"But Brett felt strongly that a contemporary war environment would be more accessible for most people so the game moved into 'modern war' and the C&C fiction began to take shape." "Command & Conquer was originally a fantasy game with wizards and warriors," Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle added. "We weren't exactly sure it would work at first, but when we had so much fun playing it in the office, we knew we were on to something." "I think the appeal was the combination of plausible sci-fi military units melded with the real-time aspects of Populous with a light splash of the unit progression found in Civilization," said Lead Programmer Joe Bostic (via CVG). The original C&C built on the foundation of many of the concepts established in Dune 2 and proved to be an exciting new endeavor for Westwood Studios. This led to the birth of Command & Conquer, which explored an alternate world devastated by two warring factions competing over control of a resource called Tiberium. Instead, the development team wanted to explore something new. Westwood wanted to build on those ideas further, but not through the Dune license. It utilized unit-based combat, resource management, and an isometric viewpoint. Dune 2, specifically, featured some mechanics that are taken for granted by some of today's RTS userbase. Prior to that year, Westwood was recognized for creating a pair of games based on the Dune license, which released on the Sega Megadrive. However, it didn't start off life as an original title. Westwood Studios released the original C&C back in 1995.
#Command and conquer red alert 2 soviet units series#
The sands of timeīefore diving into Red Alert, let's look at the Command & Conquer series as a whole. Today, we're looking back at Command & Conquer: Red Alert.
While there are many wonderful RTS games to be found in 2021, there was one title in the genre that stood out above its contemporaries in 1996. For today, we're taking the focus off of shooters and platformers and shifting gears to real-time strategy. We've looked back at how games like Quake, Super Mario RPG, Crash Bandicoot, Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64, and several other 1996 releases have impacted this great hobby. Gaming was being revolutionized in a number of ways 25 years ago.