After a decade of quiet, the venerable Command & Conquer
franchise has risen from the ashes like a phoenix, thanks to the release of a
remaster of the first two games in the series. But what if you are a stranger to
this series? What do you conquer and who do you command? Who is the sinister
bald man in all the videos? Relax as we have you covered.
The Basics
Command & Conquer is a video game franchise created by
Westwood Studios in the early 1990s and published by Electronic Arts between 1995
and 2009. Eight main games in three distinct sub-series were released, along
with a myriad of expansions and spin-offs.
The core games are based around the idea of constructing a
base (consisting of several buildings dedicated to constructing vehicles,
training infantry and gathering resources), assembling an army and then
fighting the enemy on the battlefield to achieve strategic objectives. These
may range from simply destroying all enemy forces to escaping to a certain
location, escorting a friendly or safeguarding a location from enemy assault.
The three distinct sub-series all feature dramatically varying factions, tones
and background lore.
The Tiberian series, often referred to as the core Command
& Conquer series, is set in the near future and revolves around a
substance called Tiberium, which falls to Earth in a meteor shower. Tiberium,
when harvested, provides massive amounts of energy and minerals for very low-intensive
mining, allowing it to be used to construct weapons of war very rapidly. A
semi-mystical religious cult turned paramilitary organisation, the Brotherhood
of Nod, led by the charismatic Kane, has sworn to exploit Tiberium for its own
end, but its measures are ruthless and brutal. The Global Defence Initiative
(GDI) is founded by the United Nations to secure Tiberium for the betterment of
mankind, but soon becomes the UN’s de facto military wing in the war
against Nod. Later games in the series reveal that Tiberium is an energy source
developed by an alien race known as the Scrin. A Scrin harvesting force later invades
Earth to reclaim the Tiberium, widening the scope of the conflict.
The Red Alert series is an alternate-history series set
in a splinter timeline, created when Albert Einstein travels from the 1950s to 1924
to assassinate Adolf Hitler and avert World War II. Although the plan is
successful, the changes to the timeline are unpredictable. In the new timeline,
Josef Stalin instead launches a massive invasion of Europe,
resulting in a devastating conflict. In the 1970s the conflict widens to
include an assault on the mainland United States. Attempts to use time travel
again to prevent this new conflict cause history to further spin off its axis,
resulting in the creation of a technologically-advanced Japanese empire which
also attempts to conquer the world. The Red Alert series was originally
intended to be a more direct prequel to the Tiberian series (hence the
otherwise inexplicable presence of Kane in the first game), but evolved into
its own storyline and universe. This series is noteworthy for the increasingly
camp, humorous and self-referential tone it adopts through the games.
The Generals series is the shortest-lived of the three
sub-series, consisting of just one game and an expansion. It was created when Electronic Arts diverted what was supposed to
be a new Tiberian game to a more “realistic” take on the War on Terror,
focusing on a three-way conflict between the United States, China and a global
terrorist organisation.
The Canon
To date, the Command & Conquer series has solely
almost consisted of video games and their accompanying soundtracks. There was a
single book, a novelisation of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars by
Keith R.A. DeCandido in 2007, but it was extremely poorly received.
Tiberian Series
- Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (1995)
- Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations (1996)
- Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999)
- Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun – Firestorm (2000)
- Command & Conquer: Renegade (2002)
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007)
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars – Kane’s Wrath
(2008)
- Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight (2010)
Red Alert Series
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert – Counterstrike (1997)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert – The Aftermath (1997)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert – Retaliation (1998)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 – Yuri’s Revenge
(2001)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Uprising (2009)
Generals Series
- Command & Conquer: Generals (2003)
- Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour (2003)
Remastered Series
- Command & Conquer Remastered: Tiberian Dawn & Red Alert (2020)
The Tiberian Series
The Tiberian Series opens in 1995, shortly after a
large interstellar asteroid or comet breaks up over the Earth, showering it
with strange crystals. The substance becomes known as “Tiberium,” apparently
from the first investigation site near the Tiber River in Italy (although this
is disputed by the Brotherhood of Nod, which claims to have named it after
Julius Caesar Augustus Tiberius). Tiberium contains huge amounts of energy and
also acts in a strange “leech” fashion, drawing up valuable mineral deposits
from the surrounding area into a form convenient for collection. Tiberium
spreads through soil and through physical structures. It also emits low levels
of radiation that will kill or mutate unshielded lifeforms over time.
