Command & Conquer had its name before it had a game. In January 1993, while Westwood Studios was finishing Dune II, the studio’s Brett Sperry told The One that Dune 2 ran on “Westwood’s Command and Conquer engine which took four man years to create”, and that Westwood planned another game on it, “tentatively called Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone”, which would not take place on Dune. What arrived in September 1995 was a war on a near-future Earth, fought over a glowing alien mineral, with film of actors between the battles. Reviewers pointed out that it was Dune II again. Players bought it anyway, well over a million of them in its first year, and every other publisher set about copying it.
Fast facts
- Developer: Westwood Studios, Las Vegas. Publisher: Virgin.
- Released: late September 1995 for MS-DOS on CD-ROM; $59.95 in the United States, £45 in Britain.
- Sides: the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod, each on its own CD.
- Players: one, or up to four: two by modem, four over a network.
- Music: Frank Klepacki.
- Other versions: Macintosh (1996), Sega Saturn and PlayStation (1996–97), Nintendo 64 (1999).
- Source code: published by Electronic Arts in 2020 (the remastered game) and 2025 (the original).
Leaving Dune behind
When Computer Gaming World previewed the game in March 1995, Chris Lombardi explained why the sequel to Dune II was not called Dune III. Westwood “felt that they had mined the Dune universe of all its spice”, and wanted room for its own scenarios, vehicles and structures without “the constraints of an established fictional world”. Its replacement was a meteor made of Tiberium, an alien element that draws precious metals out of the soil. Two powers fight to control it: the Global Defense Initiative, a United Nations–style coalition, and the Brotherhood of Nod, an ancient secret society that decides its moment has come. Nod’s leader, Kane, was played by the actor and director Joe Kucan, whom Westwood had hired to direct its video shoots.
That filming was the most expensive part of the project. Lombardi called the effort “unprecedented” for a strategy game, with Kucan directing and a 3D “rendering farm” of 25 Pentium computers producing the animation. The game opens with the player “channel surfing” through news of the meteor, then offers a choice between two video feeds, one of them Nod propaganda. Each side had its own story and its own briefings, so the game shipped on two CDs, one for each campaign.
Harvest, build, fight
Most missions start with a few units and a mobile construction vehicle. Click on a clear patch of ground and it unfolds into a headquarters. From there the player builds power plants, a refinery that comes with a harvester to collect Tiberium, a barracks for infantry and a factory for vehicles, and spends the Tiberium on more buildings and a bigger army, while the enemy sends raids against the base. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Martin Cirulis, noticed that Tiberium grows back: it “actually has a life cycle”, so it paid to farm a field instead of stripping it bare.
The interface was almost all mouse. Click on a unit, or drag a box around a group, then click where it should go or what it should attack; units left alone open fire on anything that comes within range. The two sides fight differently. GDI’s equipment is durable, hard-hitting and expensive, ending in the Mammoth Tank. Nod buys its heavier weapons on the black market and favours numbers, flame-throwers, buggies and the “nigh-invisible” Stealth Tank. Cirulis counted about 20 weapon systems between them. The missions mixed base-against-base battles with commando raids, in which the player has to succeed with the units he starts with, and the campaign branched, so losing did not always mean starting again.
Reception
The first reviews were split between delight and déjà vu. Edge gave it eight out of ten while complaining that it was “an only slightly improved version” of Dune 2: “Substitute spice for Tiberium and you have Command & Conquer.” It thought the battlefield’s “chunky, predominantly brown” VGA graphics looked dated beside SVGA strategy games, and was annoyed by troops that wandered “off down a different valley and got themselves slaughtered”. It still found the game “great fun to play, offering a compelling combination of speed, strategy and surprise”, and liked the “thumping background rock track” and the spoken warnings that told players when their engineers were about to die.
Computer Gaming World reached a similar verdict. Cirulis had wished for a networked Dune II, and felt the gods of game design had taken him too literally: the game “remains mainly a good, networkable version of DUNE II”. He disliked missions that played “like a puzzle where things explode”, with one right answer found by trial and error, and the black, unexplored map that he thought had no place on Earth. But he called it “easily the best-looking and sounding strategy game yet”, and said the plot made him want to keep playing “just to see where things are going to end up”.
Selling the formula
By December 1996 Edge reported that “well over one million copies” had been sold and that most leisure PCs in Europe had run it; it called Westwood, then owned by Virgin, “the most successful videogame company in the US today”. Westwood kept it on sale with The Covert Operations (1996), a $19.95 disc of 15 harder missions, seven for GDI and eight for Nod, and ten new multiplayer maps. In February 1997 Computer Gaming World’s Terry Coleman reckoned that Command & Conquer and Blizzard’s Warcraft II had sold “somewhere near two million units” between them. A few months later the magazine found developers going back to turn-based designs to avoid being “one of the hundred real-time C&C clones being produced this year” (see real-time strategy).
