For today, we'll be doing something different and taking a look at a computer game! Not without some justification, as I'll explain later. This one also happens to be a favorite of mine from days of yore, and I imagine plenty others who played on their PCs when it released twenty years ago might also be cracking a nostalgic smile. Between massing tanks, weather control, machines, and Soviet psychic super-squids, it's Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2.
For you young 'uns, the distant and magical time called the nineties was one where video and computer games saw leaps and bounds in technology. It wasn't like now where, let's face it, the PS5 and Xbox XYZ are basically the same general thing as before but shinier--16 bit consoles leapt ahead of their eighties 8-bit analogues, 3D was entering the stage, and there also came these new-fangled things called CDs. You could pack all sorts of things onto them, including actual full motion video clips, that you could watch or interact with! And so many people made a stab at 'FMV games', which were usually terrible as games and even worse as movies! Only a small handful stood the test of time, like Wing Commander, and Command and Conquer (a pattern in names? No coincidence, says I!).
Starting in 1995 by Westwood Studios, the CNC series told a story inspired by the Gulf War, except Iraqis were replaced by the super-terrorist organization known as the Brotherhood of Nod fighting over green alien space crystals against the NATO-like GDI. It was the nineties, you could do nutty stuff like that. The live-action video cutscenes punctuating your real time strategy missions of controlling armies of tanks, planes, and laser obelisks were low-budget, using whoever happened to be hanging about the studio as actors, but they were memorable and had their charm, becoming a mainstay for the series. Amateur though they were, the cast had fun as their talking head commanders explaining why precisely you had to blow random shit up with inordinate military firepower.
After that we got a side-story in the form of Command and Conquer Red Alert, which posed the question of 'What if Albert Einstein invented time travel? And went back to eliminate Hitler? By turning him into sparklies with a handshake, somehow?' The harrowing counterfactual answer it presented was that Josef Stalin would instead kick off WW2, which here ended up involving lightning-spewing killer Tesla coils, teleporters, compensator uber-tanks, and other such grounded gizmos. The movie side of things got an upgrade, with actual actors involved this time, and though things remained rather cheesy, it was played earnestly--the Soviet campaign, with everyone trying to remain alive around a psychotic Stalin, was all kinds of memorable and fun.
A couple years later came Red Alert 2, with another boost to production values--and this time, it knew what it was, and embraced the lunacy. Right off the bat we kick off with the Soviets coming back for round 2 against the western allies with an invasion of the US--this time, with airships, psychic powers, spider bots, and killer squids! The performances had the ham dial turned up, with Udo Kier rasping his way as shady Soviet telepath Yuri, and Nicholas Worth as the communist Premier apparently interpreted his directions as 'be as RASSSSHAN as possible while verifiably ravaging the scenery!' On the American side, Nixon lookalike Ray Wise as the President and Barry Corbin as Texas general also knew full well what they were in for, and that enthusiasm really fired up a player at them to crush the opposition under your controlled armies.
It's that sort of 'hell with it, let's just have fun' attitude I do miss--and another awesome thing about the game, and really this era of gaming in general, was the score, by Frank Klepacki. You might think we get some pretentious generic orchestra, or noodling on a music maker studio, but no, we got to commanding and conquering with ludicrous armies to heavy fuckin' metal and some damn fine techno. Between the Hell March and Blow it Up, you had all sorts of tunes to headbang to while rolling out Apocalypse Tanks, and while there's still games with great music today, few match that same feeling.
Oh, and the gameplay? Yeah, it's still fun. The balance was never optimal, especially with the expansion, but back then, I didn't care. Each side had a plethora of options for crushing the other--like teleporting your laser prism tanks straight into the foe's base, or just barraging them with enough missiles to shame Kim Jong. Crank up the game speed, and you got an adrenaline rush managing your resources, your troops, and your superweapons like no other.
The campaign storylines overall were of course real silly, but it got the job done, and when it got to the expansion (that's DLC but actually done properly for you rugrats), there was no questioning everyone was just revelling in the lunacy when you had the Soviets invade the moon or accidental time travel to dinosaur times. Here Udo Kier takes stage as the real bad guy communists and capitalists must team up against--there was even a stage where you retake Hollywood with 'Arnie Frankenfurter' and 'Sly Stallion' at your side, which was edited to be much lamer and copyright-friendly in later versions. The game also actually offered an explanation, unlike say Red Dawn, of why the Soviet invasion didn't just spiral into nuclear war--and that explanation was 'Udo Kier's magic psychic telephone with a novelty straw on the top'. Which is still somehow more realistic than most similar stories!
I might be waxing nostalgic a little, but Red Alert 2 was all kinds of fun back in the day, and while the 2D voxel graphics might be dated, they still have their own charm and aesthetic to my eyes. I'm certainly not the only one who still looks back on it fondly, with speedruns and playthroughs still going on to this day, even if current PC hardware often proves too futuristic for a humble turn of the millennium game to run on, somehow.
Eventually, once EA Games acquired Westwood, this was followed by Red Alert 3, which cranked up the camp dial even more with a new Japanese anime-inspired faction--the movie cutscenes, still retained, were slicker, and this time sporting ham-meister Tim Curry as the Soviet leader, and George friggin' Takei as the Emperor of Japan. Some diehards weren't keen on the new tone and all, and while it didn't quite match the enjoyment of Red Alert 2's story, but seeing ol' Tim overact so much he cracks himself up was a hoot. The gameplay was decent fun too--this time, among many other wacky tricks, you could suck enemy battleships into space with tractor beams and drop them back down, which never got old.
However, EA didn't really manage the series that properly after that, and following the tepidly received at best Command and Conquer 4, as well as the decline of the real time strategy genre, it was put to rest after that. There were a couple of exploitative mobile cash-ins afterwards, but this year we had a 25th anniversary remaster of the original game, alongside the first Red Alert, which got people excited again, and proved there might just be a future yet. Either way, I have lots of fond memories of this combination of movie video, army-massing gameplay, and goofy nonsense that didn't care if you though it all too much--one day, I hope, we'll see it all come back.
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