Command & Conquer

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Command & Conquer is a real-time strategy video game franchise, and it began with a studio that was fed up with deserts. In 1993, the magazine Computer Gaming World reported that Westwood Studios would not reuse the Dune license for its next strategy game. The reason, as the magazine put it, was "mostly because the programmers are tired of sand". The report promised new terrain and new enemies. It also said the design team was serious about building a multiplayer version. Westwood had just made the critically acclaimed Dune II, so the studio was leaving behind a setting that had already worked. What did it build instead? Why did the contents of the box matter so much to its fortunes? And how did a series with dozens of releases end up with its own source code in public hands?

  313

• 2. Two Discs in the Box

  ›

  One line on the packaging of the original game read: "A second copy, so you and your friend can destroy each other." Westwood Studios printed it because every box of Command & Conquer held two CD copies of the game. A single purchase was enough for two friends to face off. That choice made it the first strategy title to feature competitive online play, and it is considered the most important outside factor in its success. Every game up to Red Alert 2 shipped with two discs. Later games did not.

  The plumbing behind multiplayer changed hands over the years. Games produced by Westwood used a proprietary system called Westwood Online to host matches over the Internet, and Renegade also supported GameSpy. Titles developed under Electronic Arts kept GameSpy but swapped Westwood Online for the publisher's own servers. In 2013 the GameSpy master servers shut down. Some titles survived through a service called Gameranger.

  Every game also offered LAN and modem play, plus skirmish matches against computer-controlled enemies. Red Alert 3 then did something no rival strategy game had done: it let players tackle the campaigns cooperatively online, where others offered only solo campaigns. The catch was that connections had to run through EA's servers, which ruled out LAN play. That cooperative mode arrived in 2008, long after the two-disc box had vanished.

  9179

• 3. Construction Yards and Harvesters

  ›

  A typical match opens with an MCV, short for Mobile Construction Vehicle. This large vehicle can deploy itself into a construction yard. Every structure a faction can use is built on site at that yard. When a building is ready, the player picks a spot beside an existing structure. The prefabricated building then unfolds rapidly in a distinctive way.

  Money comes from harvesters. In the Tiberian games these specialised units haul Tiberium to a refinery, while in the Red Alert games they carry ore or the more valuable gems. The refinery converts the cargo into credits. In the games released before Red Alert 2, and in Command & Conquer 3, the raw material also needed storage space. That meant refineries and, for any excess, storage silos.

  Credits pay for an army of infantry, vehicles and aircraft, and the Red Alert series adds naval craft. Every faction fields units and structures that do similar jobs, adjusted to suit its theme with somewhat different properties. Effectiveness follows the rock-paper-scissors principle found in most real-time strategy games, and attack traits vary by faction.

  Nearly every structure doubles as a step in the tech tree. Placing new buildings unlocks extra units, structures and faction-specific abilities. Those unlocks can vanish. Advanced units may be blocked if the required building is destroyed, or if power plants cannot supply enough power.

  Navigation and control sit in a sidebar, where many rival games put the control bar along the bottom of the screen. Generals and its expansion Zero Hour were the exceptions. They dropped the sidebar and replaced harvesters with supply centers, where gathered supplies became money, along with income produced by units or buildings at set intervals.

  912413

• 4. The Tiberium Saga

  ›

  On the 26th of September 1995, Command & Conquer introduced an Earth contaminated by a mysterious substance called Tiberium. The Global Defense Initiative, formed by the UN, fights to contain it. Opposing it is the Brotherhood of Nod, a cult-like revolutionary quasi-state led by the enigmatic Kane, which wants to harness the substance instead. The manual for Renegade places these events sometime between 2017 and 2020. The game is considered the one that defined and popularized the genre. GameSpot reviewer Chris Hudak said, "Command & Conquer is one of the finest, most brilliantly-designed computer games I have ever seen." Metacritic gave it an aggregate of 94%. Its 1996 expansion, Covert Operations, was received less warmly.

  Tiberian Sun arrived on the 27th of August 1999 and jumps ahead to the year 2030. The first game's plot centered on allegorical world politics. Tiberian Sun turned toward science fiction, with Tiberium beginning to assimilate vast stretches of Earth's ecosystems. A new isometric engine with varying terrain levels created the impression of a truly three-dimensional world. An expansion called Firestorm followed.

  In 2007, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars returned the series to its strategy roots as a direct sequel to Tiberian Sun. It is set in 2047 and adds a third faction, the Scrin. Both GameRankings and Metacritic averaged it at 85%. PC Gamer U.S. awarded 90% and wrote that "one of the greatest RTS franchises of all time returns to glory". PC Gamer UK gave 82% and called it "a welcome, but limited, return". Kane's Wrath, released on the 24th of March 2008, set its campaign in 2052 and limited players to Nod. The original factions and six new sub-factions were available in a strategic mode and in skirmish matches.

  Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, released on the 16th of March 2010, was billed as the conclusion to the saga. It is set in 2062, when Tiberium has reached its next evolutionary stage and is spreading so fast that Earth is close to uninhabitable. The game removed resource gathering, base building and the Scrin. It followed Kane's Wrath directly without picking up its storyline. Reviews were mixed because of the departure from traditional gameplay and story. A different branch of the family had already left Tiberium behind in 1996, in an alternate version of the 1950s.

  1556556771

• 5. Alternate History, Played Light

  ›

  Louis Castle later judged the plan to tie Red Alert to the Tiberium story a "failed experiment". Command & Conquer: Red Alert was released on the 22nd of November 1996, set in an alternate 1950s, and was originally meant as a prequel to the whole series. It pits the Allies against the Soviets, rival factions roughly analogous to NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Critics liked it more than any other game in the franchise, with an average above 90% on both aggregator sites. Its two expansions, Counterstrike and The Aftermath, averaged 63% and 70%. A PlayStation-only release called Retaliation bundled the maps, missions and units of both expansions with some newly filmed cutscenes. Before Electronic Arts re-released the game as freeware on the 31st of August 2008, it had sold over three million copies.

  Red Alert 2 followed on the 23rd of October 2000 with a Soviet invasion of North America. The forces included tanks, conscripts, large airships and psychically dominated anti-ship giant squid. The game never mentions the Tiberian series, which left the link from the first Red Alert unclear. People who made the original games, now at Petroglyph Games, have implied it is a parallel universe created by time travel experiments somewhere in the Tiberian timeline. GameRankings averaged it at 86%. Its expansion Yuri's Revenge, released on the 10th of October 2001, follows an ex-Soviet figure named Yuri who tries to conquer the world with psychic technology and a private army. Across 31 reviews it averaged 85%, making it the best-received expansion in the series.

  On the 16th of October 2009, a Red Alert game for iOS appeared, continuing the story of Red Alert 2 and set before Red Alert 3. It launched with the Allies and the Soviet Union, with the Empire of the Rising Sun promised in an expansion. Some regions, such as the UK, never received it. Later, the Chinese developer Tencent made its own iOS version of Red Alert, which drew a highly mixed response from fans online.

  7273788026

• 6. Detours from the Formula

  ›

  Command & Conquer: Renegade, released on the 26th of February 2002, put the player on the ground as a first-person shooter. It is set during the final days of the original game's events and was the last Command & Conquer title Westwood Studios made before its liquidation. Reviews averaged 75% on both GameRankings and Metacritic. GameSpy gave it a 2002 "Wish it had been better" award, condemning the single-player game while calling the multiplayer "innovative and fun". Online play won praise for rewarding teamwork and coordinated assaults, unlike other first-person shooters of its time.

  Renegade later gained a free, fan-made remake called Renegade X. Its developers received approval from Electronic Arts, and the game entered open beta on the 26th of February 2014. It includes a short single-player campaign called Black Dawn.

  The expansion Zero Hour reached shelves on the 22nd of September 2003. It added nine new armies, over a dozen campaign missions and a mode called Generals Challenge. Full-motion video returned in this expansion. GameRankings averaged it at 85% and Metacritic at 84%, much like the base game.

  1664651719

• 7. Actors and Soundtrack

  ›

  Joe Kucan has played Kane, the villainous mastermind of the series, for 15 years, which earned him a Guinness record for the longest-running actor in a video game role in the 2008 Gamer's Edition. He is one face in an ensemble cast. The franchise became known for moving its story forward with full-motion video cutscenes, instead of scenes rendered inside the game. The early cutscenes in Command & Conquer and Red Alert were filmed from a first-person perspective. Tiberian Sun switched to traditional cinematic shots, and its actors included James Earl Jones and Michael Biehn.

  Frank Klepacki, Westwood's sound director and composer, wrote much of the music for the early games. After Westwood's liquidation in 2003, several other composers took over, and Klepacki returned in 2008 to help with the Red Alert 3 soundtrack. PC Gamer and Gameslice magazines voted his Red Alert score the best video game soundtrack of 1996. Critics have received the series' music well, although the praise was higher for earlier entries.

  His most famous piece is "Hell March", the theme of Red Alert. Electric guitar riffs, the sound of marching feet and synthesizers build to a dramatic chant. In Klepacki's own telling, he wrote more ambient themes for Covert Operations, then started tinkering with a heavy metal song aimed at Nod for the next big Command & Conquer game. Brett Sperry came into his office and asked if he had anything to hear. Klepacki played it and gave the title. Sperry replied that it was the signature song for the next game. The track ended up a staple of the Red Alert series instead, and a second version was created for Red Alert 2.

  4950519

• 8. Scores, Studios and Source Code

  ›

  In 1997, Screen Digest called the series "probably the world's biggest PC CD-ROM entertainment franchise to date." By 1999 it had sold more than 10 million copies, and by 2009 more than 30 million. Across the aggregator sites, its games averaged about 80% with expansions included and about 84% without. The 2008 Guinness edition awarded the series six world records, among them Biggest Selling RTS Series and Most Number of Platforms for an RTS. The games were developed mainly for personal computers running Microsoft Windows, with some ports to consoles and Apple Mac, plus versions for iOS and the web.

  In 1998, Electronic Arts bought Westwood Studios, although it had no direct part in making Tiberian Sun. Westwood closed in 2003, and the studio and some of its members were absorbed into EA Los Angeles, which kept the series going. When EA Los Angeles formed an internal group called Danger Close and shifted its focus to Medal of Honor, EA launched Victory Games to continue the franchise. On the 10th of December 2011, EA announced Generals 2 as the next game. Three days later it revealed a browser-based, free-to-play game, Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances, whose closed beta began on the 15th of December. In August 2012, Generals 2 was repurposed as a free-to-play game called simply Command & Conquer. After player feedback during a short alpha period, it was cancelled in October 2013, and EA disbanded Victory Games. As of July 2010 the franchise stood at eleven games and eight expansion packs, and the first three games were later released as freeware to promote their successors.

  In October 2012, EA released The Ultimate Collection on Origin, which holds every game except Sole Survivor. In November 2018 it announced a remaster of Command & Conquer, its expansions and Red Alert, built by Petroglyph Games, and that month's neighbor in December was Command & Conquer: Rivals, a mobile game for Android and iOS from the newly formed EA Redwood Studios. The Remastered Collection came out on the 5th of June 2020 and scored 82/100 on Metacritic, with 48 positive reviews, ten mixed and none negative. EA also released the source code for the remastered versions so players could build mods. In March 2024 the Ultimate Collection reached Steam, with level editors added at fan request. In February 2025, EA made the original source code for Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Generals, Zero Hour and Renegade open-source, so anyone can now read how those games were built.

  5343479022