Consoles
The console versions came at the end of 1996. Computer & Video Games expected it to change the reputation of console strategy, which was “about as common as a well-used Jaguar”. Sega Saturn Magazine’s Rich Leadbetter called the Saturn version “one of the all-time greats” and found its point-and-click controls “exceptionally easy to use, even with a joypad”. The graphics were simple enough, he admitted, for “a game you could do on the Mega-CD”, and he missed the PC version’s multiplayer mode. A Nintendo 64 version, published by Electronic Arts, followed in 1999.
Later history
Westwood made an Internet-only spin-off, Sole Survivor, in which up to 50 players each controlled a single unit, and a prequel, Red Alert (1996). Electronic Arts bought Westwood in 1998 (see Electronic Arts). The true sequel, Tiberian Sun, arrived in 1999, set in 2030 on an Earth poisoned by Tiberium; Joe Kucan came back as Kane, and James Earl Jones played the GDI’s General Solomon. The series added the first-person Renegade (2002) and Generals (2003) before EA closed Westwood in 2003, and carried on under EA’s own studios with Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007) and Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight (2010). EA gave the original game away as freeware in 2007, and in June 2020 released the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection of the first game and Red Alert.
Released source code
EA has published the game’s code twice. In May 2020, just before the Remastered Collection came out, it put the source of the collection’s TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and its map editor on GitHub, so that players could build mods for the Steam Workshop. On 27 February 2025 it published the source code of the original Command & Conquer in its own repository, alongside Red Alert, Renegade and Generals/Zero Hour. Both releases are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3, “with additional terms applied”: the licence grants no right to the “Command & Conquer” name or any other EA trademark. The 1995 code does not fully compile as published. It needs the Watcom C/C++ compiler and Borland and Microsoft assemblers, and third-party libraries that are not included, and EA says the repositories are “for preservation purposes only”.
Sources
- The One issue 52, January 1993, p. 39: Brett Sperry on Dune 2, “Westwood’s Command and Conquer engine” and the planned “Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 128, March 1995, from p. 32: Chris Lombardi, Command & Conquer sneak preview: why Westwood left the Dune universe; Tiberium, GDI, the Brotherhood of Nod and Kane, “played by actor-director Joe Kucan”; the 3D rendering farm; the channel-surfing opening; the construction vehicle and refinery; two-player modem and four-player network play.
- Edge issue 25, October 1995, p. 66: Command & Conquer testscreen (Virgin, £45, late September; eight out of ten).
- Computer Gaming World issue 137, December 1995, from p. 352: Martin E. Cirulis, “Earth In Flames” (price, two CDs, 1–4 players; Tiberium’s life cycle; the two sides and their weapons; the mouse interface; commando “quest” missions; the puzzle-like missions and the black map; “the best-looking and sounding strategy game yet”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 143, June 1996: Martin E. Cirulis, Command & Conquer: Covert Operations review ($19.95; 15 missions, seven GDI and eight Nod; ten multiplayer maps).
- Computer & Video Games issue 181, December 1996: Command & Conquer on Saturn and PlayStation, preview.
- Edge issue 39, December 1996, pp. 48–49: Westwood Studios feature (“well over one million copies”; “the most successful videogame company in the US today”; owned by Virgin).
- Sega Saturn Magazine issue 15, January 1997, pp. 48–49 and 72: Command & Conquer showcase and review by Rich Leadbetter.
- Computer Gaming World issue 151, February 1997: Terry Coleman’s strategy column (Command & Conquer and Warcraft II near two million units); Sole Survivor sneak preview (Internet-only, up to 50 players).
- Computer Gaming World issue 156, July 1997, p. 49: developers and “the hundred real-time C&C clones”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 172, November 1998: “EA Acquires Westwood For $122.5M”.
- N64 Gamer issue 13, March 1999: Command & Conquer for the Nintendo 64, from EA.
- Computer Gaming World issue 185, December 1999, p. 219: Tiberian Sun review (2030; Joe Kucan as Kane; James Earl Jones).
- Edge issue 121, March 2003, letters: Westwood “now been dissolved”.
- Electronic Arts, CnC_Remastered_Collection repository, GitHub (web, secondary): source for TiberianDawn.dll, RedAlert.dll and the map editor, first committed 27 May 2020; GPL v3 “with additional terms applied”. https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection
- Electronic Arts, CnC_Tiberian_Dawn repository, GitHub (web, secondary): source code of Command & Conquer, committed 27 February 2025; build requirements; “for preservation purposes only”; the licence’s additional terms on EA trademarks. https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Tiberian_Dawn
- Wikipedia, “Command & Conquer (1995 video game)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates for each platform, including the Macintosh version; Frank Klepacki as composer; freeware release in 2007; the Remastered Collection on 5 June 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_(1995_video_game)
- Wikipedia, “Command & Conquer” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release years of Renegade, Generals, Tiberium Wars and Tiberian Twilight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer