Command & Conquer

aka: C&C, Command & Conquer (Special Gold Edition), Command & Conquer for Windows 95, Command & Conquer: Der Tiberiumkonflikt, Command & Conquer: Der Tiberiumkonflikt (SVGA-Version), Command & Conquer: Teil 1 - Der Tiberiumkonflikt, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn
Moby ID: 338
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

Command & Conquer develops ideas from Westwood's previous game Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, forming a real-time strategy (RTS) game. The control system involves selecting units with the mouse and then directing them, while the opponents make their moves without waiting for a "turn" to end.

The game focuses on a war between two organizations, The Brotherhood of Nod and the Global Defense Initiative, which fight not only for global supremacy, but also over the mysterious extraterrestrial resource known as Tiberium which is highly valuable yet lethal to direct human contact. The player can take control of either side for more than 15 missions. Both have different units and structures, including artillery, tanks and light infantry.

In most missions, a base needs to be built first in order to build new units and structures. Most important are the harvesters, which collect Tiberium and deliver it to a refinery, where it's converted into money, thus funding the construction of a base and an army.

The game also features FMV mission briefings and victory cutscenes.

Spellings

  • コマンド&コンカー - Japanese spelling
  • 命令与征服 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 終極動員令 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

115 People (107 developers, 8 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 85% (based on 42 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 208 ratings with 12 reviews)

Genuinely dislikable.

The Good
Not much; the graphics are appealing at first, but this is definitely not the kind of game you'd expect from the company which brought you the everlasting Dune II.

The Bad
A lot of things. It was overhyped and completely lacks in many respects.

The unit AI is just absolutely crappy (the game also has a tendency to lose track of units after a few clicks); the graphics are OK but not all that good, the missions are annoying and the two sides are completely unbalanced. The music isn't very good, nor is the gameplay (annoying units, no-fun "specials") and it completely lacks the atmosphere which made Dune II the great game it was.

The Bottom Line
Play it once, I assure you you'll keep away from it long afterwards.

DOS · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 1999

A fast paced, brilliantly designed game that has stood the test of time

The Good
Everything about this game screams quality. With the multimedia revolution in full swing, Westwood went crazy on the production values and produced an expensive, lavish, and polished game miles ahead of anything else available at the time. It was the first real-time strategy game to ship on multiple CDs, and that should tell you something.

I won't use the phrase "multimedia showcase" in case I scare anyone away, but it can't be denied that lots of emphasis has been put into the game's presentation. When you install the game and boot up you get treated to an awesome FMV intro that sets the scene for the conflicts that follow, and this ostentatious, no-budget-in-sight design is found throughout the game. Fortunately, this isn't all Command and Conquer has going for it, underneath all the flash is solid gameplay and some of the best design yet put on a disk. C&C is an awesome game and one of the genre's great classics.

The plot is a sci-fi treat, consisting of a futuristic war between two factions over a rare element called Tiberium which is kind of like the Spice in the Dune series of books. The NOD are a neo-fascist army of terrorists who want to control the world's Tiberium supply, and opposing them is the Global Defense Initiative (kind of like the UN of the future). The story doesn't play a huge role in gameplay (your mission objectives usually boil down to "those pesky GDI have set up camp on our territory! GO! KILL!") But is nevertheless a well-written and entertaining piece of work, containing gimmicks such as time travel and split realities and enough pseudoscience to add a small modicum of credibility to C&C's unlikely future world. The writers behind the game deserve credit for doing this without sending it into cheese land.

The basic gameplay are rather similar to Westwood's first RTS outing Dune II, in that it's centered around harvesting minerals and building troops, but C&C is much more intense and fast. There's so much action going on here you could seriously get carpal tunnel syndrome playing this game. But even more importantly, a clean interface and smart design make the game much more centered around strategy, and ironically this was the thing most missing from strategy games in the early nineties.

The game strikes a perfect balance between base-building and fighting. You have to collect Tiberium (the game's primary resource) using special harvesters and then return it to refineries for processing. You also need energy stations to power your buildings, and since you have a fixed supply of it you can't just harvest all the Tiberium you can find, whack down thirty factories and start cranking out tanks like mad. This is a great idea and evens the playing field between skilled and unskilled players, because even if you are harvesting more Tiberium than your opponant you'll still be hamstrung (to a limited extent) by his energy needs.

