Command and Conquer : Red Alert
Super Obsessive Game #6
Type of Game
Sending troops to the slaughterhouse (even more so than in the first Command & Conquer), in the context of an alternate, futuristic war (even more so than in the first Command & Conquer).
Release date on our machines
November 1996, the RTS at that time? Crazy stuff on top of crazy stuff on top of crazy stuff... yeah
Developer
Westwood Studios, Inc. The best, right to the end, till death do us part. Rest in peace, mates.
Publisher
Virgin Interactive Entertainment SARL, not to the death, but R.I.P. to the mates anyway.
C&C Red Alert : available on Steam, on the Epic Games Store, and via EA Play, all in Remastered version. I believe the source code for the original game is available on the internet, but I'll leave it to you to find it.
I don't know how I managed, but I never saw a single advert on TV promoting a console or video game, so I always felt like I was missing out on the hype surrounding new releases. When I started secondary school in September 1996, everything changed. Well, it changed a little. Not on TV, but in the school library, which received two or three specialist magazines. I take my hat off to the educational ideology of the person who had the brilliant idea of making Gen4 and Consoles + available to students. I preferred Joystick, but I wasn't going to push my luck by asking the school to subscribe to it. My slightly introverted geeky friends and I would reread the same articles thirty times, even though they were sometimes even worse written than the essays we scribbled during break time just before French class. We scrutinised every detail of the tiny, poor-quality screenshots... all so we could repeat the same enthusiastic exclamations when we met up in the playground. I was going to rave about Ultima Online, Total Annihilation, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Age of Empires, Blood, Half-Life, KKnD and a thousand other wonders, whether I played them later or not. I discovered the future existence of Red Alert in one of the first papers I leafed through, completely captivated by the little blurry pixels revealing themselves before my eyes, sparkling with excitement.
The newspaper seller at school
It seemed so similar, yet so different from the first Command & Conquer, the perfect combination to delight little Tiberian Dawn addicts like us. I fell off my chair admiring the micro-images of attack dogs, cruisers, heavy tanks and Tesla coils... What's more, it wasn't coming out three years later, but just a few months after the Covert Operations expansion for the first C&C! An expansion that I had only seen running at my cousin Walter's house, but that didn't matter. Surprise leading to joy, leading to impatience, leading to anger, leading to threats against the family, leading to the purchase of the game, finally!
We take the same ones and paint them red
OK! Let's calm down for a minute. Once the euphoria had passed, I realised that the gameplay was still the same as in the previous game. You build your base, generate electricity with power plant, recruit your troops in buildings, and throw them at your opponent to destroy them. Yeah, but now we have access to air and naval units! Damn diesel-powered caterpillar tracks on a bed of torpedoes! Bring on the bombers, submarines, paratroopers, destroyers, and maritime troop carriers! Oh, and assault dogs, too, I already mentioned that. I never recruited them because it made me sad to see them die, but I applaud the initiative to have the means to slaughter infantry by the bucketful. Seriously, though! Such incredible content! Even if it recycled half of the units that already existed in the first C&C, we got new maps, new graphics, and a new scenario!
Almost all developers did that anyway. That's what we kids wanted. The same game, just a little better. That's it! Awesome! No need to reinvent the concept, go 3D, or get carried away with meaningless nonsense. Just give us more of the same! Who cares! We're playing the new Command & Conquer! Take the money from our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, for goodness' sake! All we had to do was stop buying Pogs or Dragon Ball cards for a few weeks to afford a video game, can you believe it? The way we used to rave about half the world and spit on the rest, without a care in the world. The good old days, basically. And a bit of good-natured stupidity too.
The day before the future of tiberium in the past perfect tense
While I absolutely adored the first Command & Conquer, I found its sequel even more compelling. Well, not really a sequel, but a prequel set in an alternate universe. ‘An uchronia, that’s what it’s called,’ I would say to myself when I learned the word twenty years later. But in reality, when I read the definition, I immediately thought of this game. So, um, it goes like this: Einstein travels back in time to kill Hitler before he establishes the Third Reich! And then Stalin tries to conquer the world in his place! No, but seriously, it's sooooooo good! In any case, when you're eleven years old, there's no better scenario possible. At first, I regretted that Tiberium, that toxic alien entity used as a resource, had disappeared (or rather, hadn't appeared yet), in favour of simple piles of ore lying on the ground, as well as... multicoloured crystals? Huh? Okay, fine. I shed a few tears over the disappearance of the beetle-shaped harvesters, replaced by what looked like end-of-life refuse collection lorries.
