Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun

It took our time but gave us plenty.

- John strike

Was I the only one who used to misplace my stealth tanks? It was a problem I had in 1995’s command & conquer, so imagine my woes in 1999 when c&c’s sequel, tiberian sun, introduced cloaking devices that made entire bases disappear. Thanks, Westwood.

Tiberian Sun is the sequel to C&C, set after the first Tiberium War. It was the first game released after Red Alert, which was conceived as an expansion for the original C&C. Red Alert became so impressive, however, that Westwood marketed it as a standalone game. Tiberian Sun, meanwhile, was teased on Red Alert’s installation disc as a first-person Mechwarrior-style game that would eventually became C&C Renegade. The real Tiberian Sun was spared such ignominy, and became one of my favourite games in the series.

In the context of the C&C universe, Tiberian Sun isn’t the first game you’d install if you were to replay the series. It is, however, one of the most important. While it lacked the contemporary military feel and tank rushes central to the Red Alert games, it was a leap forward for the genre for many other reasons. Crucially, its futuristic setting allowed for more unusual units, in turn offering a new perspective for how different factions in a real-time strategy could be balanced (or not) against one another.

I reinstalled it because most of us played Tiberian Sun at a resolution of around 800x600, which made the unit models look blocky and almost cell shaded – worse in some ways than Red Alert. I remember being disappointed at how the units looked when I installed the demo off the PC Gamer cover disc.