The 1995 release of Command & Conquer (C&C) from Westwood Studios was a bolt out of the blue in the gaming world. During this time, the real-time strategy genre was little more than experimental, and although games such as Dune II had already laid down some of the basic framework expected from this type of game, it was really the first C&C title that set the genre on fire in gaming circles. It was the first time that many budding strategy gamers who have since turned into tried-and-true strategy gaming fans—had actually been given the reins of command.
When I first played Command & Conquer, I was immediately captivated by its world. The introductory cutscene, with live-action footage and urgent voiceover, set the stage for an intense rivalry between the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod. “We fight for peace,” says the voiceover, and that’s exactly what the GDI does. But the Nod is also fighting, with no clear motive but only a promise of “everlasting peace” if it wins.
Because of this, and also because of the resources that must be collected through an economy of war, the core nerds of today. Command & Conquer created an… RTS and made a great foundation and took it with the introduction of the next couple games.
Innovative Changes in Gameplay: Profundity and Ease of Access
Command & Conquer distinguished itself from the games that came before it with gameplay that was easy to dive into but had a lot of underlying intricacies. It was an RTS that did not demand too much micromanagement. The game allowed, and to a certain extent even encouraged, players to focus on the broad strokes of their in-game plan and worry less about the moment-to-moment happenings of their units. On top of this, Command & Conquer was built on top of a sturdy and time-tested game engine.
In comparison to the previous real-time strategy (RTS) games, resource management in Command & Conquer (C&C) was made more straightforward. The main resource, Tiberium, was harvested by deploying a harvester unit to a Tiberium patch. Once the unit was full, it would return to a nearby refinery and begin to slowly convert the Tiberium into credits. All units and structures cost a certain amount of credits to produce, with an exception for a few free units and defensive structures that the player was given by default. The player entirely lost a unit or structure when they had no credits to fund it. Just because resource management in Command & Conquer was made easier doesn’t mean it’s a poor system in comparison to other RTS games. It’s a different kind of resource system, and I kind of like it.
Constructing bases in C&C was an instinctive and pleasing task. Buildings simply appeared atop the battlefield, immediate and ready for use, as if quarried from the bedrock on which the landscape was premised. Such a method was the channel through both expansion into the enemy remained a rewardingly fast process and the player could focus on troops and tactics rather than doilies on the command-and-control network. And the game remains a beloved standard—easy to decry as a mindless dolt of a thing, but I have yet to see the same format elicit as much pathos.
Another area where C&C really stood out was in unit management. There were so many different types of units you could command, and not just in the typical rock–scissors–paper format, either. A variety of infantry units; various types of tanks and armored vehicles; a nice complement of aircraft that included bombers and two different varieties of helicopter; and “empty” classes that you couldn’t shape up into in the early game. Then there was the pantheon of specialists. I remember you could even recruit some lady who was a do-gooding pyromaniac and came with her own flamethrower. I don’t remember if she had a name, or if she was just called Flame Tank Engineer.
In addition to the many visual innovations that the original Command & Conquer is remembered for, it also introduced the concept of “fog of war” to the RTS format. Fog of war is the simple notion that everything in a certain radius is blacked out and invisible unless you have a unit in that area. This same field of vision that your unit has is the same area in which the unit’s artificial intelligence can work with—meaning the unit’s AI can only function in its line of sight.
One more thing made the game successful: It was perfectly paced. You never felt like you were slogging through a level, dragging your sorry forces from one side of the map to another. You were always in the midst of fast, sharp, real-time combat, carving out and defending a base, then launching a real attack. But you also had to think; the game was always asking you to think, even when you were in the middle of a fight. If you didn’t keep an eye on your resources, if you didn’t put your Heisenbergian cussedness to good use and figure out your opponent’s intentions, the game invariably punished you for it.
A Fresh Look at Narrative and Immersion
Not only does Command & Conquer give you some great new toys and rules to play with, it sets a standard we ought to emulate for pushing the very edges of the envelope of this genre toward immersion and compelling narrative in the service of good gaming. Westwood Studios is clearly the New Hollywood. Despite Electronic Arts’s known antipathy for narrative in any form, Westwood has crafted an engaging and almost believable milieu in which to immerse you.
One of the many features of Command & Conquer that stick in people’s minds is the use of full-motion video (FMV). The video vignettes in the game lent the character interactions a liveliness and presence that the game otherwise would not have. The video direction was very cinematic, in service of the 1995 game as a whole, with its famous live video plot. When the PC game reboot takes place in 2022 or 2023, how will the EA team replace those actor-carried vignettes? Using Unreal Engine 5, the odds seem favorable for some extremely high-def, spooky-real mission briefings, but who will be convincing enough to top Westwood’s original vision and charisma of Joseph D. Kucan, and will that be enough?
The narrative of the game was split into two clear and separate campaigns; one was played almost entirely on the side of what one might call the “good guys” (the GDI), and the other was spent leading the forces of the “bad guys” (the Brotherhood of Nod). Both offered an almost equal quantity of missions and took players on a tour to understand the stories almost as if they had opened up a futuristic field diary of two completely contrasting arsenals of life.
The game’s great sense of immersion extended to its mission design. There were so many assets to the appearance of the game that greatly enhanced its believability. Missions were much more detailed and particular than what gamers were used to. The C&C team really thought each mission through to move both the believable “what if” narrative as well as the player’s sense of being an active participant forward. And the player was the participant in diverse objectives that usually changed several times within the mission from what they started with. The doing of the missions felt great, had a good rhythm, and was much more than “go here, shoot that.”
