In a deliberately overly nostalgic video, I attempt to explain the significance of the original Command and Conquer, and what it was like to see it for the first time through the eyes of an excited 8 year old.
"It quickly became too difficult for me to get any further through the campaign, so I spend way more time on red alert's skirmish mode." - shows my favorite skirmish map back then.😎
Talking about smells and games. Reminds me of when I'd go to my little sister's friend's house and they'd be off playing and his dad let me play on his computer. He fired up Mechwarrior 2 and showed me how to play. Just remembering that instantly brings back waves of senses from the smell of their house, the lighting, the wonder and excitement in experiencing something completely novel and magical to me as a kid. Some of the memories of me sitting in that hard wooden chair, hearing my sister and friend pretending to be dogs across the house, the music from the game and thick atmosphere it created.... those memories are permanently sealed into my brain, and I love it. :)
Similarly, I remember scenes from a Leven Thumps novel whenever I play Super Mario Land because I played it so much in the car during road trips while listening to the Leven Thumps audiobooks.
I think I'm going to feel nostalgia over the smell of the Valve Index. Unfortunately, my mum used my boxes for storage purposes and they now smell like my nan's house. But one day, I'm sure I will smell Valve hardware again and remember what it was like to jump into Boneworks for the first time...
Similar too, but with Diablo II and fresh wooden furniture, discovering Diablo II in my cousin house was like a transcedental experience, the graphics were insane at the time, and the game had that bomb soundtrack, but the funny part is that my brother was with me and he also have the same trigger for recording the experience, there are a lot of people that get this feeling, even not feeling exactly the same way.
One could argue that this shows that the Warhammer 40K Universe is comparable to something written by a child, simplistic and predictable. And one could argue that this is not as much an insult as others would perceive it, rather a reflection on the wonder of the fact that all adults are simply grown up children with irrevocable desire to be so... carefree.
@@noellesato311 "And this one has immortal Egyptian terminators, and this one has very strong and very fast super soldiers, and this one is a very big bug fleet..."
My father used to play this game non stop in my early teens. Man whould just turn on my gaming rig and play Command and Conquer on full blown volume on the TV. Didn't know there was a remaster tho, I should get him a copy.
@@ODSTGeneralYT Some things from OpenRA are nice bonus features, but the devs cowarding out with engineers being able to capture everything instantly is annoying.
The appeal of C&C to boys growing up in the 90s i think was that our earlier childhood was filled with plastic soldiers and vehicles. Playing wargames and imagining the battlefields we could produce. Then C&C came along and there it all was for us to act out on screen.
Dude even my toy soldiers are practically my command and conquer games that are just irl. I drew a lot of the Brotherhood symbols, played with just stuff that are tanks in my mind and so on. It's such a nostalgic rush seeing this video, almost everything comes back.
Same here. A bunch of us drew out own games (ie sessions/skirmishes) of Red Alert in school. We did not have a pop limit on paper so all our papers would be full of action in a few minutes.
yeah I never drew the menu but I always drew my own little bases, complete with many obelisks. My friends were baffled but there we go :-) I even had some wierd toy that you could make little Tanks with, out of playdough or wet tissues. I remember in one of my new classes, I had a tissue tank, one kid saw it and tried to make me seem lame by shouting "Oh My God that kid plays with toy tanks at our age!!" (which was age 12) but 2 of the kids who heard it had played C&C and it turned into a discussion of which faction was best :D
you just have the best scripts. Every video seems to give me an insight into your mind and into your experiences and feelings. Just wanted to get this out. I‘m genuinly sad that you have so „few“ subscribers. I just wish that you‘d be making enough money to be financially independent forever. I think you‘d be the only youtuber apart fron videogamedunkey that I‘d support using patreon
I don't really use Patreon but I definitely would sub to Philip. He's talked in a past video about how he doesn't want to just "take" money from his subscribers tho and would rather do sponsored operations as long as they are morally right and honest.