The arrival of Tiberium was exploited by the Brotherhood of
Nod, a quasi-religious cult which claims it was founded circa 1800 BC in
ancient Babylon. The Brotherhood’s ideology promotes the notion of peace, unity
and eternal brotherhood in which humanity is unified to face the struggles of
life as one people. The Brotherhood also believed that the world had come to be
dominated by corrupt superpowers only at the expense of the world’s poorer
nations. The arrival of Tiberium allowed smaller nations to gain excess to
cheap energy and also allowed the Brotherhood to quickly build up a military machine
to rival that of the traditional superpowers, a process it dubbed “peace
through power.” After going public in the early 1990s, the Brotherhood won the
allegiance of numerous countries through Asia (most notably China), the Middle
East and Africa and began waging war against what it regarded as the imperialist
and colonialist powers of Europe and the United States.
Key to the Brotherhood’s success is its charismatic leader,
Kane. Despite his American accent, outlandish sources claim that Kane is the actual Biblical
Caine, brother of Abel and is over 6,000 years old. Some of Kane’s utterances also
suggest he is not human at all. However, Kane’s mystical background and alleged alien origins are possibly an attempt at myth-making to give him
greater credence than would otherwise be possible. The only thing that is clear
is that he has greater knowledge of Tiberium than anyone else and he appears to
not age at all, or very slowly.
Opposed to Nod and Kane is the Global Defence Initiative
(GDI), a military force funded by the United Nations to secure Tiberium
resources and work to defeat those who would turn it against the population. As
a military force beyond the control of any one nation, the GDI is controversial and it faces
numerous funding battles through its existence.
The original Command & Conquer (1995), later
renamed Tiberian Dawn, is set in the late 1990s and depicts the First
Tiberium War, a struggle between GDI and Nod for control of global Tiberium
resources. The game is split into two campaigns, with a Nod campaign seeing Nod
fighting a war for control of Africa. The GDI campaign sees a new and untested
GDI commander fighting Nod for control of Europe, culminating in a massive
battle at the Nod Temple Prime in Sarajevo. The expansion, Covert Operations (1996), features
missions that take place during the original game. The First Tiberium War ends
with Kane’s apparent death and the destruction of the Nod Temple by GDI’s
orbital ion cannon weapon.
Tiberian Sun (1999) is set in 2030 and reveals that
Tiberium has overrun most of the Earth’s surface, destroying major cities and
displacing hundreds of millions of people, with agricultural regions and wildlife
habitats devastated. GDI, now commanded from an orbital space station known as
the Philadelphia, has neutralised Nod by helping a moderate rise to
power, Hassan, and take control of the Brotherhood to use it as a force for
good (at least as defined by GDI). However, Kane unexpectedly announces his
return and Hassan is executed. The Brotherhood reverts to its former ways,
building a powerful war machine, and GDI is forced into an unexpected conflict.
Loyalists within the Brotherhood have spent thirty years building up a new war
machine and developing CABAL, a powerful AI to help coordinate the Brotherhood’s
plans. The game heavily revolves around the Tacitus, a computer system
found in a wrecked alien spacecraft, which holds the key to understanding
Tiberium. In the game’s GDI campaign, which is considered canonical, GDI
overcomes initial setbacks to defeat Kane’s army in a massive battle outside Cairo.
In the Nod campaign, Kane succeeds launching his Tiberium missiles from Cairo
which completely saturate the world with Tiberium and bring about his “ascension”
to a higher plane, and the forced evolution of humanity into an unknown form.
The game’s expansion, Firestorm (2000), depicts the
aftermath of the war with Nod regrouping under General Slavik. However, CABAL
rebels against Nod and goes rogue, posing a threat to all of humanity. The
Brotherhood and GDI reluctantly join forces to defeat and destroy CABAL. At the
end of this conflict is revealed that CABAL has saved Kane’s life and is
bringing about his restoration.
Command & Conquer: Renegade (2002) is a spin-off
from the main series. It is a first-person shooter set during the closing days
of the First Tiberian War and focuses on a GDI commando sent behind enemy lines
to rescue some captured scientists.
