let's have a conversation about command and conquer lore

[Tegiminis]

so i played some tiberian sun and then watched all the cutscenes and then read the cnc wiki and you know what?

wow this series has some completely nutty lore. i mean, we all knew it when cnc3 basically ignored the dire state of the world in tiberian sun, but it’s truly bonkers.

and on top of that the lore bible is totally incoherent and contradicts basically everything in the games apparently. i don’t have access to it but i know @iguferon does so look forward to snippets from that in this VERY THREAD wow

anyway here’s a petty caption writer from the wiki for you

and a collection of all the GDI cutscenes from Tiberian Sun, which plays like a really shoddily edited sg-1 episode. seriously it’s half an hour long and really funny, please watch it

[Felix]

Sarin nerve gas! The Soviets love it

[Tegiminis]

the mutants call normal people “blunts” and the normal people call mutants “shiners” because in the future racism is real but only directed at mutants

james earl jones in tiberian sun is apparently supposed to be the canon player character from the first game lol

[iguferon]

in addition to all the absurd ALIENS!!! shit tiberian sun introduced to the command and conquer lore apparently there were also ANCIENT ALIENS too

i don’t think any of this is mentioned in any of the C&C games at all lol

[Chevluh]

The thing I really like in the first C&C is despite the setting it was a sort of pastiche of gulf war era war coverage and the game was somewhat grounded despite its GI Joe side. I loved that the manual illustrations were actual photographs with the buildings and units photoshopped in. I also loved that the DOS install program was presented as installing the actual EVA uplink that’d allow you, the field general, to communicate with your superiors and units. That, grounded setting and all, stopped with Tiberian Sun so I pretty much dropped the whole thing. In fact I posit that Tiberian Sun’s greatest crime is attributing an actor to the player character. It’s not you anymore.

On the other hand, Red Alert 2! That one is the complete realization of full FMV potential. It’s the other side of GI Joe, firmly in campy territory. War dolphins and rocketeers and all. It doesn’t make the player character actor mistake, either. It also follows that pretty much the only C&C game I paid attention to after that was Red Alert 3. It understood. Look at evil russian Tim Curry here. He understands.

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Red Alert’s lore is completely wack, too. Like, alright, it’s an Einstein-prompted alternate WW2 in which Hitler doesn’t exist so the germans are the good guys and the russians became a cackling politically correct nazi-cold-war amalgamate instead, with both zeppelins and Tesla coils. But wait, Kane’s there and it also leads into the creation of GDI and the emergence of the brotherhood of Nod. At first I thought there was a continuity problem because they mention the actual WW2 in C&C but no, they talk about WW1 in the final GDI briefing.

But then in Red Alert 2 the C&C link gets dropped. Kane is replaced, admittedly with another memorable creepy bald bearded Rasputin stand-in with his own agenda. It’s kinda odd that this change is never addressed since Red Alert’s lore is otherwise a hodgepodge of multiple time travel-induced timeline reboots (at least thrice).

That being said C&C Renegade 2, sequel to the C&C FPS that was planned to take place after Red Alert 2, would have reintroduced the Brotherhood of Nod. There’s that great bit of concept art where the propped up arm of a fallen soviet statue is in fact an early Hand of Nod.

Red Alert 2 also has a chinese mobile online clickfest spinoff that turns everyone into dota-style bunnygirls, because apparently Red Alert 2 became hugely popular there through piracy.

In conclusion:

SPACE!

[Tegiminis]

i like tiberian sun a lot for basically the reason you hate it, which is: the setting is such a drastic and absurd departure from the gulf war aesthetic of the first game that it borders on parody.

tiberian sun has all the trappings of the future in terminator, nod cyborgs crushing the last survivors of an embattled human race, it’s such patent absurdity that there’s no way i can take it seriously.

the gravest mistake cnc 3 did was try and rein that influence in. no! let it run wild! that’s what made red alert 2 so good!

