Real-Time Strategy | Code Like It's 198x

In a real-time strategy game nobody waits for a turn. The player gathers a resource, spends it on buildings, uses the buildings to produce units and sends the units to fight, while a computer or human opponent does all of the same things at the same moment. The formula most people mean by the name came from Westwood Studios’ Dune II in 1992. Computer Gaming World called it “a real-time exercise in every sense of the word”, and three years later Westwood’s Command & Conquer made it one of the most copied designs on the PC. The words “real-time strategy” are older than the formula, though, and so are several games with a claim to have come first.

Fast facts

The pattern: gather a resource, build a base, produce units, destroy the enemy’s base, all without turns.
Forerunners: Cytron Masters (1982), Stonkers (1983), Nether Earth (1987), Herzog Zwei (1989), Populous (1989).
The template: Dune II (Westwood Studios and Virgin Games, 1992).
The boom: Warcraft (1994), Command & Conquer (1995), Total Annihilation and Age of Empires (1997), StarCraft (1998).
What grew from it: professional StarCraft in South Korea, and the MOBA, which began as a custom map for Warcraft III.

A name before a genre

“Real-time strategy” was an advertising phrase before it was a genre. In 1980 and 1981 Strategic Simulations Inc. advertised Computer Quarterback for the Apple II as “a real-time strategy football game”. In The Art of Computer Game Design (1984), the designer Chris Crawford wrote that “real-time play is rare in strategy games, although this is changing”, and named Avalon Hill’s Legionnaire as “a notable real-time strategy game”.

The first game with a good claim to the modern shape was SSI’s Cytron Masters (1982) for the Apple II, written by Dan Bunten. SSI sold it as one of a new line, RapidFire, that promised “the fast-paced action and pure excitement of arcade games” together with “the challenge and sophistication of strategy simulations”. Two players spent power to buy robot units, the Cytrons, which beamed into an arena: mines, bunkers, shooters, commanders and missiles, each at its own cost. Power came from power centres on the field. Mark Botner, who had play-tested it, explained in Computer Gaming World what set it apart from “other war games consisting of player #1’s turn, player #2’s turn”: the Cytrons moved and fought continuously, and carried out “not only your instructions but built-in ones as well”.

Stonkers and Nether Earth

On the other side of the Atlantic, Imagine Software released John Gibson’s Stonkers for the 48K Spectrum at the end of 1983, at £5.50. The player’s tanks, artillery and infantry faced an enemy that started moving “as soon as the game commences”, and four supply units had to ferry supplies from a port to the front, where any unit that went unsupplied “will be lost for good”. CRASH liked what that did to a wargame: “It keeps you on the go constantly without having to wait while the enemy ‘has his turn’.” Another reviewer found it moved so fast “you barely have any time left to think, and you’re punching keys all the while”. The first batches of tapes crashed without warning, and Imagine offered to replace them. Big K called it “one of the very best general’s-eye-view battle simulations around”.

Argus Press’s Nether Earth (1987), also for the Spectrum, added production. The player flew a small craft over a battlefield, landed it at a base to design robots from chassis, weapons and electronics, and paid for them from resources that grew each day from captured factories. Robots could be steered directly or left to act on their own. CRASH called it “a strange mix of strategy and action that works surprisingly well”.

Herzog Zwei and Populous

In 1989 Technosoft’s Herzog Zwei for the Mega Drive put two players, or one against the console, in charge of rival bases. Each player flew a robot that could turn into a jet, and dispatched other forces from the bases to attack and defend outposts. British magazines, reviewing it as a Japanese import in 1990, were surprised to find a strategy game on a console. “Strategy on a console. Wonders will never cease?” wrote The Games Machine, which gave it 75% but thought it “really a multi-direction shoot-’em-up with one or two tactical possibilities”, best in two-player mode, where “fierce rivalry” developed between friends. Computer & Video Games gave it 82%.

The phrase itself spread through American magazines with Bullfrog’s games. When Computer Gaming World made Populous its game of the year in 1990, it praised its “unique approach to real-time strategy”; it described Powermonger as “a real-time strategy/wargame”, and in 1992 it introduced the imported Mega-lo-Mania as “a real-time strategy game similar to the popular Bullfrog games”. In July 1991 Amazing Computing reported that “real-time strategy games are a hot item just now”, mostly thanks to Populous, “although a few mavericks like the outstanding Carrier Command made the rounds even earlier”.