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007) picks
up the story in 2047. After helping defeat CABAL, the Brotherhood went to
ground and vanished for seventeen years. The GDI has successfully established safe
“Blue Zone” cities which can resist the spread of Tiberium and a new way of
life has emerged, but this focus on nation-building and massive infrastructure
construction has shifted attention away from its military and intelligence
divisions. As a result, GDI is caught by surprise when Kane announces (again)
his return with a nuclear missile strike on the Philadelphia,
decapitating both the military and civilian leadership of the organisation in
one swift move. Nod succeed in overrunning much of GDI’s territory, but a successful
counter-offensive stalls their advance, forcing them to switch to developing
weapons of mass destruction, including a liquid Tiberium bomb. GDI discover the bomb’s existence and use an ion cannon strike to neutralise it; however, the
interaction of the ion cannon and the resulting bomb explosion send a massive
signal across the solar system. The Scrin, the aliens who originally sent
Tiberium to Earth, realise that the substance is ready for harvesting and send an invasion force to claim it. However, rather than the entire planet being
overrun with Tiberium as they expect, they find the human race still extant
and capable of defending itself. With their superior technology, the Scrin establish several invasion beachheads but faced stiff resistance from both GDI and Nod
forces and their vastly superior numbers. With insufficient forces to defeat all of humanity, the Scrin set about
building massive towers, possibly wormhole gateways to allow them to bring in
reinforcements from their homeworld. Kane wants one of these gateways captured
intact to allow him to “ascend,” but GDI thwart his plans by destroying all
of the gateways and wiping out the last remnants of the Scrin invaders. Nod,
once again, go to ground.
Tiberium Wars’ expansion pack, Kane’s Wrath
(2008), depicts three military campaigns. The first is set in 2034 and depicts
the struggle for power in the Brotherhood after the events of Tiberian Sun
and Firestorm. The second is set before and during the Third Tiberium
War and focuses on internal Nod struggles. The third is set in 2052 and sees
the Brotherhood finally reclaim the alien Tacitus databank, which Kane plans to
use to bring about his plan to ascend.
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight (2010) is
set in 2077 and depicts a world in which the Brotherhood of Nod and GDI have formed
an uneasy alliance, Nod using the data from the Tacitus to bring Tiberium under
control and GDI providing the enormous resources needed to stop it overrunning
the last of the Blue Zones. In secret, Nod has been working to reactivate one
of the destroyed Scrin towers to bring about ascension, but this is not general
knowledge within the Brotherhood. One of Kane’s followers, Gideon, betrays him
by denouncing the alliance with GDI.
GDI and Nod fight a devastating war
against Gideon’s Brotherhood forces, but GDI discovers Kane’s own betrayal and
race to stop him reactivating the tower, fearing it will allow the Scrin to
invade the planet. They fail, and Kane steps through the portal and vanishes,
taking most of the Brotherhood with him. The expected Scrin counter-attack
never materialises, and GDI is able to use the information left behind in the
Tacitus to actually outright eradicate most of the Tiberium from the Earth, and
begin the process of rebuilding. Kane’s ultimate fate is unknown.
This is the “core” Command & Conquer series and
is noteworthy for its shifting tone, from a near-future, semi-realistic
military conflict to a much more overtly science fictional, post-apocalyptic
story featuring an alien invasion of the planet. This sub-series features the
franchise’s most iconic character, the villainous Kane (played by Joe Kucan).
The series is noteworthy for its FMV (full motion video) cutscenes, featuring
actors including Michael Biehn, James Earl Jones, Tricia Helfer, Josh Holloway,
Michael Ironside, Billy Dee Williams, Grace Park, Keith Szarabajka and Carl
Lumbly. It’s also unusual in that the primary story arc begun in the first game
had in fact been planned out by the writers ahead of time as a trilogy (who had
announced Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun and Tiberian Twilight
as the three game titles as early as 1996) and this story was more or less executed
to completion, although the events of Tiberium Wars had been inserted to
expand the franchise.
Although fondly regarded for its foundational role in the
RTS genre, the Tiberian series has a more mixed critical reception. Tiberian
Dawn was considered revolutionary at the time but was quickly superseded in
unit and level design by Red Alert. Tiberian Sun was heavily criticised
for a poor unit selection (mostly revolving around walkers rather than tanks)
and a very slow pace of gameplay compared to earlier titles in the series, as
well as not being on a par with competitor games like Total Annihilation
and StarCraft. Command & Conquer 3 was very warmly received
in 2007 and was praised for getting the match of story, units and gameplay just
right. However, Command & Conquer 4 attempted to break away from the
core gameplay loop of the series by abandoning base-building and traditional
resource gathering and was heavily criticised as the worst C&C game
of them all, despite bringing the overall storyline to a (more or less) coherent
conclusion. C&C4’s critical drubbing and commercial underperformance
is held responsible for the demise of the franchise.
