ago and I have had all my Riana Rouge material sitting on my desktop ever since. I'm happy to report that my mom is doing well now (out of rehab!) and now… now you all get to learn about Riana Rouge!
--
Original update published on October 13, 2026
The title promises that it will be the craziest FMV game we've never heard of… and that title is accurate. Our own LeHah was watching this video when he noticed something… familiar not even a minute in. No, it wasn't the BDSM lizard. No, it wasn't the flower that kisses a woman and then rips her face off. It was this:
That's Riana Rouge and she's blasting away at something with a futuristic rifle. A very familiar futuristic rifle.
That's right, Ms. Rouge (and let's be clear: that's R-O-U-G-E like the color and not R-O-G-U-E like the… rogues) is blasting away at BDSM lizards and face-eating flowers with one of the prop rifles used in the making of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. I was fascinated and had to know more. What was this insane-looking game, released over a year after Wing Commander IV, and how did it get a meson blaster? And why didn't anyone ever notice?
Now, could this all be a coincidence? Plenty of the props in these kinds of productions were rentals or commonly available objects. We need look no further than Maniac's pornography in Wing Commander III, which came from a prop shop that provided the same material for countless TV shows and movies, or Seether's seemingly-distinctive knife in Wing Commander IV, which was a consumer knife available for purchase by anyone. However, we do know that the rifles used in WC4 were created by the production's prop shop because we have the original sketches that were used to design them preserved. So this is not a case of Ms. Rouge simply having the same prop, she has a prop that originated from Wing Commander IV's summer 1995 film shoot!
Our first step: learn more about the game itself. Much to my surprise, simply looking up Riana Rouge on MobyGames showed me that the meson blaster is ON THE FRONT OF THE BOX. I also learned that it was ported to the Macintosh and released in Japan! The Japanese version of Riana Rouge even has the rifle on both the front and the back of the box.
Searching for the game's marketing I also found a magazine ad and an unknown promo image that both prominently feature the Wing Commander IV rifle!
Fasciting! Question two: who's that girl? The answer to this one shocked me, too. The beautiful, scantily clad woman on the front of the box is NOT a hired actress. Her name is Gillian Bonner and she was, in fact, Riana Rouge's Chris Roberts: game designer, art director, executive producer and even head of the studio that made the game, Black Dragon Publishing. Riana Rouge was not some cheap adult game churned out as quickly as possible to take advantage of the full motion video craze… it was a passion project that was in development for several years headed by Riana herself! Searching gaming magazines, it seems like she was also a one woman promotional campaign for the game making endless appearances in interviews and at trade shows.
There's even a photo of her at E3 posing with a cool sci-fi bike… a real world version of exactly the trade show setup that Cameron Howe had on the television show Halt and Catch Fire!
Then there's the Playboy connection! Ms. Bonner was a Playboy employee who ended up posing for the magazine, becoming Miss April 1996. Further research revealed that she appeared in a number of issues and two videos for the company. And she used her Playmate pictorial to promote… her plans to make video games! We've left out the pictorial but you can see from the article (you're here to read the articles, right?) she has a pretty interesting story.
She must have remained friendly with the magazine because they continued to publish updates about her work and even advertised it! The April 1997 issue gives an update about her gaming company and in June 1998 they even plug the game… complete with a photo of the Wing Commander IV rifle! We've cropped the 1997 update to keep this page safe for work. The Internet Archive has a complete and uncensored set of 1990s Playboy scans.
At this point, this is completely fascinating to me. She seems like a creative person with a great sense of marketing and an unlikely passion! This made me want to learn more about the making of the game and so I visited several versions of her circa-1997 websites via the Internet Archive. There a found a host of 1997-resolution images of Ms. Bonner posing with the meson blaster…
... and two different trailers showing the game at different stages…
... and a 'making of' video in which the rifle appears!...
... and I even learned that there was a poster for sale at one point. I'd love to have one of these in my Wing Commander collection!
I also noticed a thumbnail of a very different looking box where she seems to be carrying a very different rifle. That prompted me to look further into the game's publishing history. What I learned was again, pretty crazy. Ms. Bonner's company, Black Dragon Publishing, had multiple deals with major publishers to put out Riana Rouge including Ubisoft and a particularly high profile, high profile deal with Eidos JUST as their initial Tomb Raider became a hit. But it seems like all of these fell through and when the game actually came out it was self-published in much smaller numbers. Copies are expensive today!