Which of these was the first real-time strategy game is still argued. Later writers have made the case for Cytron Masters, Stonkers and Herzog Zwei; IGN called Herzog Zwei “arguably the first RTS game ever”. Each had some of the ingredients. None had all of them together until 1992.

Dune II

Westwood Studios, founded in 1985 by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle, made Dune II for Virgin Games. It came out on the PC at the end of 1992, as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty in America and Dune II: Battle for Arrakis in Europe, and on the Amiga in 1993. Virgin’s advertisements credited its design to Aaron E. Powell and Joe Bostic, its programming to Bostic and Scott K. Bowen, its music and sound to Frank Klepacki and Dwight Okahara, and its production to Sperry.

Three houses, the Atreides, the Harkonnens and the invented Ordos, competed to mine spice on the planet Arrakis. Each mission began with a construction yard on a patch of rock. The player laid concrete, built windtraps for power, a refinery and a barracks, and sent harvesters out to the red spice fields to earn credits, while the enemy, already dug in somewhere in the unexplored desert, did the same. Sandworms swallowed anything that strayed onto the sand. Computer Gaming World’s previewer, Chuck Moss, called it a game that “marries the development/financial management dynamic of Sim City to the tactical battle challenge of The Perfect General”, and found it “a fast, tense, visual” game. Its reviewer in April 1993 praised the interface: click a building to see what it could make and what it cost, click a unit to give it orders, and use the radar to send units anywhere on the map. “Dune II is a real-time exercise in every sense of the word,” he wrote. “The buildings which occupy its overhead point of view show continuous motion and activity.”

Sperry told The One that Westwood had wanted “a game which was easy to learn and difficult to master”, with no “long and boring manual”. He also gave away the name of the next game. “Dune 2 uses Westwood’s Command and Conquer engine which took four man years to create,” he said, and Westwood planned another game on it, “tentatively called Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone”. Looking back in 1997, he told Edge that Command & Conquer “was borne of a perceived gap in the market — that started with Dune 2, actually, and the premise was, well, strategy games are fun, but that fun is rarely realised”. Later accounts by Westwood’s staff name Herzog Zwei and Populous among the games that shaped Dune II.

Warcraft and Command & Conquer

Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) moved the formula to a fantasy war between two races. Computer Gaming World reviewed it under the headline “War Crime In Real Time”, and in September 1995 called it “the best real-time strategy game since Dune II”. It added what Dune II had lacked: two players could fight each other by modem or over a network. Computer Gaming World had welcomed that before release, since Westwood had not yet said whether its own sequel would have network play.

Westwood’s own follow-up, Command & Conquer, came out on CD-ROM in September 1995, with filmed briefings between missions and a war between two rival organisations over a mineral called Tiberium. Edge gave it eight out of ten but grumbled that it was “an only slightly improved version of” Dune II: “Substitute spice for Tiberium and you have Command & Conquer.” It still found the game “great fun to play, offering a compelling combination of speed, strategy and surprise”.

The clone years

Players agreed with the fun more than with the grumble, and the imitations followed. In May 1997 Computer Gaming World’s Elliott Chin compared the “deluge of real-time strategy games trying to mimic Command & Conquer‘s success” to the flood of Doom clones a few years earlier. Two months later the magazine reported that six of seven developers it had spoken to were working on turn-based games instead, because they would “rather be one amongst a dozen turn-based games than be one of the hundred real-time C&C clones being produced this year”. Reviewers reached for the word “clone” for KKND, Dark Reign and Dark Colony, and even Computer & Video Games opened its review of Ensemble Studios’ Age of Empires (1997) with “Another C&C clone? Perhaps, but this time the battle ground is history itself.”

The better games moved the design on. Cavedog’s Total Annihilation (1997) was soon advertised as the winner of “over 50 awards world wide”, and Age of Empires took the formula into history. Blizzard’s StarCraft (1998) gave its three races, the Terrans, the Protoss and the Zerg, different units and different ways of building instead of the same army in different colours. Computer Gaming World’s Robert Coffey called it “the most satisfying real-time strategy game to date”, and praised missions that could be won in more than one way.

StarCraft in Korea

StarCraft lasted longest in South Korea. By January 2001 Computer Gaming World reported that Koreans had bought more copies than any other country, that 40,000 were still selling each month, and that there were weekly tournaments, sponsored professional players and StarCraft television shows. The esports entry tells that story.

After 2000

Blizzard’s Warcraft III (2002) led to a new genre by accident. Its players built custom maps, and one of them, Defense of the Ancients (2003), kept only a single hero for each player and the computer-controlled waves of units, with no base building or unit production. Its descendants, League of Legends (2009) and Valve’s Dota 2 (2013), became the multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBA, and took much of the competitive audience that real-time strategy had built.

