Kim and his friends, like many PC gamers, jumped on board the new game and never looked back. Blizzard Entertainment, which had earned a reputation for quality with its own hit real-time strategy franchise, Warcraft, stormed onto the scene with 1998’s Starcraft. “I really got into it, and we would play after school.” Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Australia were also prime markets for real-time strategy games, with new RTS games frequently topping the charts in these countries.īut the success of Red Alert was the tip of the iceberg. “ Red Alert was the main game everyone played multiplayer,” Kim says. Photograph: CGW Museumĭavid Kim, lead game designer at the newly formed Uncapped Games and former designer on Starcraft II, was introduced to Red Alert while growing up in South Korea. The market, hungry for RTS games, used to be able to support roundups like this one in Computer Gaming World, with more launching each year. Westwood’s rapid release of two blockbuster titles put real-time strategy on the cover of PC gaming magazines, not only in the United States but across the globe. The studio doubled down on its success with the release of Red Alert in 1996, which sold even more quickly than its predecessor and included an online chat program, Westwood Chat, that players could use to organize online games.

Command & Conquer hit stores in 1995 and sold more than a million copies in its first year, establishing Westwood as a leader in a new, breakout genre. Louis Castle, speaking to Computer & Video Games magazine in a 2008 interview, said Westwood “wanted players to imagine that their computer at home was a terminal to a real battlefield that communicated directly with your units in the field.” The team at Westwood took inspiration from media coverage of the Gulf War but added its own sci-fi spin. Sperry, frustrated with the restrictions and costs of licensing an established franchise like Dune, pushed Westwood to gamble on a new, original IP that riffed on modern warfare and the technology that drove it. Yet Dune II didn’t receive a direct sequel.

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