Pressing spacebar in the Command and Conquer remake toggles between the original imagery,
and a remastered, higher resolution one. At any moment you can switch between the two
in just the press of a button. But I already see this game in 2 different ways.
The first is how it appears today; a rather simplistic, yet still enjoyable, base-building
RTS with lots of cheesy cutscenes. If you were to play it for the first time today,
this is likely how you’d see it. But in an instant, I can change something
in my mind to feel about it like how I used to back in the 90’s. I would have been about
7 or 8. I can still remember seeing it at a friend’s house for the first time and
being ENTHRALLED by the game. Enthralled. I thought long and hard about which word to
use and that seemed to be the best, yet even that undersells my absolute obsession with
the game. This was the first time I had ever seen an RTS! Remember, I was coming from really
simple platformer games like Rick Dangerous and Turrican. Compared with them, Command
and Conquer might as well have been a Playstation 7 game, it seemed THAT advanced to me.
Those weren’t just pixelated maps and units. Those state of the art machines, which I could
buy and command about as I liked! I didn’t see the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the
gameplay. I didn’t care about efficient build-orders or about beating those levels.
For me, it was the idea of being the boss, in command of something powerful, and the
concept of building up my base and unlocking increasingly powerful units was a revelation
to me which entirely transformed what I deemed was possible from gaming!
My friend’s brother lined up all those tanks, in order of how strong they were. Again, I
didn’t see stats or figures. I pictured myself driving them. How I’d be happy even
in that cheapest little bike, and how awesome it would have been to have been able to drive
it! What if I had a fleet of the most powerful units? Would there be any limit to my strength?!
And when I saw those cutscenes, I saw pre-rendered graphics that looked better than any videogame
I could ever imagine coming out. I obsessed about the one with the sam site that gets
blown up by grenades. Or that one where Seth’s talking and then that gun pops out on the
side of the screen and then Kane kills him! Woah!!! Those scenes were the epitome of cool
and I can only count myself lucky that I didn’t go so far as to shave my hair off, to glue
it to my face and start talking about a brotherhood of some sort at meal times.
But what did follow were several years of happy obsession as I planned my own game like
it. I’d draw boxart for it, always involving a close up of a face and some ridiculously
reflective glasses. I’d think up all the tanks I’d include. I always go over the
top. It wouldn’t just be ‘medium’ tank. There would be ‘Heavy’, ‘Super-Heavy’,
‘Super-Mega-heavy’, one that would fire nukes, one that would fire acid. That commando
dude with the one-hit-kill sniper rifle was AWESOME! So what if you could get one with
a machine-gun sniper-rifle? …and so on. Balance be damned! I’d draw pictures of
them. How they’d look in the buy menu, and I’d write down how much HP each one could
have. How many shots they could fire, and how many people they could kill and so on.
My Mum actually grew concerned that I was becoming a monster. That this game was a bad
influence on me. But it was never about the violent aspect to me, in the same way that
looking up to super-heroes is about more than just about how many people they can hurt at
the same time, even though that’s generally something that they do quite frequently. It
was, in its essence, about commanding, and conquering. The thrill at seeing that Tiberium.
That morbid fascination at what it must be like to be able to burn people alive.
Okay, with hindsight, it does sound quite violent. But it wasn’t that which made it
so engaging to younger Philip. It was the stuff around the violence. It was what LED
to the violence. But it wasn’t the act of violence itself. It’s hard to describe these
differences, but they were enough to make its appeal to younger Philip wholly innocent.