Real-time strategy carried on. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty came out in 2010. The older games returned as remasters: StarCraft: Remastered in 2017, when Blizzard also made the original free to play, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition in 2019, and the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection in 2020. Relic Entertainment’s Age of Empires IV followed in 2021.

The code went public too. When the Remastered Collection came out in 2020, Electronic Arts released the source of the remaster’s Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert game libraries and its map editor, and in February 2025 it published the original source code of Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Renegade and Generals/Zero Hour on GitHub under the GNU General Public License, version 3, with additional terms.

Sources

Byte vol. 6 no. 1, January 1981, p. 263: SSI advertisement, Computer Quarterback (“a real-time strategy football game”).
Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984), on strategy games: Legionnaire, “a notable real-time strategy game”.
Computer Gaming World issue 5, July 1982, p. 2: SSI’s RapidFire advertisement for Cytron Masters. Issue 6, September 1982, p. 30: Mark Botner, “Cytron Masters: The View From a Play Tester”.
Computer & Video Games issue 27, January 1984, p. 12: Stonkers due in late November at £5.50.
CRASH issue 2, March 1984, p. 102: Stonkers review (John Gibson, £5.50, 62% overall; the enemy “has his turn”; the faulty tapes).
Big K issue 1, April 1984, p. 32: Stonkers review (“general’s-eye-view battle simulations”).
CRASH issue 40, May 1987, pp. 26–27: Nether Earth review (Argus Press, £9.95).
The Games Machine issue 28, March 1990, p. 50: Herzog Zwei review (Technosoft, 75%).
Computer & Video Games issue 101, April 1990, p. 103: Herzog Zwei review (82%).
Computer Gaming World issue 73, July 1990, p. 43 (Powermonger); issue 74, September 1990, p. 74 (Populous, game of the year); issue 93, April 1992, p. 18 (Mega-lo-Mania).
Amazing Computing vol. 6 no. 7, July 1991, p. 60: “Real-time strategy games are a hot item just now”.
Computer Gaming World issue 109, August 1993, p. 32: Westwood Studios founded in 1985 by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle.
Computer Gaming World issue 101, December 1992, pp. 102–104: Chuck Moss, Dune II sneak preview.
The One issue 52, January 1993, p. 39: Simon Byron, Dune 2 work in progress, with Brett Sperry’s comments.
Computer Gaming World issue 105, April 1993, pp. 84–85: Dune II review.
CU Amiga, July 1993, p. 75: Virgin Games advertisement for Dune II with credits. The One issue 59, August 1993, p. 19: advertisement, “Battle for Arrakis”.
Computer Gaming World issue 122, September 1994, pp. 25–26: Warcraft preview and network play. PC Player (Germany), August 1994, p. 11: Warcraft runs in real time, with a two-player mode by modem or network.
Computer Gaming World issue 126, January 1995, p. 230: Chris Lombardi, “War Crime In Real Time” (Warcraft). Issue 134, September 1995, p. 22: “The best real-time strategy game since Dune II”.
Edge issue 25, October 1995, p. 66: Command & Conquer review (eight out of ten).
Computer Gaming World issue 154, May 1997: Elliott Chin, “Meat Is Murder”. Issue 156, July 1997, p. 49: developers and “the hundred real-time C&C clones”.
Edge issue 51, November 1997, p. 57: Brett Sperry at the ECTS round table.
Interaction (Sierra), Fall 1998, p. 31: Total Annihilation advertisement (“over 50 awards”).
Computer & Video Games issue 193, December 1997, p. 61: Age of Empires (“Another C&C clone?”).
Computer Gaming World issue 168, July 1998, p. 172: Robert Coffey, StarCraft review. Issue 198, January 2001: StarCraft in Korea.
“Real-time strategy”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the competing “first” claims, including IGN’s for Herzog Zwei, and its 1989 release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_strategy
“Dune II”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release dates and titles; later statements by Westwood staff on its influences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_II
“Multiplayer online battle arena”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends, Dota 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_arena
“StarCraft” and “Age of Empires”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): StarCraft II, the remasters and Age of Empires IV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft
“Command & Conquer”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the Remastered Collection (2020) and the source code releases of 2020 and February 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer
Electronic Arts, CnC_Tiberian_Dawn and related repositories on GitHub (web, secondary): “licensed under the GPL v3 license, with additional terms applied”. https://github.com/electronicarts