The Red Alert Series
The Red Alert series opens in 1946 in New Mexico,
with Albert Einstein putting the finishing touches to the Chronosphere, a
device capable of travelling through time. Einstein transports himself to 1924,
just outside Landsberg, Germany, where Adolf Hitler is being released from
prison following his role in the Munich Putsch of 1923. Einstein shakes Hitler’s
hand, apparently vapourising him with energy, before he is pulled back to his
own time.
A new timeline is created, one where Germany was not taken
over by the Nazi Party and World War II did not take place. However, in this
alternate timeline there is no check to the advance of the Soviet Union, which
begins expanding into Eastern Europe in the 1940s. By the early 1950s a new equivalent
to NATO, the Alliance, has been founded, consisting of the UK, Germany, France,
Greece, Italy and several other European powers, although the United States
(still isolationist, since its global economic dominance resulting from WWII
did not come to pass) is reluctant to join. The Allies form a powerful military
to act as a counterbalance to the Soviets, but this not enough to stop Stalin
ordering an invasion of Europe. A devastating war erupts, eventually becoming
more destructive than the “real” World War II.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996) chronicles
this alternative Second World War (assumed to begin in 1952, before Stalin’s
death of natural causes, although it may be that in this alternate timeline and
with the removal of the stress of the heavy losses in WWII, Stalin would have
lived much longer). Red Alert was originally designed as a prequel to Tiberian
Dawn, with the plan being that the Allied victory would be canonical, with
the Allies eventually founding the GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod arising from
the ashes of the Soviet Union and unifying its forces (this would explain why
Russia goes unmentioned in Tiberian Dawn). This also explains why Kane cameos
as a Soviet advisor. However, Westwood changed its mind and decided to divorce
the two timelines. Further expansions – Counterstrike and The Aftermath
(both 1997) – expand the conflict with new missions and units, whilst Retaliation
(1998) combines the two packs with new cut scenes for console release.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) is set in
the early 1970s and assumes an Allied victory in the first game. It reveals
that after the war devastated Europe, the United States stepped in and helped
both the Allies and the Russians rebuild after the conflict. Russia has been a
key ally of the United States ever since, but it is revealed that this is a ruse
and Russia has been rebuilding its military in secret, plotting a massive invasion
of North America via forces secretly assembled in Mexico and Alaska. The reborn
Soviet Union executes the invasion with the help of Yuri, a mysterious man who
has developed extensive psychic powers. The invasion is a success, with Washington,
DC falling to the invaders and Yuri using his psychic powers to compel the US
surrender, but the military mostly ignores the order and continues fighting. US
Special Forces also eliminate the short-range Russian nuclear weapons in
Eastern Europe, which allows the Allies to invade the Soviet Union itself whilst
the bulk of its forces are fighting in North America. The Soviets are
eventually defeated. The Soviet campaign depicts the USSR as being victorious
in both America and Europe, but then switches to an internal struggle between
the Russian commander (the player) and Yuri.
Yuri’s Revenge (2001) is the expansion to Red
Alert 2 and depicts a renewed conflict, with Yuri using his “psychic
dominators” to take control of two-thirds of the world’s population and launch
a renewed invasion of the United States. Unable to fight off the invasion, the
US uses Einstein’s Chronosphere to travel back in time to the events of the
previous war and disrupt Yuri’s plans. Yuri is defeated once and for all. Yuri’s
Revenge is notable as the first Command & Conquer game to
feature three factions rather than two (as also later seen in the Generals
series and Command & Conquer 3) and also the last game in the series
to use 2D graphics.
Red Alert 3 (2008) opens during the closing moments
of Red Alert 2, with the Allies closing in on Moscow. In desperation,
the Soviets trigger a secret time machine they have been building in imitation
of the Chronosphere and successfully travel back to 1927. They kill Einstein
after he killed Hitler – resulting in the creation of the new timeline in
the first place – but before he could develop much of the Allied weapon
technology (including nukes). Returning to their home time, they find the
Soviet Union victorious in its conquest of both North America and Europe, but
vulnerable to a sneak attack by the Empire of the Rising Sun, a superpower centred
in Asia and led by Japan (in the former timeline, Japan was simply a member of
the Allies). In the resulting chaos the Allies and Soviets form a reluctant
alliance which breaks the back of the Empire and sees Japan occupied. An
attempt by the Soviets to betray the Allies is thwarted and the Soviet
leadership is imprisoned.
