Command & Conquer

Command & Conquer from 1995 by Westwood Studios stood at the birth of the real-time strategy genre in the form players know it today, and together with Warcraft it defined the rules of the genre for years to come. The player sides with one of two factions — the military organization GDI or the mysterious Brotherhood of Nod — and across a series of interconnected missions builds bases, mines the mysterious mineral Tiberium, and commands units in a battle for control of a world plagued by this alien substance. Both factions' campaigns offer a different perspective on the same war, which in 1995 was an unusual and highly praised approach to storytelling in a strategy game, and the missions also shift settings from urban areas through forests to desert regions affected by Tiberium.

The gameplay is built on a simple but functional system of base-building, resource mining, and mouse-driven unit control, complemented by a clear interface that became a model for entire generations of RTS titles. Units of both factions had a distinct character — GDI relied on heavy machinery and air strikes, Nod on speed, sabotage, and stealth — so playing as either side felt genuinely different. Live-action cutscenes were inserted between missions, with characters addressing the player directly from the screen — at the time a complete novelty that gave the game a cinematic atmosphere and helped tell a gripping story about a global conflict. The music was composed by Frank Klepacki, whose energetic electronic tracks are among the most recognizable in gaming music history and still evoke the atmosphere of nineties war strategy games.

Command & Conquer became a commercial and critical hit and launched one of the most successful game series of the nineties and 2000s. Its influence on the RTS genre is fundamental — it established conventions later adopted by dozens of other games, and multiplayer over network or modem showed just how much fun it could be to measure yourself against a live opponent. The game later also received a remastered version that made the original experience accessible to modern players, and it remains a mandatory stop for anyone interested in the history of strategy games.

Why play it: For anyone interested in the history of strategy games — the title that established the RTS genre's conventions and, with network multiplayer, showed how much fun it is to measure yourself against a live opponent.