The meticulousness of Command and Conquer’s world-building is one of the facets I adore most about the game. The C&C universe is unprecedentedly broad, and every game resource that isn’t a cutscene reveals a bit more of its lore. Nothing achieves that more effusively than the game’s instruction manual. It’s also quite remarkable to me in another sense. My younger self was always admonished by teachers for refusing to use quotation marks. The manual’s writers side with me: at least 80% of the content is pure narrative that begs to be read from cover to cover. There are no boring technical bits to trudge through, as the “missions” section does that on an equally enthralling level itself.
Also pivotal in making the game engrossing was the work done on its audio. The soundtrack of the game was put together by Westwood’s in-house composer Frank Klepacki. He mixed rock, techno, and orchestra to intense and even over-the-top effect. (Have you ever listened to Hell March? It’s fabulous.) The tunes Klepacki wrote went hand in hand with the moments in the games when they would be most impactful and gave an added weight to the story the visuals were telling.
Legacy and Community: Molding the Tomorrows of Real-Time Strategy Games
Command & Conquer is a defining moment for the real-time strategy (RTS) genre for video games. It left a lasting impact on the medium that is still felt over 25 years later. Most importantly for this discussion, it has a passionately dedicated community built around it, with fans hailing from all across the globe and of all ages. C&C went on to have a multitude of sequels and spiritual successors. At the core of all of them is the vibrant community, and one might argue that the community is the actual lasting legacy of Command & Conquer.
The C&C community’s togetherness took root during the game’s well-nurtured multiplayer mode. This was when we still hooked up machines with serial and parallel cables. This was when TCP/IP was in its messy infancy and when 9600-baud modems maxed out at 14.4. At Cain’s crummy apartment, we had an Alienware box set on a card table (hey, this was when Alienware was still good), and we would take turns playing against some poor schmoe who happened to be at the top of the Gamespy lobby’s list. We did this almost every night—and when we didn’t, it was because we were taking the fight to someone else’s house.
Crucially, the game’s legacy was also sustained by the flexibility of the engine, which inspired countless modifications. After the release, the number of user-submitted maps was dwarfed only by the number of maps for Doom (1993). C&C and its engine were renowned for their accessibility, allowing even amateurs to create high-quality scenarios. These maps often challenged the game’s original formula and led to surprisingly fresh content. With C&C and D2 (1997) at their lead, the Westwood/EA teams always made a point to mention their enthusiastic reception of these not-very-poor maps or total conversions.
The countless real-time strategy games that emerged in the wake of Command & Conquer owe much to its original format, narrative structure, and technological prowess. Although many consider the burgeoning of the RTS genre to have been presaged by the influential 1990 title Dune II, Command & Conquer is what clearly indexed the genre’s commercial and creative potential. And unlike Dune II, it accomplished this with a style that was much more “MTV-generation-friendly.”
C&C’s bequest, too, lives on in the coterie of strategy games whose creators cut their teeth on Westwood’s path-defining pair, not least of all Blizzard, which went from being a Westwood knockoff to the strategy genre’s other torchbearer by the late 1990s. The emphasis “drama through the economy of war,” in the words of Westwood eminence Luis Sempeé, is still very much a thing.
For people like me and many others who played Command & Conquer in its glory days, the game has a certain undeniable charm. It’s a game I look back on fondly, because it’s one of the first times I remember sitting down at a computer and fucking losing myself entirely. I can see how it’s left its mark on me and countless others who’ve played it, too. It was also one of the first games I ever played where the music significantly added to the character and charm of the game.
In the lasting effects of Command & Conquer, we can see that it virtually singlehandedly set up and defined the “real-time strategy game” genre in the early 1990s, creating the first real hit, after a few false starts, in the field of “strategic war games.” C&C created an image of real-time war that looked… just look at the screen: war is happening. And C&C really used the computers of the day pretty well to make pretty clear what was happening and what would happen in real iterations of war. Would WarCraft ever have happened if C&C hadn’t? Would Total War be the name of a game that it is? Would StarCraft have taken over? The answers to such questions invariably come out as ‘No.’
As I contemplate the influence of Command & Conquer, I realize that the game was an epochal event in the making of RTS games. The up-to-this-point unseen game mechanics, ground-breaking narratives, and astoundingly bright and detailed new standards have molded our understanding of what a game is like.
The next time you play an RTS game, think about where it came from. If the series influenced it (as was probable), you can probably trace that influence back to one of two games: C&C or C&C: Red Alert.
The many games that have come after C&C show just how influential it has been; they’re the direct result of its structure and use of modern tropes, not to mention its potent mix of real-time strategy and base defense. The C&C series and their progeny are also beloved by the world of eSports for the dramatic, “down-to-the-wire” gameplay moments they deliver a big part of their almost perverse replayability. And the C&C fans are so diehard, they seem almost a part of the game—like how Metal Gear has its fan-delivered Easter Egg Codec calls.
Command and Conquer is a beloved game in the history of real-time strategy games in the PC world. For gamers who first played it nearly 30 years ago—an experience that pushed the story of the real-time strategy genre forward with appealing characters, novel units, innovative in-base building, and interesting twists on resource gathering. Not to mention an impressive audiovisual presentation that beguiled us in the era of Red Alert. Is history going to repeat itself with Command and Conquer: Rivals?