Uprising (2009) is Red Alert 3’s expansion. It deals
with the aftermath of the previous conflict, with both the USSR and the Empire
of the Rising Sun attempting to reestablish themselves and both facing internal
and external conflicts. In the canonical ending, the Allies are victorious once
again. The USSR and the Empire both collapse, with the resulting free nations
joining the Allies in becoming democratic powers. However, a wild card is left
unresolved in the form of Yuriko Omega, a young Japanese woman with formidable
psionic powers created through experimentation.
The
Red Alert series is seen as the campy, self-aware
and increasingly ludicrous antidote to the more serious
Tiberian series.
The series plays on Cold War and WWII tropes turned up to eleven and features an
even heavier emphasis on larger-than-life characters (
culminating in what mostpeople would agree to be the single most ridiculous line of dialogue uttered inthe history of human fiction). The series cast includes Kari Wuhrer, Ray Wise,
Barry Corbin, J.K. Simmons, Jonathan Pryce, David Hasselhoff, Gemma Atkinson,
Jenny McCarthy, Tim Curry, Peter Stormare, Gina Carano, Ric Flair, Malcolm
McDowell, Holly Valance and George Takei as the Emperor of Japan.
The Red Alert series, although a spin-off, is widely
regarded as the strongest sequence of games in the franchise, with Red Alert
having a better unit balance and mission design than Tiberian Dawn and Red
Alert 2 often being cited as the best individual game in the entire Command
& Conquer canon. Red Alert 3 attracted significant criticism for
its incredibly OTT tone, though, and its mission and unit design was considered
disappointing following Command & Conquer 3. Red Alert 3’s
mixed reception may have driven the decision to make Command & Conquer 4
a completely different style of game, further alienating fans.
The Generals Series
Command & Conquer: Generals (2003) is set in 2013
and depicts a more realistic world than either the Tiberian or Red
Alert series. The story opens with a Middle Eastern terrorist organisation
called the Global Liberation Army launching a surprise nuclear attack on
Tiananmen Square in Beijing and attempting to trigger a global nuclear war between
the United States and China. The game depicts attempts by both the USA and
China to destroy the GLA, with them occasionally coming to blows as their
forces are operating in the same territory. Eventually they succeed and the GLA
is driven out of Asia and the Middle East altogether. C&C Generals
is notable as being the first game in the franchise’s history to not have
FMV briefings, and also the first to use a full 3D game engine.
The game’s expansion pack, Zero Hour (also 2003),
sees the war renewed with the GLA regrouping in Europe. After a lengthy
campaign, China invades Europe and destroys the GLA altogether, but refuses to leave,
preferring to establish the “Eurasian Unity League” in Europe, hinting at a
future conflict between the League and the United States.
The Generals series is the shortest in the franchise’s
history, and was never really supposed to exist. Instead, the game started life
as C&C3 but was repurposed in development to “cash in” on the War on
Terror and the invasion of Iraq. On release, the game’s story was heavily
criticised for sensationalising real-life events, including terrorist attacks
on civilian targets and the use of units such as suicide bombers, although the
move to full 3D was generally praised as being successful.
However, the game was redeemed by the release of Zero Hour,
which added a huge amount of new content to the game (much of it meant to be in
the original title but cut for time reasons), including specialist generals and
the uncapped use of superweapons. It also dramatically adjusted the tone from the
grim and serious nature of the original game to a more knowing and somewhat lighter
tone. Particularly praised was a new showdown mode where each specialist
general faced down each of the others in a conflict that had absolutely nothing
to do with real life conflicts and was cheesier and more enjoyable as a result.
As a result, Zero Hour arguably challenges Red Alert 2 for the
title of best game in the entire C&C franchise.
The Command & Conquer series began as a spiritual successor to Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (1992), the game that popularised the modern RTS genre.
Development History
Westwood Studios began life in the mid-1980s as a games
development studio based in Las Vegas. They worked with SSI (Strategic Simulations,
Inc.) on their late 1980s Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying games, which set
them in good stead to create their own RPG series, the first two games in the well-received
Eye of the Beholder trilogy (1991-92) and then using the same engine for
their own IP, the Lands of Lore trilogy (1993-99). They also developed
the Legend of Kyrandia trilogy (1992-94), an adventure game influenced
by LucasArts and Sierra titles.
In the middle of this period they were offered the chance to
work on the Dune IP. Virgin Interactive, who owned the video game rights,
were developing an adventure/strategy hybrid with Cryo Interactive and wanted
to expand the IP with another game in a different genre. The team at Virgin
were inspired by a Sega Megadrive (Genesis in the US) game called Herzog Zwei
(1989), which allowed players to control multiple units from a top-down perspective.
They held a brainstorming session with Westwood where some of the staff
proposed creating a fast-paced wargame which looked a bit like Civilization
or SimCity, but where the action unfolded in real-time. The genre wasn’t
completely new to Westwood, who’d worked on BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s
Revenge (1990) which was notable as one of the first games that allowed
players to order entire units into battle simultaneously. A key development of
the new game was the mouse and keyboard interface, which allowed for much
greater, more precise control than Herzog Zwei.
The game was developed relatively quickly, with an internal
competition at Virgin to see if Cryo or Virgin could get their game out first.
Cryo won the race and their game reached the market first as Dune in early
1992, with Westwood’s game released as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
(the much punchier The Battle for Arrakis in Europe) just a few months
later.
Dune II was the much-better received of the two games
and attracted high review scores, as well as an energetic multiplayer scene. The
game was showered with praise and sold a huge number of copies. The team at
Westwood were pleased, although they also noted fan feedback that having to
click on each unit and send it into battle individually was laborious. Having to
tap a button (“Attack” or “Move”) and then a destination was also not particularly
fun. For the Megadrive port in 1993, they added the ability to select several
units at once and also a context-sensitive controller, so clicking on open land
would cause the selected unit to move there and, on an enemy, would make them
attack.
A small team at Westwood began developing a “spiritual
sequel” to Dune II that would expand on the same ideas but in a new IP which
they owned themselves. They also developed new ideas, such as using the “bandboxing”
technique from the new generation of operating systems to select multiple units
easily and quickly. With the advent of the CD-ROM format, they also decided to
have elaborate mission briefings performed by actors, with fully-rendered CG
cutscenes. Despite the game’s ambition, the budget was tight so they saved
money by using some of the developers as actors for the cutscenes. Their dialogue
and cutscene director, Joe Kucan, agreed to play the game’s villain, Kane. The
writing of the game took on a contemporary feel, referencing locations in the
news such as Sarajevo and Bosnia, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the
writers decided to make the enemy a global terrorist organisation.
Westwood were feeling confident about the new game, which
they dubbed Command & Conquer, but they felt upstaged when another
developer, Blizzard Interactive, beat them to market by ten months with their
own real-time strategy game, WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, released in late
1994. Fortunately, although WarCraft picked up good reviews and modest
sales, it failed to make a huge impact and lacked some of Command &
Conquer’s innovations, such as bandbox selecting.
Command & Conquer was a huge success by both Westwood’s
standards and the strategy genre overall, selling over a million copies in
under a year (almost four times WarCraft’s sales). The developers had mapped
out a storyline unfolding over three games, with the sequels to be called Tiberian
Sun and Tiberian Twilight (with the first game retroactively named Tiberian
Dawn, in a similar fashion to the rebranding of the original Star Wars
as A New Hope), each featuring a new engine and substantial improvements
to gameplay and design. However, the developers wanted to get a new game out
quickly by repurposing their existing engine and decided to start work on a
WWII-themed prequel. This evolved into Command & Conquer: Red Alert.
Red Alert was released in November 1996, just thirteen
months after the original game, and won even greater critical acclaim and even bigger
sales. Both Command & Conquer and Red Alert were also ported
to the Sony PlayStation in 1996 and 1997, winning acclaim for the quality of
the ports and bringing the strategy genre to the console space. In addition,
Westwood ported Dune II to the new engine (complete with brand new FMV
cutscenes), releasing it as an early example of a video game remake as Dune
2000 in 1999.
Development of Command & Conquer 2: Tiberian Sun
(the “2” was later omitted to encourage more newcomers to the franchise to try
out the game) began in 1997, but faced heavy delays. The company was acquired
by Electronic Arts in 1998, with the resulting financial and business complexities
slowing development down. In addition, there was considerable internal debate about
whether to move to a new engine and if the company should be pursuing a 3D
model. Eventually it was decided to stay in 2D but to use voxels (three-dimensional
pixels) to represent units, for improved performance. They also decided to
switch from a top-down to an isometric viewpoint. This “2.5D” approach felt fresh
in 1997, but somewhat dated by the time the game was released in late 1999.
In addition, the RTS genre had developed with remarkable speed
in the meantime. WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness had been released just a
couple of months after Command & Conquer and won immense acclaim for
featuring innovations beyond Westwood’s model (such as limited unit queuing,
allowing multiple units to be built simultaneously and a heavier narrative
focus, with “hero” units on the battlefield). Total Annihilation, released
in September 1997 by Cavedog Entertainment, won even greater critical acclaim
for its full 3D engine (albeit viewed from a fixed perspective), unique
resource gathering system and its ability to render far larger armies than C&C
could manage. The biggest success of the period was StarCraft, released
in early 1998 by Blizzard. The game had begun as a space opera reskin of WarCraft,
but had been redeveloped into a much more original game, also using an
isometric viewpoint. The game featured fully-rendered CG cutscenes that were
light-years beyond Westwood’s abilities and a truly compelling balance between
three distinct factions that was very finely tuned. StarCraft went on to
become the biggest-selling RTS game of all time, with almost 20 million copies
sold to date and establishing a strong presence in South Korea, where the game
became a staple of Internet cafes and multiplayer matches were even covered on
sports channels.
Against this backdrop, Tiberian Sun arrived in late
1999 feeling very late to a party its own creators had started, not helped by a
slower style of gameplay and an uninspired unit selection that dispensed with
fan favourites from the first two games in favour of identikit robots. Despite a
mixed critical reception and complaints that the game had failed to innovate
compared to the competition, the game sold quite well, but failed to match the speed
of success of the first two games in the series.
The developers decided to repeat the pattern from the
original game, by using the same engine to develop Red Alert 2. Responding
to the complaints of fans, Red Alert 2 hewed much closer to its forebear
than Tiberian Sun had, with stronger focus on unit variety and side
balance. The result was the best-received game of the series, with a lack of
innovation largely forgiven for how playable and fun it was.
Westwood turned its attention to the future and began
developing a 3D engine to use in the third and (at that time) final set of Command
& Conquer games. Due to the sales success of Dune 2000, they
decided to prototype the new engine in that franchise first, with the result
being Emperor: Battle for Dune, released in early 2001. The game was
moderately well-received, although the 3D engine was somewhat primitive
compared to those seen in the likes of Homeworld (1999) and Ground
Control (2000).
During the development of Red Alert 2, a new studio called
Westwood Pacific had been opened in Los Angeles. Westwood Pacific had undertaken
the bulk of development on Red Alert 2 and, after the shipping of the Yuri’s
Revenge expansion, used the Emperor engine to begin development on
the third C&C game in the Tiberian universe. Westwood Las
Vegas wanted to lead development on this game, but had been side-tracked into
working on the FPS Command & Conquer: Renegade (released in 2002 to indifference)
and the MMORPG Earth and Beyond (2002), which had an expensive
development process.
Due to overrunning cost issues and the distinct failure of Earth
and Beyond to make much impact on the MMORPG scene, EA decided to shutter
Westwood Las Vegas in January 2003. Some of the team transferred to EA Pacific,
whilst others formed a new company, Petroglyph, and secured a licence to work on
a Star Wars RTS (which became Empire at War).
Early during the development of Command & Conquer 3,
EA decided to redirect it from being a Tiberian game to focusing on contemporary
issues, such as the War on Terror and the impending invasion of Iraq. This
resulted in Command & Conquer: Generals and its expansion Zero
Hour. Despite distaste in some quarters for the exploitative subject matter,
the game was highly playable and praised for being a more convincing move into
3D than Emperor had been.
EA Pacific rebranded as EA Los Angeles, a much larger studio
with multiple games in different genres in development. An FPS team worked on
additions to the Medal of Honor franchise whilst the RTS team developed
both the Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth franchise and further
Command & Conquer games. This resulted in Command & Conquer
3: Tiberium Wars in 2007 and Red Alert 3 in 2008. Both were well-received,
especially given that the RTS genre had fallen out of favour in recent years
and the games were relatively rare releases in the field.
Unfortunately, the RTS genre had been dealt a serious blow
by the advent of the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) genre in 2003 with Defense
of the Ancients (DotA). A heavily-modified map from WarCraft III,
DotA concentrated the gameplay loop into a much smaller amount of
territory with a more focused objective. The changes to the genre most notable
reduced the focus to a single field of engagement, unlike an RTS where large and
small battles might be happening simultaneously across a much larger map. This
change was important to improve the viability of MOBAs as a spectator sport,
making the action easier to follow.
