Real-time strategy is rich with history, decades of peaks and valleys as the genre changed, evolved, and waned in popularity. And while there are a number of influential RTS games you can point to, like StarCraft and Age of Empires, the genre wouldn’t in any way be what it is without one crucial game, Command & Conquer. It quite literally is the grandfather of modern RTS games, setting the stage in every way. But perhaps what’s most surprising about Command & Conquer is how impeccably well it still holds up today.
Originally released on PC in 1995, Command & Conquer wasn’t the first RTS game, but it advanced the formula to such a startling degree that it basically became the de facto blueprint. Developed by Westwood Studios, Command & Conquer didn’t get made in a vacuum — but actually built upon a foundation created by one of the studio’s previous games, Dune II (an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi series).
And where Dune II was a fairly complex and multi-faceted strategy experience, Command & Conquer flourished by boiling that complexity down into an easy-to-learn experience. If you’ve played any RTS game in the last three decades, its gameplay loop finds its roots directly from Command & Conquer: building a base, harvesting resources, constructing an army, attacking the enemy, and doing it all over again.
But the brilliance of Command & Conquer is how all those strategic elements and base building were tweaked to support fast gameplay, and a focus on offense. Instead of completely methodical base-building, Command & Conquer was more about on-the-fly management — directing your units to the right place and adjusting production to fill gaps in your military. This emphasis on faster gameplay made it feel more active than a lot of contemporary RTS games, something that StarCraft would lean even harder into three years later.
In this way, Command & Conquer was able to attract droves of new players to real-time strategy, as a game more appealing to anyone who might have been turned off by the slow and deliberate planning. But the other crucial elements were the game’s modern military setting, which made it drastically easier to understand what each unit would specialize in — tinged with just enough sci-fi to make it interesting. When you see a tank in Command & Conquer, you know it’s going to be a slow unit good against buildings, but easily outflanked by fast vehicles and infantry. Tied into this is how the game’s two different factions feel drastically different, really reinforcing the warring countries kind of feel.
And then there’s Command & Conquer’s story, a mix of delightfully hammy storytelling and uniquely designed strategy maps — a definitive piece for the creation of future RTS campaigns.
In Command & Conquer, you play as both sides of a globe-spanning conflict, where the Global Defense Initiative of the United Nations fights a cult-like paramilitary called the Brotherhood of Nod. These two sides are extremely coded as the “heroes” and “villains,” to such a degree that Command & Conquer genuinely feels like a parody of military media, in a good way. A huge part of that is the game’s delightful full-motion-video (FMV) cutscenes, where real actors absolutely ham it up, clearly having the time of their lives.
It’s almost like a military soap opera in the best way, and those FMV sequences became essential to the very identity of the series. But it infuses the first game with this kind of quirky nostalgia, where even if you’re playing it for the first time today, it’s a fun romp drenched in satirical humor.
When you combine that slapdash story with the finely tuned gameplay, you get a game that’s greater than the sum of its parts. And it’s no wonder that countless RTS games have taken liberal inspiration ever since. Command & Conquer is just one of those games that’s truly timeless.