@iguferon

i don’t think any of this is mentioned in any of the C&C games at all lol

nope lol. tacitus obviously is but MARTIAN PYRAMIDS and proto-gdi/nod definitely not

could you image if they did a prequel that was egyptians fighting over the tacitus using alien technology, set in 1200 bc or whatever? god it would be atrocious. i want it.

[DaleNixon]

I love when they brought the U.S. in in C&C 1 and quickly shut that down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yikHDMxegP8

My first C&C (and RTS experience in general) was renting the Saturn version from Blockbuster!

[sponkmonkey]

Mine was the N64 one, also rented!

[Father.Torque]

Wasn’t there a relatively recent Command & Conquer game where each faction was represented by a different variety of Hot Lady so you could pick the Hot Lady you like the best like some kind of dating sim?

[Mikey]

I mean if there is I’m finally interested in this series

[sponkmonkey]

I think that was Red Alert 3?

ok it was Red Alert 3 and I’m not going to link to it here, you can google that if you need to see it

[zombieman000]

EVA’s distorted/processed voice in C&C1 was always pleasing to me in I guess a proto-ASMR way https://youtube.com/watch?v=m6w2ZRPahe48?t=44

[Tegiminis]

They even had posters of them if you got the collector’s edition.

[Chevluh]

It stealthily started in Red Alert 1, where each side has a hot lady although it’s more apparent with the Allies who have Tania, their commando unit and a pretty obvious Lara Croft ripoff that became the series’ sex symbol, while the russian hot lady, Nadia, is a commanding officer so your interactions are less direct (plus she’s sleeping with Stalin anyway, although she really is a Nod spy and assassin). That being said they’re both depicted as strong and not particularly fanservicy women.

Tiberian Sun has hot ladies too, your Nod assistant and a mutant love interest on the GDI side, although they’re once again not too obviously used as cheese cake, although it’s a bit more apparent than in RA1.

Then it became much more blatant in Red Alert 2 where Tanya (played by Kari Wuhrer of Sliders fame plus a number of sexy things), always bending over and in danger of spilling out of her tank top, starts overtly hitting on you during the game (offering a date at the end) and both factions get hot ladies as intelligence officers and EVA voices (the allied one is even named Eva, implying that’s where the system’s name comes from). Still, unlike Tanya they’re decently dressed. In the alternate timeline of the Red Alert 2 expansion, the allied ending has Eva beating Tanya to the punch when it comes to asking you for a date (Tanya’s reaction is to ask Einstein for a ride in the time machine to correct that little kink in the new timeline).

The one you’re likely really thinking of is Red Alert 3, which amped up everything including the cheesecake. It has (at least) 8 hot ladies, a number of which, if not all, being playboy models, the costumes are full of often absurd midriffs and cleavage, a good chunk of the promo materials was cheesecake shots of the ladies. It kinda fits the tone of the RA2+ games where every culture is made of goofy pop culture stereotypes but you need ot have a tolerance for that kind of stuff. Really cracks me up that Yuri’s equivalent in that timeline, a pigtailed japanese highschool girl, is naturally named Yuriko.

I guess the chinese RA2 spinoff rebalances things a bit since almost all the males (excluding Einstein but including general Carville) are fashion models too.

Can’t speak for post-Tiberian mainline C&C games or spinoffs.

EDIT: Red Alert 2 Carville vs 红警OL Carville

EDITEDIT: And Solomon (original, US mobile C&C, chinese mobile RA): https://imgur.com/a/NYxhwqX

[Chevluh]

That reminded me I’d seen a screenshot from a preview version of Red Alert 2 where the pentagon is a star-shaped building, but I’ve had no luck finding it again. In the final game it’s the real-world version.

It’s kinda funny though, because on the other hand the Eiffel tower was real-world-accurate in the preview version but has been changed into a three-legged “Paris tower” in the final version. I guess there must’ve been some trademark problem there.

