Command & Conquer

A few notes of "Act on Instinct", the image of the radar map and the line "Construction complete" — and any '90s gamer is suddenly back in the trenches of one of the most influential strategy games in history. Command & Conquer arrived on the SEGA Saturn too, in an environment that was by no means natural for real-time strategy.

The original C&C by Westwood practically defined the RTS genre for the masses: you build a base, harvest resources (the legendary Tiberium), assemble an army and crush your opponent in real time in a conflict between the GDI and Nod factions. Add live-action cutscenes with actors, Frank Klepacki's red-hot soundtrack and a style that combined military gravity with tongue-in-cheek humor. On PC it was a phenomenon that, together with the Dune series, laid the foundations of modern real-time strategy.

But the conversion to a console was always a struggle. The RTS genre was born on mouse and keyboard, and controlling dozens of units with a gamepad is a task worthy of a martyr. The Saturn version thus represents an interesting chapter in how creators tried to bring complex strategy into the living room in front of the TV — back in an era when it wasn't at all clear whether it even made sense. It was precisely these console ports that showed which way the road led and which it didn't.

The historical value of Command & Conquer is indisputable. The series became a huge brand, spawned a whole line of sequels and spin-offs and raised an entire generation of players who learned to think in terms of economy, micromanagement and time pressure. Even though this game's home is the PC, the very fact that a publisher tried to get it onto the Saturn too shows how coveted it was at the time.

Today it's a window into an era when strategy was only just learning to be accessible to everyone. Whether you approach it as a historical document or as a nostalgic challenge, it still pulses with that tension between the seconds when you're building and the seconds when the enemy is already attacking.

Why play: One of the cornerstones of the RTS genre — and a rare chance to taste how a PC legend wrestled with a console controller.