@@Captaincinquo I love the B-movie plots, even if they’re not the best. It fits in universe, the people playing each character really do feel like their roles when we see them. And the quality of life in YR is so nice. And runs on toasters now!
Someone else who played this on a PlayStation!!! I remember how awful the controls were, seemed like the first few missions just didn’t want to cooperate with me at all. To be fair that made the leap to PC just just that much better, as I got Red Alert 2 as a present not too long after that...then the moment I saw Command and Conquer Generals on PC for the first time, now that just seemed to be where the series peaked. I don’t think I’ve ever had a video on C&C invoke so much nostalgia, the ‘horrifying’ aspects of the game really didn’t click for me at all when I was younger, nor did the campaign when the Skirmish mode let me play the game like an odd version of Simcity as a base builder. Not even going to get into how amazing it was to see the series progress with the online play, as that was my first ever time seeing that aspect actually come into play damn. What a phenomenally accurate video 👍
I played this game for the first time on a pc. Was a friend's pc in 1995. I was 10. Afterwards i got it on my playstation, played a lot. Same for red alert, played on another friend's pc. Then got it on playstation, played it a lot. Then when finally back in 2002 i got my own pc, i had to get this game of course on it and play it a lot. These days i of course bought the remastered version from steam. However i haven't had that much time to play it anymore. Also yes, Frank Klepacki made some amazing music for these games. I still listen to Act on instinct, Hell March and Full Stop / Warfare all the time. Original and remastered versions.
Man its weird hearing you talking about the smell of your friends house in relation to C&C. I used to play this game at my cousins house cause we had no PC , and it had this distinct smell, wich to this day i associate with childhood, big boxes of random Legos, my first Videogames (in this case, C&C Tiberian Sun) and just overall warmth and joy. I vividly remember us trying to build the closest replicas of all the GDI units with the Legos we had and then adding more guns and stuff to it. The feeling and Sound of the Legos while digging in those big boxes just to find the right piece, sheer bliss. Funny how i liked to think this is something only i expirience and now in the days of the Internet i discover that there are people out there, hundrets of kilometers away, speeking other languages, with just the same mechanims going on in their heads. Also i like how you decribed the feeling of looking forward as a child and now backward as an adult. Man, this Video really hit me good... You might well be my favorite Content creator at the moment! Keep up the good work and have a happy new Years Philip !
Westwood lives in death! Born in 91 and also played it on a PS1, it's also one of my fondest childhood gaming memories, there's something special about this game.
You can take a topic as overdiscussed as nostalgia, and make it interesting again. Perfectly summarizes how I am feeling about games right now, now that I stuck with it for so long.
much reminds me of when I was a kid and my dad showing me how to play age of empires for the first time and going from web browser games, age of empires seemed so complex and mysterious to my child brain. theres something about being a child and not really understanding a games mechanics that gives it that magical feeling that I feel is lost on me now
Tibsun is free (see the cncnet comment) and has been for some time. They also have some Unix packages. Very simple setup. I don't see any point in adding that to steam. The only thing I want to see there would be a remaster :D
Well since the remaster collection for CnC TibDawn and red alert 1 sold, they propably got permission to remaster most of the older CnC games, anything older than CnC 3 and red alert 3.
Alternately, you could download some of the standalone mods for the game, such as WarZone (an enhanced version of the game with new units and improved visuals) or Twisted Insurrection (an alternate timeline where GDI lost the First Tiberium War).
Anyone else remember the wonders of being able to share the two discs of old command & conquer/ red alert games? Used to share copies with one of my best friends as a kid - when he had to move away, we never swapped back. We lost touch, but I still have a set of half the discs from the series in drawer somewhere as a memento as I just couldn't bare to get rid of them.