Yeah, but faced with the avalanche of new missions and new content, I didn't whinge for long. Nor did I whinge about the tactical possibilities offered by the diversity of units. Nor about the simple fact that it was new, quite literally. And what about the cutscenes? Well, they're great! Even more kitsch and cheesy than before, so funny hahahah! Except that, as in Tiberian Dawn, I took everything at face value and thought it was really well done. Stalin as a lunatic alcoholic who can kill any of his underlings on a whim, Tanya the ultra-angry commando who would make Ellen Ripley super jealous, and Kane, of course, the big bad guy from the first C&C who was supposed to have died in the destruction of his NOD temple, but who is there, sitting right in the middle of the past of a parallel timeline. But go ahead, it's so awesooooooome! In any case, it made a mockery of everything I knew about science fiction in 1996. Which was almost nothing.
Soviet Techno-Post-Rock
Lord Frank Klepacki has achieved the feat of producing a soundtrack that is almost identical to that of Tiberian Dawn, but just as indispensable. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little; there has been some evolution in style, but you have to immerse yourself in the music for at least fifty hours of gameplay to grasp the nuances. The flashy electro-rock-R&B style that left a lasting impression on me in Tiberian Dawn remains predominant, but it also sounds colder, dated... Siberian? And much less R&B too. Gone are the stylish singers who add sunshine to the tracks. In their place are hundreds of frozen workers labouring rhythmically on endless production lines to build mammoth tanks as quickly as possible! That said, you could play this instalment while listening to the music from the previous one without it bothering you in the slightest. The reverse is also true. In fact, the remake of both games released in 2020 allows you to do just that. What's more, it's a pretty decent remake, which is an unexpected achievement from Electronic Arts, that greedy shark from hell. This is the perfect opportunity to listen to Hell March again in its best context. Hell March. That unbeatable monument to jubilation, when the Red Alert intro cinematic starts and those completely ecstatic electric guitar riffs ring out... then you hear the full version again during a mission, and discover its second half, which is more electronic and more disturbing. This track alone is worth buying the game three times over. Luckily, it wasn't included in the Covert Ops expansion for the first C&C, as was originally planned! I would probably have discovered it fifteen years later, in a video listing the best RTS music of all time, and I would have shrugged my shoulders and forgotten about it immediately. A dull life, clearly.
Triple backflip in your tank
Red Alert hadn't even hit the shop shelves yet, and I was in PE class, stuck at the top of the uneven bars. I was terrified of that apparatus at the time, and I was frozen there like a rabbit with myxomatosis on a country road in the middle of the night. A friend of mine motivated me by saying, ‘The game box is right there, come and get it!’ That's a pretty clear way to quantify our level of fandom. It didn't give me the strength to overcome my vertigo at the time, and it made me look like a freak that most people wanted nothing to do with, but it still made me laugh. Finally, when we got our hands on it, a debriefing of the utmost importance took place every morning of the week. "So, did you complete mission 5, the one where you only have three tanks and two submarines? Did you see how awesome the attack dogs are? And Tanya, she's so cool, right?‘ It's possible that we used a different word than “cool” to describe her, as good lads who were very sensitive to the humour of Duke Nukem 3D and the... let's say “highlighting” of a certain Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. I don't know how things are in secondary schools these days, but we weren't about to change the world. Today, with a thousand years of introspection and hindsight under my belt, I find the setting a little less immersive than the toxic but carefree atmosphere of Tiberian Dawn.
Something about the choice of units seems less magical; I prefer the obelisk of light to the Tesla coil, for example. And I even like the crappy little turret more than the bunker, come to that. Maybe it's also in the sound effects; I still imitate the cheesy punchlines of the commando from the first C&C, but Tanya's, hardly ever. And not being able to control the boats made them so... well, scary, a little bit. Yeah, I was even afraid of boats drawn in three pixels in a video game. Not as much as the real oil tankers that made the entire beach at Le Havre vibrate when they entered the port, but still a little bit. All this to say: I felt like between 1995 and 1996, some of the coolness had disappeared along the way, or at least changed in nature. In any case, there was still so much left that I didn't notice anything, until neurotic nostalgia came and stuck its nose into everything.
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