Then why don't we remember Riana Rouge today? Is it because it didn't have a major publisher? It seems like what happened is that the game was poorly reviewed and simply forgotten. The theme seems to be that it had too much game for the porn fans and too much porn for the game fans. The Black Dragon website had posted plans for Riana Rouge 2 but they sadly never came to be. Here are two contemporary reviews from Computer Games Strategy Plus (April 1998) and PC Games (June 1998):
But bad reviews don't necessarily mean the game wasn't worthwhile or interesting or that it wasn't special; 1997-8 was the tail end of the 'FMV craze' and everyone was sick of endless slop trying to take advantage of games like Wing Commander. It's likely no one even gave this one a second look. And of course I had to know both how the game was and I needed to catalog how (or even if?! - could the real game have the earlier rifle and the WC4 one just have been used in promo photos?) the rifle appears… so I gave it a second look myself!
And, well, it's pretty neat. I should stress that it's neat in a "this is a bizarre creative explosion unlike anything I've ever seen" sense rather than a "this is a wonderful video game that plays perfectly" sense. But it's basically an adventure game consisting of very competently made full motion video sequences that are also incredibly weird and interesting. It's divided into several "worlds" and each one tells a different story, with gameplay mostly consisting of branching videos a bit like Wing Commander III. It's maybe more art piece than it is video game and it's totally understandable how that wouldn't be appreciated in 1998… but today it's the kind of thing that should absolutely be a cult classic.
But what about the sex? Well, here's the weird thing: yes, it does have sex scenes with nudity… but there are only two of them and they are very, very few and far between. It comes off as a game that thought it could only sell itself with a little bit of pornography but that is also much more interesting in being sexy than it is actually slinging sex. And its sense of sexy is very, very odd… odd in a way that you appreciate seeing but maybe not at all in a way that buyers of adult video games would ever actually want.
The Wing Commander IV rifles appear in a section called 'Prison World'. There, Riana (now with a cool goth look, she changes appearances based on the environment) is locked in some kind of space jail. She escapes and goes on to pick up the rifle and fight robots until the reaches a mysterious being that must be freed from a space pod. Looking through the files, the rifle shows up in a grand total of 25 videos! We've put them all together in one video on YouTube:
The 'game over' screen is also a FAX that displays Riana with the rifle!
And there's a cool splash screen with the Macintosh version's installer!
Now, what about the big mystery? I DID ultimately find an answer as to how this game was connected to Wing Commander IV! And I found it… by reading the credits in the manual. They revealed that the game had TWO shoots, one in Florida and one in Los Angeles… which likely explains why the rifle changed from the earlier shots. And there in the Los Angeles credits was a familiar name: Bob Kertesz - Bluescreen Compositing.
That's Bob-O-Matte! Bob Kertesz was a beloved figure on the Wing Commander III, IV and Prophecy shoots. He was the owner and operator of a company called BlueScreen LLC which was responsible for the green screen matte shots that were a huge part of all three of those productions. Looks like he went on to provide the same service for Riana Rouge… and maybe brought an extra rifle with him in the process! Wing Commander fans know Bob-O-Matte for his cameos in each game. He shows up at the funerals in WC3, is killed by the jammer in WC4 and is the man playing with tarot cards in WCP!
So that leaves one final question: what became of Gillian Bonner? While researching this story I did manage to track her down and can confirm from her social media that she seems to be alive and well. She runs an impressive company but does not work in game development; which, honestly, after seeing all this is a shame! My takeaway from her story as best I can understand it is that she really did have something unique to offer the world from a creative standpoint. I reached out to see if she remembered the rifle but did not get a response; I won't post any of her current details so as not to 'doxx' her. But I certainly wish her the best and greatly appreciate this amazing little part she has added to the Wing Commander story!
If you're interested in playing around with some of this, I've uploaded all of the individual videos in their original formats as well as the trailers and the making of clip here. ISOs of either version of the game are easy to find on the Internet Archive if you want to play yourself.
I want to end by giving a personal special thank you to my friend LeHah who probably doesn't even know what he did. When he discovered the Wing Commander IV rifle in the video my mom had just had another stroke and we were desperately waiting for word of how she was doing. Looking into this was the perfect distraction at a time when my worry was absolutely consuming me. That was about three months ago and I have had all my Riana Rouge material sitting on my desktop ever since. I'm happy to report that my mom is doing well now (out of rehab!) and now… now you all get to learn about Riana Rouge!
--
Original update published on October 13, 2026
