Red Alert begins with a time machine. In 1924 Albert Einstein travels back to Germany and removes Adolf Hitler from history before he can come to power. Without Hitler there is no Second World War as we know it, and Stalin’s Soviet Union fills the space, pushing west across Europe until the Allies have to fight it. Westwood Studios made this the prequel to Command & Conquer: the war that, by the end, sets up the world of Tiberium and the Global Defense Initiative. It sold on the reputation of the first game, and reviewers agreed it was the best of the real-time strategy games that had followed it, even while one of them called it an expansion in disguise.
Fast facts
- Developer: Westwood Studios. Publisher: Virgin Interactive Entertainment.
- Released: November 1996 in North America and December 1996 in Europe, for MS-DOS and Windows 95; $54.99 in the United States, £34.99 in Britain.
- Sides: the Allies and the Soviet Union.
- Players: one, or up to eight over a network or the Internet, with a skirmish mode against up to seven computer opponents.
- Music: Frank Klepacki, including the theme “Hell March”.
- Other versions: PlayStation (1997), and Retaliation (1998) for the PlayStation.
- Source code: published by Electronic Arts in 2020 (the remastered game) and 2025 (the original).
A prequel, not a sequel
The fans who had spent a year with Command & Conquer were waiting for a sequel, and Computer & Video Games had to break the news: “Unfortunately, this isn’t it.” Red Alert was “the prequel to the original game, explaining how NOD and GDI were formed”, with about 20 missions for each side. Westwood’s real sequel, Tiberian Sun, did not come until 1999.
The story was told, as before, in filmed scenes between missions. Stalin himself briefs the Soviet player. Computer Gaming World’s Martin Cirulis thought his “frightening grin and gallows humor will haunt you in just about every cut-scene on the Russian side”, and warned that players with “a working knowledge of history” might be uneasy at being told by Stalin what a fine fellow he was. Its technology came from what Cirulis called “the journal of non-reproducible results”: Tesla’s work built into giant coils that “fry Allied units at long range”, and Einstein himself captured as a prize of war.
What changed
The biggest change was on the screen. Under Windows 95 the battlefield was drawn in SVGA, at 640 × 400 according to PC Zone, instead of the first game’s “chunky” VGA. Cirulis found that the higher resolution did more than look sharper: the player could see about twice as much of the battlefield, and the action felt slower, which answered those who “complained that C&C was only about mouse-clicking”. The MS-DOS version stayed in the lower resolution, and he thought it “buggy and inadequate”. Groups could now be moved together and made to keep their formation.
The two sides were further apart than GDI and Nod had been. The Soviets had attack dogs that could “tear a soldier to shreds in a second”, submarines, ground-attack aircraft, V2 rockets and the Tesla coil, a tower that fires lightning. The Allies answered with gunboats, destroyers and cruisers, medics who heal nearby infantry, and a spy in a dinner jacket whom only the dogs could sniff out. Terry Coleman, Computer Gaming World’s strategy columnist, liked the commando Tanya best: “a not-so-closet pyromaniac who empties her revolvers into anything that moves”. Cirulis thought the Soviets “very cool and innovative” and the Allies a set of “holdovers from C&C”, as if they had been worked on last.
Online from the start
Multiplayer was where Red Alert moved furthest. PC Zone‘s reviewer installed it at home and within half an hour was playing, through Westwood’s own Internet server, against a stranger in New York, who beat him. Up to eight could play over a network. The multiplayer games added tricks the campaign did not have, such as the Allies’ fake buildings for fooling an opponent, radar jammers and ore thieves. A skirmish mode set the player against up to seven computer opponents, and a map editor on the CD let players make their own battlefields, which soon appeared on web sites for download. Early in 1997 the online games service Mplayer, where Command & Conquer was already one of the most played games, announced that it would add Red Alert.
Reception
Coleman called it “a Mozart symphony to all the Salieri clones”, which had followed Command & Conquer in a flood, and “sleek, sophisticated and very addictive”. PC Zone led its reviews with it and called it a “time sponge”: “You think you’ve been playing it for half an hour, but a quick glance at the clock reveals that it’s now the year 1999.” Cirulis was cooler. He found the missions “much better designed” than the first game’s and “meshed more tightly to the storyline”, but wrote that “RED ALERT could have been a real leap forward instead of a very cool expansion”. He still called it “easily the best real-time strat game of the quarter”.
Coleman thought the music “robust, adrenaline-pumping stuff”. It was by Frank Klepacki, Westwood’s in-house composer, and its best-known piece, the march “Hell March”, is still there in the game’s music table, as the track HELL226M, in the source code EA later published.