Lovely story! I remember when you only needed the disk for installation, so you could share with friends and all play. I also remember you could sometimes put your game CD into a CD Player and discover it contained the soundtrack. You never know you're in the good old days until they're over
@@HighSchoolHistoryTeacher C&C needed the disc to run the game (The game graphics are actually loaded from the disc), but you could still play 2-player LAN with the two discs from one game. Three if you had the expansion pack (and probably four for RA1 since it had two expansion discs). The expansion pack discs for C&C1 and RA1 all contain CD audio tracks. I listened to the Covert Ops so much it's barely usable nowadays, lol. Too bad they messed up the CD audio on the second Red Alert expansion, giving it the same tracks as the first one.
Phillip, you gave me goosebumps, man. Like you, I also met C&C when I was way younger, at a friend's house. Except I met it in its PC version. The whole idea of building a base, producing units and commanding an army was what made me turn from consoles forever, after that. Command & Conquer single-handedly put me in the path of PC gaming, from which I never strayed ever since. The last console I ever owned was a Playstation, the first one.
This was the first RTS I ever played. It was a joy to revisit this game, I still have vivid memories of 10 year old me playing the 3rd GDI mission. This was the first mission you could build a large base but only produce infrantry, and in the N64 the map vision wasn't top-down, but kinda "tilted", and the word was rendered in 3D, so it really felt like I was fighting an uphill battle against the Nod. it was so enjoyable swarming the enemies with rifflemen just to hear the thunderous sound of them firing at the same time.
I got a weird happy feeling I get whenever I'm nostalgic from listening to you talk about this game, when in reality it came before me and I've yet to play it
Definately had the same experience with my cousin trying to think up ridiculous vehicles for the game. Like a giraffe tank that shoots at planes, or a tank that tunnels underground, or one that teleports across the map. Or a totally ripped bodybuilder commando that requires a nuclear bomb to kill, and can be 'distracted' by Tanya. It's surprising how much of that eventually became reality as the series continued. And indeed, the smells of my cousin's attic computer room, or our grandpa's study will now always be associated with Doom, Transport Tycoon and Command & Conquer.
Back than, my mother bought a PC from a friend. He didn't need it any more but forgot to remove the C&C CD-ROM from the CD drive. I wondered what it was and started playing my very first PC game. I played several hours without understanding what's going on and how things work. Only by luck I managed to beat the first 3 levels and than got stuck, couldn't figure out how to beat it. My mother occasionally watched me playing, was as clueless as I was and said: "When you can't beat this game, its better to return the CD-ROM to our friend." After that I never got in touch with C&C again. I played The Settlers and Warcraft 3 Reforged but aside of that, never got in touch with RTS games. Only through your video, all these forgotten memories returned. 😪 Thank you Phillip for this trip into my childhood.
This might have been my favorite video of yours last year (close enough). I watched this video in january of 2021, and besides just enjoying the video, you got me to go and find openra and get myself and over a dozen friends hooked on the game for hundreds of hours! Thanks for the fun and memories!
Tiberian Dawn was the very reason I conviced my parents to buy me a PC at all. Saw the demo at a friends and was just entrhalled (or as you put it: enthrilled) by it. And hearing Act on Instinct reliably re-creates that feeling - and the memories - of starting and playing the campaign for the very first time. God, I love C&C.
"the magazine mistaking the cloud for a GAP generator" I remember that answer in the letters page! C&C had a similar effect on me too, I saw it around a friends and as a console pleb immediately wished I could have a PC to play it too. I was so pleased to find out it was on the Playstation later on.
This honestly really hit home with me. I had an extremely similar childhood experience when I first got my hands on Dune 2000 (basically a C&C clone). Played it endlessly and was also so obsessed I ended up making huge numbers of the buildings out of cardboard so I could play it for real in my room with my toy tanks and cars. Also distinctly remember making a mini gun with added backpack and ammo chain out of cardboard as well XD. My parents must have thought I was nuts. Top video mate. You've made me all nostalgic.
it's both hilarious and scary how familiar this is. crudely drawing up the bases of Tib Dawn in school, entrenching in Skirmish because of being shite in RA and TibDawn...good times
I know that I'm late to this video, but I just want you to know that you have unlocked a really old memory with that intro sequence. The song "Act on Instinct" that plays at the beginning is deeply rooted in my memory as one of those MOTDs on CS:S servers from the late 00's. Of course, I was just a child then and had no idea what the lady was saying so there was essentially no way for me to figure out what that song was. Well, after something like 11-15 years, you've helped me unearth these hyperspecific memories... Thanks for this Philip.
