Back in 1995, a small game development operation known as Westwood Studios created a real-time strategy game known as Command and Conquer. This studio, who before had only created small RTS-styled games as tie-ins to Frank Herbert’s Dune series of books, would soon become known essentially as the creator of the modern real-time strategy game model: using a gratuitously-simplified model of the workings of any nation’s proverbial war machine, players needed to amass resources, build a base, raise an army, and ultimately conquer their opponents through the use of said forces. Though other strategy game developers have tweaked this standard and added their own trademark play styles or concepts in their own games, the original Command and Conquer is still seen to have set the standard for the RTS genre.
But “CnC” and its successors have had other impacts, especially pertaining to storyline, thematic elements, and real-world tie-ins. From the bleak, post-apocalyptic alternate history of the Tiberium games to the goofy time-traveling parody of the Red Alert series, these games have pushed the envelope as to how much a game’s fiction can leak into the real world and cross over into such contemporary issues as terrorism, ideological warfare, the media, management of our natural resources, climate change, WMDs, and even political parody.
The Tiberium storyline, beginning with the original CnC in 1995, follows the rapidly-unfolding conflict between the UN-commissioned Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and a theoretically-ancient paramilitary religious organization known as the Brotherhood of Nod. Nod, harboring connections to and sending support and aid to various nationalist and terrorist organizations, has supposedly been on the UN’s watch list for decades. It isn’t until the appearance of a green, self-replicating crystal known as Tiberium (named for the Tiber river valley in Italy, the place of its discovery) that the tension erupts into full-scale war between the UN’s GDI and the Brotherhood, a war fought not only with bullets and armor, but also with words, deceit, political sabotage and defamation, and, just as things begin to seem so real you could be watching them on your home television, an enormous orbital laser cannon. Two similar wars follow, with thematic elements ranging from the alteration of the world’s ecosystems to the ramifications of extensive use of high technology. The final game (as of now) in the series follows the third war between GDI and Nod, which ends with no clear winner and a renewed initiative to begin reclaiming the earth from the little crystal that caused so much damage.
The games bring true morality into question on a couple of levels. On one hand, the Brotherhood of Nod is headed by a megalomaniacal genius bent on the slow but sure journey towards what is only known as “ascension,” some new level for both humanity and the rest of the planet somehow connected to Tiberium. His methods are underhanded and brutal, once consisting of the obliteration of Bialystock, Poland with UN weaponry to hurt the GDI’s image in the eyes of the rest of the world. He sits atop a vast, stolen nuclear stockpile and uses religion to control his masses of soldiers. On the other, much of the world’s population, forced to live in squalor as Tiberium spreads across the planet like some sort of environmental virus, have been ignored by GDI as their resources are pointed towards the security and maintenance of what few zones left on earth have remained unaffected by Tiberium contamination. For them, the Brotherhood is seen as a benevolent organization, a group outside of the limits of global law who have found a way not only to survive in the reality of a Tiberium-covered Earth, but have thrived in it.
Which brings me to the subject of the war between GDI and Nod: Tiberium itself. In it’s earlier incarnations, Tiberium spread itself by mutating and assimilating local flora and fauna to produce spores vital to its replication. As time dragged on, the chemical has slowly evolved into a crystalline structure. In all of its forms, however, Tiberium has proved to be two things.
First, Tiberium is very valuable. It leeches minerals from the surrounding environment (soil, water, air, etc.) and accumulates on the surface of the earth. Many of these minerals include valuable metals and even trace amounts of petroleum, making Tiberium one of the most valuable substances humanity has ever known.
Secondly, though, Tiberium is extremely dangerous, both to collect and to live with. It is self-replicating, emitting a unique radiation signature that converts all matter around it into more of itself. To be exposed to this radiation even for a short time can cause all manner of deadly effects as it strips the human body away into its component minerals as it grows through it. For the most recent Tiberium game, CnC3: Tiberium Wars, the development team even had a physics research team from MIT write part of Tiberium’s backstory, classifying not only its mineral structure but the qualitative measurements of its radiation signature:
“Tiberium is a dense "dynamic proton lattice" held together by exotic heavy particles. When Tiberium comes into contact with other matter, the heavy particles randomly collide with the nuclei of the target matter, smashing it to pieces (in the case of smaller nuclei) or incrementally knocking off protons or neutrons (in the case of heavier nuclei). Tiberium captures a fraction of the protons that are ejected during this collision process and incorporates them into its own structure, thus transmuting matter into more Tiberium. Whenever one of the heavy particles —a muon or tauon — collides with an atomic nucleus, fission occurs, which results in the production of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation as well as other forms of electromagnetic radiation (like infra-red). During the transmutation process, nuclei that Tiberium has come into contact with may be changed into nuclei with different (usually fewer) numbers of protons or neutrons.”
(From the in-game Journal “Living with Tiberium;” Director Mike Verdu mentions the inclusion of MIT’s white paper in this interview.)
Overall, the Tiberium series deals with exaggerated versions of rather pressing modern-day issues, such as the double-edged sword of our petroleum economy and the massive ideological issues driving deep fissures between us as a nation and the rest of the world. The Red Alert series, on the other hand, is more whimsical, dealing with many “what if?” questions and taking a far more light-hearted mindset than its grim predecessor. Put simply, the Red Alert series is a set of games built upon no-expenses-spared political incorrectness.
The story asks one simple question: What if Albert Einstein DID build a time machine?” In this scenario, Einstein is able to go back in time and neutralize Adolf Hitler before he becomes a threat to the world. When he returns to the present (in this case, the 1950s), he is shocked to see that World War II still happened, albeit in a different way: free to run unopposed, Josef Stalin has invaded Western Europe, and it’s up to a new allied coalition to stop him.
The game deals with dozens of exaggerations and parodies on both sides of the war: the Allies focus on gleaming patriotism and the preservation of liberty, gratuitously plastering the American Eagle on everything they can and finding clean, humanitarian methods of stopping the Soviet advance. The Soviets, on the opposite extreme, are a ruthless attrition-based military with no qualms against the use of excessive force. They even have a super weapon known as the “Iron Curtain” that improves the integrity of their armored columns to the point of nigh-invincibility.
The Red Alert series is a comical reflection on one of the darkest times in World History, later games following the progress of the Cold War gone bad, ending in the invasion of the United States. The third installment in the series arrives this fall, in which an embittered Soviet Union attempts an experiment similar to that of the one that started the entire series. They eliminate Einstein, causing a time paradox that causes the Allies and the Soviets to re-enter conflict against the newly-risen and heavily armed superpower of Japan. At the end of the day, it does a good job of parodying all sides depicted and forces players to take a long, hard look at the way we all (keyword: ALL, as in the whole world) must look through the eyes of our neighbors here and abroad.
Westwood (and now EA) have done a phenomenal job at creating games which not only entertain, but also open eyes. In my personal opinion, the greatest forms of expression are not the ones that an observer merely looks at, but the ones that help an observer truly see. If games are an art form, then Command and Conquer definitely fits this bill.
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