C&C introduced the idea of an interlocked tech tree, where all functions in the game are dependant on something else. If you don't have a refinery you can't process any Tiberium, and if your storage facilities are destroyed you lose all the Tiberium you collected. This opens the strategic window and gives you a lot of options you didn't have in previous games. You don't need to destroy the enemy's army to win, a controlled series of strikes against storage facilities will cripple his ability to fight.

Like Dune II, the two factions have numerous units at their disposal that perform similar functions but are different enough to make playing as a different side seem like a whole new experience. The GDI have powerful tanks and vehicles, while the NOD have stronger airborn weapons and footsoldiers. Late-game battles become absolutely crazy, with both sides fighting over scraps of Tiberium, launching surprise attacks everywhere, calling in airstrikes etc.

Westwood even listened to their fans and fixed the myriad of problems that plagued the Dune II. You can move more than one soldier at a time (an amazingly simple feature that no-one else had thought to implement before) and unlike Dune II you can place buildings anywhere you want instead of only on pre-build concrete slabs (why the hell did they even include such a retarded feature?). Has the enemy got tanks in place that are stopping you from launching a ground offensive? Maybe you can sneak past using transport helicopters. The plethora of options available makes it very replayable next to myopic strategy games like Warcraft and Dune II.

As you'd expect, the graphics are superb. They actually created 3D models of the buildings and units and then converted them to 2D sprites, giving the game a lifelike, perfectly proportioned feel. And one of the defining features of subsequent Command & Conquer games would remain the use of live action full-motion video cutscenes that play between missions and serve to both further a typically epic storyline as well as provide the player with their objectives for the next level through mission briefings. And the music is pure genius, consisting of industrial metal tracks and bombastic rock songs. As a composer of video game music, Frank Klepacki is up there in the Bobby Prince and Yosunori Mitsuda class.

The game also has a strong selling point in its multiplayer, mostly thanks to its support of IPX emulators like Kali. C&C was the first game to allow more than two players, and team games of C&C are adrenaline in its purest form.

The Bad
C&C is a great game and quite close to perfection. What does tick me off is how Westwood ended up prostituting their license, resulting in billions of pointless sequels, add-ons and media tie-ins that all but killed the franchise. Kind of like what happened to Tomb Raider, but with fewer boobs.

At least the new C&C game is good, by all accounts. I'll have to check it out.

The Bottom Line
C&C was released neck and neck with Blizzard's RTS game, Warcraft II, and soon debates were heating up the net about which game was superior. C&C had far better graphics, technology and more refined gameplay, while Warcraft II had charm, simplicity, and sheer playability. Ultimately it's a matter of personal opinion, and while I prefer Warcraft II C&C is still a brilliant game and a classic in every sense.

DOS · by Maw (832) · 2007

This game made "Real-Time Strategy" a household term.

The Good
C&C was one of the first Real-Time Strategy games I ever played. It was so easy to use, and I thought it was really fun. It always reminded me of playing with those little plastic army men. It was so nice being able to move all those units around with the click of a mouse. It seemed as though there was a lot of attention to detail, and I thought the graphics were pretty good. The music was great.

The Bad
The acting was average, but I really don't like the video mode they use for the cutscenes... I think they're really hard on the eyes with all those horizontal black lines.

The enemy AI left a lot to be desired. I mean, if you can build a wall and box them in and they aren't even smart enough to destroy it, that's pretty poor. It made it easier though. :)

The Bottom Line
Before C&C, there were, of course, many real-time strategy games, but C&C popularized the genre. Since it came out, there have been countless other games that emulated the interface. What Wolfenstein was to First-Person shooters, C&C was to RTS games. For this reason, it deserves special recognition.

You can probably find it pretty cheap these days, so why not try it out if you haven't before? It's spawned several sequels as of this time, and because of their success even more are sure to follow.

DOS · by Raphael (1245) · 1999

[ View all 12 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Windows version Freeman (64836) Nov 27, 2016
Infringement Indra was here (20756) May 22, 2015
Hotkeys Donatello (466) May 12, 2014

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The game appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Controversy

The PC version of this game had an advertisement that read "Previous High Scores" and under these words were several photographs of historical and contemporary military figures with high death counts. Among those pictured were Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Napoleon Bonaparte, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić and others. The controversy stems from the inclusion of then-president of France Jacques Chirac among them. The ad can be viewed here.

Cover screenshots

Obviously, the in-game screenshots on the back cover are faked (e.g. hovercraft landing from the side) or taken from a beta version that had different graphics than the release version (e.g. insignia on the Construction Yard's roof).

German version

Westwood voluntarily changed a few things in the German version, because they feared the game could be indexed.

  • The cover: the soldier on the cover was displayed bigger, so that the weapon on the left couldn't be seen anymore
  • The manual: the photos of the soldier units were censored with "Geheim" [secret], so that nobody could see that they had human faces
  • The game: the soldiers were called 'androids' or 'bots', and they spilled black blood (oil) when they died
  • Some videos were censored, e.g. when Seth gets a shot in the head, and a few video sequences are missing altogether.

A complete list of changes can be found on schnittberichte.com (German).

Kane

Kane is played by Joseph D. Kucan, the voice and video director for most of Westwood's games (including the Command & Conquer series).

While other roles were filled by Westwood employees (e.g. Eric Gooch who played Seth was an artist, and Kia Huntzinger who voiced the EVA unit was a receptionist) or local actors (e.g. Eric Martin who played General Sheppard), Kucan's role as Kane was the subject of frequent questions by the community. Kucan would intentionally answer with absurd fictional stories, except at Gamescom 2009, where he answered truthfully - he was told to record a test video for the VQA video format Westwood was working on, where he was to imitate a villain character. The role stuck since, and he would portray or voice the character in future titles in the series, as late as promo material for 2020's Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection.

Macintosh and Windows versions

In 1996, Westwood released the Macintosh version, which increased resolution from 320x200 to 640x400, brought a new interface with a different icon style, and Westwood Online multiplayer. These changes would be transferred to the 1997 Windows release (the Gold version).

Mega Score

It was the first game to be featured on the cover of Mega Score, the longest running Portuguese gaming magazine, on the second issue (November 1995). The honours of the first belong to the Sega Saturn.

Online servers

The game's online servers were migrated from the official Westwood Online infrastructure to the community-run XWIS (XCC WOL IRC Server), under approval and sponsorship from EA's German office on 20 October 2005. The Westwood Online domains have acted as a redirect to XWIS services since then, requiring no additional steps from the user to access the servers short of registering an account.

References

Open up the instruction manual to the page right after the table of contents, the one with the fire that has the quote from Kane. The last line says "(Global Net Interpol, file #GEN4:16)". That "#GEN4:16" actually refers to Genesis 4:16 from the Bible. That explains where they got the idea for Kane and the Brotherhood of Nod.

Sales

Westwood received an entry in the Guinness Book of Records, because they sold the game more than 10 million times worldwide.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • April 1998 (Issue #165) - Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • June 1996 (Issue #143) – Strategy Game of the Year
    • June 1996 (Issue #143) – Strategy Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #48 in the "150 Best Games of All Time" list
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly
    • February 1997 (Issue 91) - Game of the Month (Saturn version)
    • March 1997 (Issue 92) - Strategy Game of the Year runner-up (multiplatform) (Readers' Choice)
  • Game Informer
    • August 2001 (Issue 100) - #28 in the "Top 100 Games of All Time" poll
  • GameSpot
    • 7th Best Villain in Gaming History (for Kane)
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #31 Top Game of All Time
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #2 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
    • Issue 01/2007 - one of the "Ten Most Influential PC-Games". It is the milestone which stands for the change from turn-based to real-time strategy games.
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #24 in the "Readers All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
  • PC Player (Germany)
    • Issue 01/1996 - Best Game in 1995
    • Issue 01/1996 - Best Strategy Game in 1995 *Power Play
    • Issue 02/1996 – Best Multiplayer Game in 1995 *Total! (Germany)
    • Issue 01/2000 – Most Exotic N64 Genre in 1999

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Der.Archivar, havoc of smeg, Itay Shahar, Luis Silva, Maw and PCGamer77

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

SEGA Saturn added by Kartanym. Macintosh added by Kabushi. Windows added by Plix.

Additional contributors: Terok Nor, MAT, Derrick 'Knight' Steele, Xantheous, Alaka, Xoleras, formercontrib, ケヴィン, Macs Black, CaesarZX, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Plok, MrFlibble, FatherJack.

Game added October 31, 1999. Last modified March 16, 2024.