My dad had Command and Conquer for mac. Some of my earliest memories are trying to figure out the game and watching the cutscenes. The music also stuck with me like it did with you. Westwood struck gold with C&C.
I began with C&C on the Apple Macintosh, one of my first ever games, followed by testing Red Alert at a relatives house - a magical memory in its own right, later leading to getting Red Alert: Retaliation for the Playstation. I didn't understand a word of English at the time, yet I kept returning to both, playing, losing and replaying over and over again. I loved and still love the "modern" almost normal setting of C&C and the almost magical exploration of it and the more fantastical Red Alert. I never saw the cutscenes as especially campy or even B-style. Back they, they were as good as they could be and I took them dead seriously. Even now, I tend to roll my eyes more than anything whenever I hear someone refer to them as 'dated' or 'campy'. Yes, they are old and not made by professional actors, but they are leaps better than many B-movies from the time.
I was just watching one of your videos. It's amazing how I come back to your channel constantly. Over the years, I've watched and left lots of youtubers behind, but it's been 8 years and I still wait for your uploads like a child waiting for christmas. Anyway, time to watch this video now. Thanks, Phillip.
Amazing video, Phillip. I have very similar stories relating to this C&C as well. Me and my two older brothers had an N64 in my childhood, and I played this game A LOT. One of the many things I remember is that, after seeing my middle brother save the game many times during one session, not knowing what that meant, I took it as a good thing to do frequently. The result? I would just save MANY, MANY times, without even leaving the saving menu. I would press the save button dozens of times. I didn't knew what that did, I didn't even think about it. Maybe my tanks would get stronger, maybe I got money, idk. I just did it. And it sort of worked, at least in my mind. Another small thing is, me and my brothers called the commando dude the "no problem", since he said this whenever prompted to act.
What a very lovely way to articulate the nostalgic feelings of so many people. I've had a similar experience with C&C and I agree with so much in this video. Thank you OP for this lovely love letter to the quirky series that stole my heart as well.
Ive played command and conquer remastered and it was a really awesome experience, the soundtrack, gameplay and pacing of the game i love all and this remaster comes with a lot of surprises to the old fan base with little details and behind the scenes cutscenes. 10/10 for everyone, we need more of this type of games 🌟k
This little trip down Philip's memory lane gave me chills, I like hearing about the nostalgic little details that made an event/game/whatever such a worthwhile memory because we all have our own versions of it
I have never played command and conquer but still loved this vid and could relate to it. I had a similar experience, but with the total war franchise. Saw it at my friends house, was my first RTS that I ever saw and was instantly hooked. Thank you for making this video, for all of us with nostalgic childhood experiences with video games.
Wow sir, I want to first say thank you for this video. You described EXACTLY how my childhood was towards this game. I still remember the days in school where me and my classmates would draw the buildings / landscape on our own pieces of paper and act like we're doing LAN play 😂😂
This series has always blown me away. It's cute in a weird way, the machinery and units all fit the music and feel the environments and story gave. It is beautiful Rolling Round in Tiberium Sun across Ice Sheets was one of the best feelings I've had. Building and holding choke points and watching how big your base grows in comparison to the enemy. It's a power trip leading your units to victory and being safety
When I heard about the remastered edition I pre ordered it as soon as I could, this was one of my favourite games growing up and you hit the nail on the head multiple times in this video, especially the part about the link cable, me and my brother used to bring my TV and PS1 into his bedroom and link them up, we'd play for hours and hours on red alert, always making sure that we hit the select button immediatly after we load in so we'd ally to each other and not accidently kill each other if we started too close, nothing but great memories from these early C&C's
In 2001, when I was 7 years old I got tranfered to a foster family. They already had a kid in foster care at that time, and he had C&C1 for PS1 and I was obsessed with it. I played it every single day on my PS1. Eventually the disc broke a few years later and it wasnt until 2007 I found it for PC. I never had the Nod Disc, but only GDI disc & I still remember how I dreamed off playing as Nod instead of GDI.
