Command & Conquer

1001 Video Games

Command & Conquer appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Controversy

The PC-CD Rom version of this game had an advertisement that read "Previous High Scores" and under these words were several photographs of political and military figures. Among those pictured were Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, etc... The controversy stems from the inclusion of then French President Jacques Chirac being included among these men. The ad can be viewed here.

Cover screenshots

Obviously, the in-game screenshots on the back cover are faked or taken from a beta version that actually had better graphics than the release version.

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 when they died (oil)
• Some videos were censored, e.g. when Seth gets a head-shot 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 & video director for most of Westwood's games (including the Command & Conquer series).

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.

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.

SVGA version

Later Westwood also released an SVGA Windows 95 version, called Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn Gold. The game content itself was unaffected, but when playing against someone with the SVGA version you had a great advantage: you could see almost 4 times as much as the DOS version on one screen.

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)

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