Command & Conquer

Command & Conquer did more than any series to make real-time strategy a mainstream pastime, pairing brisk base-building with the gleeful camp of its full-motion-video briefings. The franchise really runs as three parallel wars. The Tiberian games, from the 1995 original through Tiberian Sun and the Tiberium Wars trilogy, follow the messianic Kane and his Brotherhood of Nod. The Red Alert line spins history sideways into a gonzo alternate timeline of time travel and Soviet superweapons. Generals trades story for modern asymmetric conflict. CrossBinge keeps these threads sorted. Westwood's design philosophy, fast economies and readable battlefields, still feels cleaner than many strategy games that followed, and the writing's knowing pulp, especially anything involving Kane, gave the genre a personality it rarely recaptured. This collection preserves a series that defined an era of PC gaming.

The Command & Conquer franchise spans 20 games in the CrossBinge catalog.