I feel like you are retelling my experience with CnC as a child - it was the first video game I ever played at age 8 and I continued to draw rivaling bases in class and my free time, one of our rooms on a longer school trip received the name "tank factory" with the appropriate illustration as I imagined it from the the game. I think this game made me develop an interest in weapons technology, eventually the Cold War - today I am operating a Cold War museum. This was probably the most emotional, personal video you ever did from my point of view and I thank you wholeheartedly for it! Hope you have a great 2021, love your content to bits!
Played CnC on PS1 when I was about 5, the best RTS game ever made! - I also played the demo for hours and hours, until my brother put the disc in the bin!
Thanks for the video dude. My story was kind of the same, growing up with jazz jackrabbit and suddenly transitioning to red alert and then, my favorite, tiberian sun. The most relatable part for me was when you brought up drawing tanks, which is exactly what I did. Tanks with all sorts of elaborate anti-air, anti-personell and anti-tank weaponry, specialized against everything. Also the tiberian sun cutscene where the lasers get shot up by titans is amazing. Thanks a lot for sharing the memory man.
It's funny you said no one would have these same memories and feelings as you did, but so much of this video hit home. This was my first video game ever as a child, and I remember trying to create my own command and conquer style game, drawing out all the artwork and stats. I even had my friend borrow a giant book called "How to learn C++" that I was somehow going to read at 10 years old to try and program our own game. I even had two older brothers who got me into the game that snickered as I referred to the tesla coils as testacoils. Thank you for making this video and giving me a bit of nostalgia to the game that started it all for me.
I will always remember my dad playing red alert when I was six. The awe of seeing red heavy tanks, tesla coils, tanya/volkov, cruisers in action. Set up my gaming hobby till today. More than 20 years later, hard to feel that sense of awe again in today's games.
You with command and conquer was exactly like me and rollercoaster tycoon. I was a coaster nerd to the extreme, I never drew portraits or houses, always a classic steel or wooden roller coaster. The obsession is real to this day, I still put in 20ish hours every now and again
This hit close to home, was so nostalgic getting this game on re-release on Remastered was sooooooo nice to see my old friend. The remastered version video where it says Welcome back Commander I got shivers
The game I remember playing non stop when I was younger was Neverwinter Nights. I would always listen to the band Led Zeppelin while playing. Seeing the game or hearing music I’d listen to will always remind me of the other immediately. I’d come home after school and play for as long I’d be allowed and on weekends I’d end up playing for most of the day. I hardly remember the actual game now but I remember the feeling of thinking it was the best game I’d ever played and wanting to spend basically every waking moment playing it.
Funny how associations like that get made. When I discovered the game Little Big Adventure I was totally into J-Pop, and now whenever I listen to Ayumi Hamasaki I totally get in the mood to replay that game. C&C games, though... their soundtrack is just a blast all by itself. These games just contain their own audio triggers.
I still remember on an old friends PC we built at least 2 dozen tesla coils and then had a single allied teams solider stand in the middle of all of them. With a simple switch to change him to an enemy every single coil charges up at the same time lagging out the PC for 10+seconds before the death was complete.
Can remember as if it was last summer (11yo at the time): I have had a demo version, I mean it was the first three GDI-missions, played like crazy over several weeks. I was as proud as a King when I somehow managed the third mission in the third or fourth attempt after what felt like 8 hours of play time ... In this level I was SO desperate, the laser towers (it was probably just one) kicked me down and down again - Would like to experience it again to be swept away by a game like this! Until I had enough pocket money to buy the full version, it was a summer later, but the saving was worth it :-)
Man, you took me back 20+ years with this one. Sounds like we had similar childhoods. The part about the black cheat cloud especially. That thing freaked me out so much as a kid. I thought it was a sign my game disc was scratched lol. Also I spent all my time in church drawing battles between GDI and Nod with the same complete innocence you spoke of. Fond memories.