I can’t find the words to convey that now, so it’s no wonder that my parents were unable
to understand it back then. But to put it simply: my obsession with this violent game
did not make me grow up to be a monster. I came away from this with happy memories and
a passion to make my own base-building games. Remember: I’m trying to describe how a child
thinks here. A child who grew up with an antiquated gaming system, who, upon viewing Command and
Conquer, had just been launched 10 years in gaming in an instant. A child who was in love
with a game I didn’t even own, on a console I couldn’t afford. Yes, I eventually got
my hands on the game and… it quickly became too difficult for me to get any further through
the campaign with. So in the end I spent way more time on Red Alert’s Skirmish mode,
which allowed me to tailor the challenge to suit whatever I fancied doing that day, be
it walls of teslacoils, fields of heavy tanks, lines of mines or fleets of cruisers with
impossibly long range. I’d mess about with cheats which caused a scary, floaty black
cloud to appear on the map, electrocuting anybody unfortunate enough to be within its
vicinity. I remember some one from the Official Playstation Magazine mistaking this for a
gap generator. But I knew better! How has it taken this long for me to get around to
talking about this game? I’ve created THOUSANDS of videos on youtube, yet only now have thought
to discuss this: a game which I’ve created memories with which are JUST as strong as
any other game I’ve ever played. Now that I am, countless memories are flooding back
to me from all those gaming sessions I had. My unsuspecting self totally unaware that
they would ever be shared in this sort of medium. I just thought the future of gaming
was better graphics and stronger tanks. Nostalgia’s a funny thing: of all the senses we use sight
the most, and yet it’s the lesser used ones like tastes and smells which recall the most
vivid recollections about the past. Now I’m not saying I licked my friend’s Command
and Conquer disk. Nor am I denying it. But the smell of his house will always bring back
memories of Command and Conquer that I had otherwise forgotten. And, perhaps thanks to
its associations with the game, I loved the song, ‘Act on instinct’. The tune, the
instruments… those weird little voice clips in the background. It scares me to think that
I’ve forgotten so many of the game’s tracks since then. Yet I still find myself magically
recalling upcoming bits of the tracks as they’re playing. They’re still in my head somewhere,
just waiting for the right triggers to come flooding back again. Of course, these days
we’ve got the remastered edition of the soundtrack, too. Objectively better in every
way, but that can’t compete with nostalgia, and the original will always be my favourite,
and its choice of instruments… perfect. Just because.
Playing through the remaster, I guess I’m very lucky. I don’t just get a trip down
memory lane to some of my earliest gaming memories, but, in an instant, I can see how
the game is today. And I get to replay it as though it’s a completely new game! I
can scout out the map with bikes, I can create several harvesters to improve my economy.
I can actually BEAT those missions that I swore were impossible as a child! I finally
get to see the game the developers worked so hard on to create. I can appreciate their
efforts at balancing the units, and at devising fiendish missions for me to unravel. With
the power of hindsight- and so many better and more modern games to compare it to- I
can see through this game’s limitations and weaknesses, like the awful pathfinding
and shoddy acting. Though admittedly, those things are more quaint than they are bad.
And I’m surprised by how well it holds up! This primitive RTS doesn’t outstay its welcome,
thanks to its short, sweet simple missions and a few enjoyable point-and-click commando
segments. Its sequel, Red Alert, was a vast improvement in almost every way. Though I
still don’t find the setting or theme as appealing as I do the original’s. Its indoor
missions are still horrendously difficult and unfun. But those final few missions of
the campaigns where it puts you up against an impossibly large enemy base are definitely
the best in the whole collection. And its skirmish mode has stood the test of time well.
I find it runs out of steam towards the end of a match, but have been surprised by the
variety the mode provides and at the amount of atmosphere these shrouded maps and basic
AI enemies can generate. It doesn’t have the endless replayability that AOE2 does,
but regardless, I’ve got my money’s worth from the AI matches I’ve been playing these
past few months. All purely done for the fun of it. I could honestly talk about those early
Command and Conquer games for hours. How the first Playstation Magazine I bought came with
a demo of it which I’d play over and over and over again.
Oh yeah, didn’t I mention? I played these RTSes on a Playstation, using a controller.
I recall my friend’s elaborate link up cable to enable us to play it 2-player. How I reached
a new level where I could finally buy tanks on the day the eclipse happened in 1999, and
my cousin was there but I’m not sure why. How I bought so many rifle units it slowed
my playstation down! How I’d play one specific level of Red Alert’s skirmish mode over
and over again, creating teslacoils to protect my base. How I’d never understand why my
Mum would snigger as I referred to them as ‘testacoils’.
This doesn’t mean anything to you. I understand that. It saddens me to think that things have
moved on, and that it will require so much more to make children feel the same way as
Command and Conquer made me feel. It saddens me that when I played that game, I looked
forward to the future of gaming, and how much better things would get, and yet now I’m
here and things are objectively better, I’m still fondly looking back at the past again
and longing for that feeling of awe and wonder that only seemed possible in my childhood.
And to think the studio that created this game was swallowed up and destroyed.
But I’m happy I experienced it. And while it’s sad to see it drift into the distant
past, I have found solace in the most unlikely of places: the comments sections of Youtube
videos, where I find other people discussing and gushing about how much they loved the
very same things about the game as I did, back then. On this one, others seem as enthralled
by that weird little chorus with the strange bell instruments. That 1:02 timestamp is almost
like a flagpost for us all to stand around, happy to know that we aren’t alone in feeling
the way we do about something so oddly specific, even if their nostalgia for it might be a
very different nostalgia from that of my own. Yes, you can laugh at how obsessed I got over
so few pixels. But please, if you go away from this video with anything, let it be the
knowledge that there was a time when a game like this could rival anything else out there.
When this was all that was needed to make somebody as happy as it is possible to be.