How the original Command & Conquer lets us live our armyman fantasy
Command & Conquer (1995)
Command & Conquer (1995)
All young boys have had armyman fantasies at one point or another. Arguably, these dreams never go away; just look at how popular airsoft has become in recent years. Not to mention the amount of stag parties and boys groups who go paintballing. No sooner does the camo go on, than people immediately start fancying themselves as crackshot commandos.
But that’s all just fun and games, quite literally, or at least until you take a paintball at point blank range. You see, it’s all well and good no-scoping people in Battlefield or Call of Duty, and reckoning you could do the same in real life. But we Rambo fantasists never seem to realise that modern war just isn’t like that.
It’s all remote control slaughter these days, video game players sending drones into the hotzone a hundred miles away from their base. Even if geeks like us had to scramble and mobilise, we’d just be nailing hapless enemies from impossible distances away in our mega-advanced helicopter gunship.
If we ever had to actually go to the frontlines, our fortunes would change pretty quickly. There we’d be, swanning along the frontlines, all square-jawed and well-hung. Then suddenly we get our heads taken off from a dozen miles away by some laughing, wise-cracking sniper.
No, if I ever have to do any soldiering, I think I’d like to be the commanding officer. That seems like a handy gig. I could get away with being all fierce and bald and short of breath. Siegfried Sassoon would write poems about me. General Melchett would invite me to keep wicket for the local XI.
War’s all about strategy, see, and it’s a lot easier to be strategic from a cushy office, than out in the field where it’s 900 decibels, dark and foggy and there’s a ton of shrapnel coming at you, but luckily you were able to deflect the blow with a 14-year-old ensign’s body.
The dearly departed Westwood Studios knew all of this when they created Command & Conquer in the mid 1990s. It wasn’t their first wartime rodeo: they had already made great strides for the Real-Time Strategy genre with Dune II.
There’s a question: why don’t you get great strategy games based on sci-fi anymore? I remember I picked up a Star Wars game for PC, that was almost entirely a reskin of Age of Empires 2, with the Imperial March blasting as the first background song – now that was more like it.
But before any of that, we had this: the first game in the Command & Conquer series, fan-named Tiberian Dawn because obviously the fans know best. This is what you call a proper PC game, from the days of having two separate speakers, the old Microsoft logos, the Windows 95 startup chime, compact discs being the brand new thing and a CRT monitor that weighed a ton.
Now, I’ve never particularly been a PC gamer. I’ve played much more ROMs and emulators and even flash games on PC than I’ve played actual PC games. I’m hardly ever on Steam, so I’m moreorless immune to their constant sales. The only games I ever play on PC are games that simply don’t translate well to consoles, usually real-time strategies like Age of Empires, and C&C.
So I’m a bit uneducated on the history of PC gaming, never having top-notch PC hardware at any time. But as far as I’m concerned, PC gaming up until this point was, at best, primitive. I just saw it as a blaze of discoloured purple and blue graphics, with not a single sound effect to enjoy, all pushing whatever the hell DOS was to its absolute limits. Imagine an infinity of Commander Keen games, or those rubbish Mega Man PC games.
In 1995, Command & Conquer seemed to change all that and dragged PC games kicking and screaming into some sort of modernity. Boy, talk about an incentive to keep you playing – before and after every mission, whether you choose the United Nations-backed GDI side or the insurrectionist NOD faction, you’re treated to compelling full-motion videos, with acting done by many of the game’s developers.
It’s green-screen done well, probably because the resolution of the original game would have been, I don’t know, 244×240 or something ridiculous. But it doesn’t look bad at all. The other CG scenes that bookend the missions are a bit more like the hokier parts of Toy Story, I suppose, but that just makes the whole package more charming.
As you progress further into the campaign, you’ll unlock more music tracks for the playlist as well, and this game’s soundtrack is definitely one of the most iconic in all of gaming.
The famous Hell March tune didn’t come until the next game, but one of gaming’s classic and most memorable moments comes when you embark on the GDI campaign and one of your ships is firing missiles onto the beachhead as ‘Act on Instinct’ plays. This gets followed by ‘Just Do It Up’, and everyone remembers the ‘Mechanical Man.’
I should say though, that the single-player campaign for both factions is pretty tricky, in some cases a bit frustrating to go back to. I can’t say I ever made a huge amount of progress on the campaign when I first played this game as a kid either, but it’s a difficult prospect for any gamer.
Each of the missions is less an exercise in your strategic knowhow, and more a puzzle, a challenge for you to find the one and only way of winning. This in turn might be because the computer AI isn’t really an AI at all – it just makes money, builds expensive units and occasionally throws them at you. If you attack its Harvester, its main moneymaker, it throws the kitchen sink at you. And famously, if you put sandbags or concrete walls in its way, it simply won’t know what to do.
The worst missions are the ones where you don’t get to build up your base and train units; rather, you have to keep certain units alive. If they get capped, you fail. Makes sense, but it’s not too easy to prevent their grisly death when you have to move them slowly and carefully through the fog of war, hoping they don’t get burned to a crisp by a laser blast from the greatest structure in any real-time strategy game, the Obelisk of Light.
This all means that your only real strategy on those missions is to save every three seconds as you progress. Not particularly fun, it has to be said, but we can forgive them – it was very early days for the genre, after all.
Unfotuately, you were stuck with the single-player campaign unless you got some LAN play going with a friend, because this edition lacked a Skirmish mode that would let you have a random battle against the AI.
Such a mode was later added to the Remastered version of the game, which also comes with the original Red Alert and can be had from Steam for twenty bones or less. I’d say that’s worth it, if you have a twenty lying around, but keep in mind that both of these games are definitely aged by now.
Aged, but still well worth playing, if only as a history lesson. If you want to check out a really badly aged version of the original Command & Conquer, you should try the ill-advised ports to PS1 and Nintendo 64. Actually, to be fair, I do have fond memories of playing against pals with two PlayStations literally wired up and connected to each other.
God, the things we did before online play. Us warmongering boys need a way of actually playing out our little wargames, you know? Unfortunately, my strategies tend to end in my grisly demise, by way of an almighty tank rush, and I get my ass blown off the map. Looks like I’m not cut out for the fat general’s life after all.
7 February 2025