Before release Edge predicted that Red Alert would “probably sell more copies than any other PC game this year”. It came close in Britain: over Christmas 1996, Edge reported, only FIFA 97 “beat C&C: Red Alert and Tomb Raider to the top spot”. Some of its rivals were unexpected. In March 1997 Edge passed on a claim in the Washington Post that Mattel’s Barbie Fashion Designer had outsold it.
Later history
Westwood kept the game going with two expansion discs of extra missions and units, Counterstrike and The Aftermath, in 1997, and the same year brought it to the PlayStation. A reworked PlayStation edition, Retaliation, followed in 1998; PlayStation Power described it as “not the sequel to Red Alert, but an update”, for one or two players. Red Alert then grew into its own series, separate from the Tiberium games. Red Alert 2 came out in 2000, when Computer Gaming World put it in its forecast of the Christmas season’s best-selling PC games, followed by its expansion Yuri’s Revenge in 2001, and, after Electronic Arts had closed Westwood in 2003, EA made Red Alert 3 (2008). EA released the original Red Alert as freeware on 31 August 2008, and in June 2020 remastered it alongside the first game in the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection.
Released source code
The source code has been published twice. In May 2020 Electronic Arts put the code of the Remastered Collection’s RedAlert.dll, together with the Tiberian Dawn code and the map editor, on GitHub for mod makers. On 27 February 2025 it published the source code of the original Red Alert in its own repository, alongside Command & Conquer, Renegade and Generals/Zero Hour. Both releases are under the GNU General Public License, version 3, “with additional terms applied”, which grant no rights to the “Command & Conquer” name or other EA trademarks. The 1996 code “does not fully compile” as published: it was written for the Watcom C/C++ compiler and Borland’s Turbo Assembler, and relies on DirectX 5 and on third-party network and sound libraries that are not included. EA describes the repositories as “for preservation purposes only”.
Sources
- Edge issue 39, December 1996, pp. 48–49: Westwood Studios feature (Red Alert nearing completion; SVGA graphics; network play; it “will probably sell more copies than any other PC game this year”).
- Computer & Video Games issue 181, December 1996: C&C: Red Alert preview (“Unfortunately, this isn’t it”; the prequel “explaining how NOD and GDI were formed”; 20 missions for each side; dogs, aircraft and the spy).
- Computer Gaming World issue 151, February 1997: Terry Coleman, “Red Alert: Real-Time Strategy Gaming Grows Up” (the premise; Tanya; the music; “a Mozart symphony to all the Salieri clones”); “Red Alert On Mplayer”.
- PC Zone issue 47, February 1997, pp. 64–66: Command & Conquer: Red Alert review (Einstein in 1924; 640 × 400 SVGA under Windows 95; new units; Internet play through Westwood’s server; eight-way network play; skirmish mode; the map editor; “time sponge”; £34.99).
- Computer Gaming World issue 152, March 1997, p. 182: Martin E. Cirulis, Red Alert review ($54.99; 1–8 players; Stalin; the Tesla coils; SVGA and the larger battlefield; the DOS version; the Soviet and Allied units; “a very cool expansion”; “best real-time strat game of the quarter”).
- Edge issue 43, March 1997: FIFA 97 top over Christmas 1996; the Washington Post claim about Barbie Fashion Designer; Red Alert’s scenario editor and fan map sites.
- PlayStation Power issue 34, Christmas 1998, buyers’ guide: C&C Retaliation (Virgin, 1–2 players, “Not the sequel to Red Alert, but an update”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 197, December 2000: C&C: Red Alert 2 in the magazine’s projected best-seller list for the holiday season.
- PC Zone issue 110, Christmas 2001: C&C Red Alert 2 expansion Yuri’s Revenge.
- Edge issue 121, March 2003, letters: Westwood “now been dissolved”.
- Electronic Arts, CnC_Red_Alert repository, GitHub (web, secondary): source code of Red Alert, committed 27 February 2025; build requirements; licence and additional terms; the music table in CODE/THEME.CPP, which includes the “HELL” theme. https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert
- Electronic Arts, CnC_Remastered_Collection repository, GitHub (web, secondary): source for RedAlert.dll, TiberianDawn.dll and the map editor, first committed 27 May 2020. https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection
- Wikipedia, “Command & Conquer: Red Alert” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates for PC and PlayStation; Counterstrike and The Aftermath (1997); Retaliation (1998); Frank Klepacki as composer; freeware release on 31 August 2008; the Remastered Collection (5 June 2020). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert
- Wikipedia, “Frank Klepacki” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): “Hell March”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Klepacki
- Wikipedia, “Command & Conquer” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Red Alert 3 (2008); Westwood’s closure in 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer