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4 hours ago
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I know precisely what I was doing on this week 25 years ago, give or take. While the exact release date of games wasn't always as set in stone back then, especially on PC, we know that roughly this week marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. One of the greatest games of its kind, it today inspires sorrow and joy in me in almost equal measure.
25 years ago, eleven-year-old Alex would have been excitedly tearing through his local Comet store looking to see if they had it yet, then heading home, installing… and watching one of the greatest video game intros of all time.
A masterwork of pre-rendered full motion video storytelling, it's simultaneously strangely well-shot and unmistakably cheap. These were the days when C&C was proudly presented by Westwood, not EA, and so the big-splash play of getting people off Battlestar Galactica or WWE Wrestlers or the like hadn't emerged yet. You instead get jobbing actors, usually known for relatively thankless work on telly (RA2's US president later played the Vice President in 24, for instance) instead undertaking equally thankless work in the realm of video games.
Anyway, it's bloody good stuff. A lot of RA2's narrative is glorious hammy schlock, thus all the scenery chewing. Equally, it's hard to imagine its imagery of an invaded New York on the cusp of obliteration would've been allowed to release just twelve months later, for obvious reasons. It landed at just the right moment, in that sense.
Thinking about Red Alert 2 has me in mind of Command & Conquer in general - and in despair that such a staple of gaming now lays dormant. The most recent C&C release is a mobile game that is insufferable money-grubbing slop. Don't take my word for it: recent Google Play Store reviews call it a "travesty of an insult to the original", "bastardized garbage", and "rubbish". And as IP holder Electronic Arts seems to be focused only on trying to generate giga-hits that can shift tens of millions of copies, it seems like traditional C&C is unlikely to return.
The funny thing about EA's stewardship of the C&C franchise is that it wasn't, as memes would suggest, overwhelmingly negative. People like to post that meme where EA is depicted as a grown adult executing one of its children, Westwood, before dumping it in a mass grave of shuttered studios. Or EA as the Grim Reaper, knocking on the door of Westwood, and Bullfrog, and Pandemic, shambling its way towards a quaking BioWare. Which, yes - Westwood did close, which was a rubbish decision. But quite a lot of what followed for C&C as a series was still very good.
Generals is many people's favourite entry. C&C3 took what made the Westwood games great and used EA's money and a Hollywood-adjacent development studio to elevate it. The game had Billy Dee Williams and Michael Ironside in it, for god's sake. And then for my money Red Alert 3 is (controversially, I know) the single best Command & Conquer game. Sublimely balanced, incredibly fun, and with a narrative feel of the most lavishly produced B-movie of all time. It went off the rails after that, admittedly. Visions were meddled in and talent departed, and the group responsible for several excellent and one naff C&C ended up crafting the forgettable single-player of the forgettable Medal of Honor reboot, effectively marking the team's demise. Bad times. But my point is: EA had a pretty good run with C&C, including some successful and well-made console ports, which for real time strategy games is no mean feat.
Still, the series now appears to be on life support, sustained only by a breathtakingly crap mobile game. I was given hope by the Command & Conquer Remastered collection, a lovingly-crafted visual overhaul of the first pair of games and their expansions. It seemed fair enough to assume that the next pair, RA2 and Tiberian Sun, would be next - but five years on from that release, hope is dying. Which leaves us with only one thing to do: to forlornly cast our gaze and minds back to those older games, in their aged glory, and think of better times.
Or, well, almost. There are modern heirs to the throne. It would be unfair to write about the lack of a modern C&C and not bring up Tempest Rising, for instance. Tempest Rising is a game that is - to quote another set of reviews, this time from Steam - "C&C but with the serial numbers filed off". Complimentary. Tempest Rising is excellent and well worth the price of entry for any latent C&C or RTS fan - but as good as it is, something is missing.
It's those damn FMV cutscenes. I can't describe it, but as well-acted and animated as they are, Tempest Rising's 3D models just don't hit the same. Those are alarmingly well-made sequences, and they've clearly been built and framed to emulate the C&C stories - but it just isn't the same. I need to see the sets rattling. I need to see extremely cheap and ropey green screen work. I need a storied actor to gnaw on the scenery with such ferocity that it clearly would not have been anticipated by the writers. While the two halves were clearly made quite separately, the truth is that the gameplay of classic C&C and the FMV sequences never existed in a vacuum - the campiness of one informed the other, and the entire experience became better for it.
There's a certain energy, too. It's a nebulous and difficult thing to describe, isn't it? A je ne sais quoi, as the French say. No matter how many C&C spiritual successors I have played, none has ever truly and fully nailed that energy and feel of the series they emulate. It may be one of those things that is simply nigh impossible to replicate without mining the IP itself. Which… ah. That would require EA's blessing.
I see the EA sale as a disaster waiting to happen. Will BioWare ever release a new Mass Effect or Dragon Age in such a regime? For various reasons, I'm not convinced. But if anything can come out of this deal, perhaps the sheer level of debt with which EA is about to saddle itself might inspire the company to do something it'd never previously consider: selling off IP that it doesn't plan to leverage. Command & Conquer still has legs, I feel - just perhaps not at a company that wants everything to sell tens of millions of units.
We live in hope. As Einstein himself says in the opening of Red Alert, time will tell. Hopefully we won't need a time machine to change this timeline, though. In the meantime, happy birthday to Red Alert 2. One of the GOATs. I'll blast Hell March 2 (and then 3) on max volume today.
