CommandCom Round-Up Page 2

02 Sep 2009 at 10:35:28 by Tim McDonald

EA's Aaron Kaufman – better known to many as APOC, C&C community manager – took the stage next, praising everyone in the room for being truly hardcore fans, and reminding them that they would indeed get the opportunity to play C&C4. Cheers followed, naturally, but grew louder when the first guest speaker moved to the front: Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood Games and one of the men who had been with the company through the early games.

The really early games, in fact, as the first thing mentioned was Dune 2, which I swear looks better on screen than it does in my memory. Despite the games usually trotted out as the forefathers of the modern RTS, Dune 2 was born, we were told, out of a combination of Military Madness and Rescue Rangers – and was called Dune 2 because it was being developed at the same time as Cryo's Dune adventure game, which was a fact discovered only shortly before release so the name had to be hastily changed.

As for Command & Conquer, though, there were both problems and accomplishments from the start. This was at the dawn of CD media, and full-screen video - “like television” - was an astonishing tool, but working out how to get full-screen video to stream from a single-speed CD drive was something that nothing else had yet accomplished, and new codecs had to be written. As mentioned above, Wing Commander used interlaced video, while 7th Guest's codec wasn't up to it.

While that might be expected, what wasn't expected was that C&C was originally to be a swords 'n' sorcery game, but publishers at the time didn't reckon that a fantasy game would sell (this would've been around the same time Warcraft was in development, remember) and so a military game it was, which was originally focused around the Americans fighting the Chinese, as including the Russians didn't feel right considering the recent end of that whole Cold War thing. This is not the direction it took in the end.

Where C&C had an advantage was in constant feedback. The game was consistently shown off, and people consistently gave thoughts on improvements. The result was a title that had 150,000 pre-orders 60 days prior to launch, while publisher Virgin had expected somewhere in the region of 100,000 sales on the first day. Publicity didn't hurt either, with a fairly early example of a media furore erupting over an advertisement listing “previous high scores” and containing pictures of all sorts of figures: Idi Amin, Hitler, Stalin, and, uh, Jacques Chirac. This resulted in the French getting a tad upset, which resulted in that particular box being whited out... which resulted in the media running the story the next day.

Red Alert, on the other hand, was originally an expansion pack and was designed to be more “fun” through the use of fringe technology. As it was still with the original team and wasn't initially meant to be a stand-alone product, though, the camp levels were still fairly low in the first instalment in that particular series.

For that matter, Castle responded to a fan question and finally told all in attendance whether or not Red Alert was a prequel to Command & Conquer. The answer? Initially, yes, hence Kane's appearance. It was originally designed to show how the Tiberium universe came into being, but really, it all rests with whoever continues the franchise.

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