Best Games - Command & Conquer
In the mid to late 90s, if you were playing games on a PC you probably played some Real Time Strategy games.
They were the in thing. The fresh new genre. We had been playing action games, and role playing games, but the RTS genre was the first to be designed exclusively around a flashy new control device. The mouse.
It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but for quite a long time computers didn’t use mice. You had a keyboard, you might have had a joystick or even a gamepad, but mice weren’t really that common. In the late 80’s or early 90’s you would be more likely to see a tape drive or midi keyboard hooked up to a computer than a mouse.
Sure, Macintosh computers came equipped with mice since the mid 80s, but who used a Mac. Or, more to the point, who played games on a Mac. The Apple II series of computers had been spoken in the same breath as the Commodore 64 when it came to finding a place to play a particular game, but for whatever reason, the Mac never enjoyed that same level of devotion. The Mac did do one thing though. It got everyone who came into contact with it used to using a mouse.
Amiga users from back in the day, I see you. You can sit down.
The adoption of mouse input to PCs was a slow trickle and until around 1992 or 1993 you couldn’t reasonably expect a computer to be sold with a mouse. It would likely be an additional purchase. And if you had to go out and buy a mouse for a computer that was running a text only interface like DOS, what would you use that for? Spreadsheets? Nope. People buy extra computer hardware to play games.
There might be some precedent for RTS games before Herzog Zwei, an action strategy game for the Sega Genesis and a handful of Japanese computers, but in the west the game that people most associated with real-time strategy was Dune II developed by Westwood.
Dune II was the direct follow up to a point and click adventure game (that included a smattering of strategy). It was a profound shift, not just for the series but for PC games.
There had been a lot of strategy games on PC. CIV and Sim City were huge hits. They put demand on your planning and execution, but they never really put any demand on your reflexes. The shift with Dune II is that here was a game that forced you to plan and strategize while reacting at high speed to the action on screen. There were games that did this with a controller, like Herzog Zwei, but to be really fast and accurate in a strategy game required a mouse.
Dune II was a great game, but it had nothing on Westwood’s follow up RTS title, Command & Conquer.
Command & Conquer took everything that made Dune II revolutionary, and refined it. Honed it. Made it genre defining. Well, genre defining if we ignore that Warcraft pulled off a similar feat a few months earlier. Not nearly as well as Command & Conquer, though honestly.
Command & Conquer did something that not even much later RTS games could pull off. It was an RTS Game with a story. The single player missions were interesting, challenging, and you actually wanted to play though each one to see what would happen next. The live action actors on virtual sets knew the assignment all of the acting is cheesy, while actually being quite good. Not so bad it’s good. For real good, in a self aware sort of way.
In the alternate history of the world of Command & Conquer, the forces of the GDI do battle with the Brotherhood of NOD over control of a substance called Tiberium. A simple enough premise. The games eventually veer into time travel, dimensional travel, invading aliens, and on and on. It’s silly, but also a great excuse to click your mouse. I’m sure that at least a few mice didn’t make it all the way through the Command & Conquer campaign.
The single player game was amazing and revolutionary and all those things, but the game also came packed with a second disc that you could lend to a friend to play lan or networked multiplayer. This is fully in the time of dial up BBSs and no real internet. Even over a dial up modem it worked remarkably well.
So, because a mouse existed for DOS PCs before graphical interfaces were common, we have Command & Conquer. I spun up the remaster, as well as the original version and played a few missions just the other day. Command & Conquer is still one of the Best Games.