The huge success of MOBAs had led to games developers
chasing that success, in particular choosing to embrace more MOBA-like elements
in their RTS series. Relic Entertainment decided to incorporate strong MOBA-like
gameplay in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (2009), abandoning the game’s
RTS roots. Although it wasn’t quite to the same degree, EA also mandated a
major change to Command & Conquer 4, particularly abandoning the
base-building element altogether in favour of having single mobile command
centres which built all of the units themselves. This move was received hugely
negatively by fans when it was confirmed, with many fans organising boycotts of
the game until base building was re-implemented. In the event it was not.
On release, Command & Conquer 4 (2010) faced the
equivalent of a critical drubbing (meaning it got 6 and 7s out of 10s rather
than the 9s to 10s the franchise had once almost automatically commanded) for
its move away from the classic gameplay style and the overwhelming focus on
multiplayer. The decision to “chase the unicorn” of getting lots of new players
interested in a 15-year-old franchise at the expense of the millions of
existing fans was very heavily criticised, and in fact was shown to be hugely
mistaken when StarCraft II, with its very strong retro feel and heavy
base-building focus, launched just three months later and was an enormous
mega-hit.
The fate of the Command & Conquer series was unclear
at this stage, but behind the scenes EA decided to move forward with a new
game. With EA Los Angeles winding down, Victory Studios was selected to begin
development of a new game which would become Command & Conquer: Generals
2, a direct follow-up to the 2003 game. Generals 2 returned the
focus to base-building with a singleplayer campaign and robust multiplayer
model. The game was a sequel to Generals but also had a general opening which
did not require foreknowledge of the first game. It also used the Frostbite 3
Engine, to give it a visual sheen unmatched by other games in the genre. However,
EA seemed to be in some internal dissent over the nature of the game and in
August 2012 renamed it just as Command & Conquer (part of a highly
annoying trend of giving new games the exact same title as earlier, already-existing
games) and manded it drop the single-player component altogether. Instead, it
was to be a free-to-play, multiplayer-only game.
Somewhat mercifully, the game was put of its (and
prospective players’) misery and cancelled in October 2013. EA did briefly
explore moving the game to a new studio in 2014 but could not find a suitable
home.
The franchise appeared to be dead in the water, along possibly
with the entire real-time strategy genre (even the mega-selling StarCraft II
seemed to run out of steam before the release of its second expansion in 2015).
Apart from a risible mobile game in 2018 (Command & Conquer: Rivals),
the franchise seemed to be no more.
Or so it seemed. In August 2017, Blizzard Entertainment
released StarCraft Remastered, a revamped version of the original game
which maintained the original gameplay but hugely improved the graphics and UI.
A year later, Electronic Arts announced Command & Conquer: The
Remastered Collection, which would update and revamp both Tiberian Dawn
and Red Alert. Fans were initially highly sceptical, until it was
confirmed that the majority of the development team from the original titles
had been reunited to work on the project. The game was released in June 2020 to
widespread critical acclaim, with the original games updated with surprising
skill and finesse to modern standards whilst also retaining the original core
gameplay. The remaster also used advanced AI techniques to upscale the original
video FMV, revamped all of the music and integrated the console-only missions
and FMV into the main game experience for the first time for PC gamers. It went
above and beyond the expectations of fans.
The Future
Just a couple of years ago, it looked like Command &
Conquer was dead forever, but the success of C&C Remastered has
changed that. Given the success of the package, hopefully a second remastered
collection will follow, including Tiberian Sun and the best game in the
series, Red Alert 2. A new game would also be nice, although it’s
unclear what form that might take. C&C4 wrapped up the Tiberian
story arc pretty conclusively, but it did leave some room for a sequel and developers
might want to still make use of Joe Kucan whilst he still looks convincingly
like the Kane of the original game. Generals 2 was in the planning
stages at one time and still seems the ripest of the sub-series for further expansion,
although at this point a sequel to the most obscure game in the main series might
feel like a bit of a stretch. Red Alert 3 took that series as far as it
could go in self-referential humour, but there might be a way of making a Red
Alert 4 that made sense.
Perhaps more likely is a new sub-series, such as a Command
& Conquer set during the actual Second World War, or a wholly new take
on contemporary warfare. Somewhat less likely, unfortunately, is a revisiting
of the Dune franchise; Funcom picked up the video game rights a few years ago and
don’t seem as interested in a revamp of the original games. What is clear is
that for the first time in a decade, there is some hope that a new Command & Conquer game is possible, and hopefully one that
does better for the series than C&C4. The future is hopeful, commander.
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