[iguferon]

Command and Conquer cutscene videos have amazing comment sections. Half of it is enormous sprawling comment threads where like a dozen guys all as stupid as Joe Rogan get their minds blown by lines like “Control the media. Control the mind.” and the other half is shit like this

or completely incoherent like this guy’s NOD ISIS fan fiction because someone in a cutscene mentioned Benghazi

[Chevluh]

The whole Kane worship fandom is something I have trouble with, gotta say.

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related to the whole lore thing, one of th most mysterious things when i played C&C1 was the ending credits. Basically none of those sequences are from the game:

But on the other hand it doesn’t seem meaningless. In particular, what’s that stone painting they’re digging up? To my young impressionable mind this prompted so many questions? Did it have something to do with tiberium, etc… Turns out it’s depicting Cain/Kane (cause Kane is Cain, yeah) murdering Abel, and thus a prized artefact from Nod history, one of those things that never gets mentioned in the games. Well, almost.

(as an aside I only discovered while searchig for this on the net that there’s two variants of the C&C GDI ending, depending on whether or not you used the ion cannon to destroy the temple)

Those credits popped back into my mind thanks to this thread, along with one of the more oddball spinoffs, renegade. Renegade is a kinda terrible FPS that features some delightfully corny one-liners and has the interesting merit of trying to depict what the Nod-GDI conflict looks from the ground, so most of the missions are based on stuff that was encountered or mentioned in C&C.

And so, in the final mission, you get to visit the temple of Nod and, apart from being a dreadful level gameplay-wise, it’s basically a fanservice bonanza. Because it’s got that museum room, with the cave painting, but it’s also got the green screen for the crooked journalist who was doing nod propaganda newscast in C&C, Kane’s briefing room, the computer room for those goofy netrunners from the C&C Nod ending and even the stuffed corpse of Seth (the guy who tried to make you attack the pentagon in C&C1). It’s got the laser barriers from the credits, too. Although it’s also kinda stupid because for example the museum room doesn’t fit with the aesthetic of the other temple rooms. Also that’s the Cairo temple, the one you build in the Nod campaign, but the canon temple is the Sarajevo one from the GDI campaign. I guess Renegade technically counts as canonizing the Cairo temple. Havok (the Renegade hero) destroys that one while Solomon (retroactively the C&C1 GDI player character) destroys the other.

Also it’s kinda funny because below the temple you find a tomb and Kane starts a whole schtick about how Nod has been there for millenia and Havok just tells him he’s just making up that ancien egyptian alien bullshit as he goes.

Renegade was also somewhat know for its multiplayer mode, in whcih each team defends a simplified RTS-C&C base that provides them with weapons and vehicles to buy with credits collected by a bot harvester. No other game ever did something quite like it. Fans remade (first in UT, then in UE3) it as Renegade X. It sticks to the not too well aged gameplay of Renegade but it’s kinda nifty. What I didn’t remember is that as a preview and testbed for the UE3 version they made a singleplayer demo mission, Black Dawn, which isn’t half bad for an amateur project. Also they somehow got whoever was in charge of C&C at EA at the time to agree to let them make those fangames.

[BustedAstromech]

C&C: Renegade certainly wasn’t good but I can’t deny I loved that first level that fulfilled the promise by letting you walk into a Hand of Nod and see all the neat training rooms and kitchen and beds that pumped out little guys from the base game. It had a laser-tag room in the basement set in Virtual Boy Red!

Pandemic’s Star Wars Battlefront dry-run, Clone Wars, had a splitscreen multiplayer mode that had similar rules, with base defenses and resources; it was probably descended from the late-90s Battlezone remake (which, as I look it up, was also made by Pandemic! ah!)

[DaleNixon]

I spent about 5 hours in Renegade X last weekend. It’s still an absolute jankfest that collapses under its own weight in almost every way, and I love it! The BOINK kill sound being intact is probably why I even tolerate playing it.