Command & Conquer
Westwood's 1995 real-time strategy war between the UN's GDI and Kane's Brotherhood of Nod, told in live-action cutscenes shot in spare rooms with Westwood's own staff. The 1996 prequel Red Alert added the Soviets and Frank Klepacki's "Hell March." Three million copies, and a name that became shorthand for the whole genre.
Westwood Studios conceived Command & Conquer near the end of Dune II and began building it in early 1993; co-founder Brett Sperry called it "the net result of the Dune II wish list". The game began as high fantasy. The mid-1990s changed that: with the Gulf War fresh and, as co-founder Louis Castle put it, "war was in the news and the threat of terrorism was on everyone's mind," the setting became a modern war between the Global Defense Initiative, a United Nations force, and the Brotherhood of Nod, a militant movement led by the mysterious Kane. Tiberium, the crystal both sides harvest, replaced Dune's spice and was inspired by the 1957 B-movie The Monolith Monsters.
The cutscenes are why people remember it. Westwood shot live-action briefings in spare rooms and warehouses with its own employees in the roles; the only professional actors were Eric Alan Martin as a GDI general and Joseph D. Kucan, who played Kane and was deeply involved in producing them. Castle said the team "had no illusions that we were as good as TV or film," and that the camp was not intentional. Frank Klepacki wrote the music, and drag-selecting plus context-sensitive clicking, lifted from the Apple desktop, made ordering armies around feel natural.
Released for DOS on September 26, 1995, it sold 500,000 copies by April 1996, a million by September, and more than three million in all. Entertainment Weekly's Bob Strauss wrote that anyone who liked toy soldiers as a kid would "think you've stepped on a land mine and gone to heaven." Red Alert, the prequel released in November 1996, moved the war to an alternate history where the Allies fight an aggressive Soviet Union; it sold 1.5 million copies in its first month, and Klepacki's score, led by the guitar-riffs-and-marching-feet theme "Hell March," was voted the best game soundtrack of 1996 by PC Gamer.
The rivalry with Blizzard's Warcraft II drove the real-time strategy boom that followed. GameSpot's Bruce Geryk wrote that the name was "nearly synonymous with RTS gaming." EA, which bought Westwood in 1998, released the original free for its 12th anniversary in 2007, remastered both games in 2020, and open-sourced the original code in 2025. The franchise had sold 30 million copies by 2009.
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