NEWS UPDATE : Command & Conquer: A Retrospective

The Command & Conquer game series has been around for nearly 15 years--arguably longer if you care to trace the game's roots back to the very beginnings. The series has come to be associated with both modern strategy games and the classic real-time strategy games of yesteryear, which saw their first days with games like Herzog Zwei for the Sega Genesis and Dune II for home computers. And Dune II, a game based partially on David Lynch's motion-picture interpretation of the classic Frank Herbert novel, begat Command & Conquer.


This started a chain of events that led to modern real-time strategy as we know it, including building bases, harvesting resources, climbing the tech tree, and commissioning armies. And from there, we've seen more than 10 years of Command & Conquer and all that we've come to associate with the series. Tanks, harvesting Tiberium resource crystals, fast-paced online multiplayer, commando units, top-level superweapons, tanks, electro-squids, tanks, actor/director Joe Kucan as series villain Kane, parachuting Soviet attack bears, tanks, robo-dolphins, former pro wrestling champion Ric Flair, former Dr. Frank-N-Furter Tim Curry, and perhaps most importantly of all: tanks. And now that nearly 15 years have elapsed since the first Command & Conquer game, what better time to recap the history of this long-lived series? Let's take a look. Part one of our feature will cover the series up to 2001, while part two will cover more-recent entries in the series.