This video is really relatable to me, i still have tons of a4 sheets of paper that I'd drawn my own ideas for C&C levels on from when i was a kid haha, I was absolutely enthralled with the game back then too.
@@2kliksphilip Yes actually! it's been the backdrop of a lot of my dreams, and sometimes the focus of em, something about the atmosphere of C&C just stays with me, especially the first game, there's nothing like it. I actually had a nightmare about there being ra1 tesla coils in my bedroom one time as a kid lol
Talking about how you would draw up your own CnC games reminded me about how me and my friends would make our own Escape Velocity inspired space games with nothing but pencil and copy paper in middle school. Our vivid imaginations, lit by the spark of a some game dev's creativity, would keep us entertained for hours. I have so many strong emotional and nostalgic attachments to games from the 90s and early 00's, so this video resonated very strongly with me.
I liked your description of your initial reaction to seeing the game. For me it was exactly the same when I first saw Age of Empires, also around age 7 or 8 and it continues to exercise a huge influence on my imagination to this day. Great video.
I first played CnC when I was about 7 years old on PS1 demo disc. I was so amazed by this game, but I could not grasp how to control the game. Things like clicking and dragging to select multiple units were so alien to me. I was so frustrated by this as I have read about the game in the magazine and how cool it is supposed to be. THEN one night miracle happened - I had a dream about the game and I was able to play and control everything in the dream how I should, its like RTS gods wanted to explain it to me. There were slight differences in the dream - sell/repair would work on units as well and click and drag would also select building and not just units. To this day this os one of the most WTF moments to me.
The first C&C had the feeling of a real war and I loved it. You'd start off as GDI, they'd hand you a commando and a battalion of humvees and foot soldiers. Or you'd start off as NOD and they'd give you 2 guys with sticks and a motorcycle. You could feel the military budget and geopolitics behind it just off that fact alone. The differences in unit composition and tactics added a lot too, especially since games like warcraft only really had 1 faction with different flavors. I wish they still made good C&C games but RA3 and C&C4 was the final nail in the coffin of the rts genre. At least there's a mountain of great games in the series to play through.
I have exactly the same strong memories about the samsite and the cutscenes :) I am a few years older then you are but it still made exactly the same impact. So great to hear. Tbh, c&c shares the rostrum with dune2 for me, because that was truly the first one I played. But I too, indeed, cant merely look at these games through the eyes of a 38y.o. there is always this childhood filter colouring everything in with wonder and excitement
I remember playing the MMORPG Tibia for the first time, in 2006. I didn't even had internet before that year and I didn't like RPGs, since it was hard to me to understand them in English. I was so amazed by the concept: a whole world to explore, new creatures to understand, new itens to get, a whole lore to be unrevealed. On top of that, I could find some friends on the same world, after days apart, just to hang out. It was so real. I loved to play that game, even though it costs me many hours and I was soo bad at that, I simply played it wrong. I until today still go from game to game, looking for that feeling that will never happen anymore.
@@ragingjaguarknight86 Oh, absolutely. There is probably nothing official C&C 1 related that I didn't play. The name "funpark" comes from a command-line parameter that was needed to unlock missions in the original game, but in the fan-made v1.06 patch, they are instead conveniently accessible in the covert operations' "New Missions" menu. On the Remaster you have to click the bolts on the corners of the main menu to unlock them. I don't think those missions exist on the Playstation version, though.
Well said and well put. I was a freshman in college when I was first introduced to this game, and many many LAN battles took place late into the night in our dorm. The message is as true today as it was then. We are going to have to act, if we want to live in a different world.
I first got C&C on the Sega Saturn, and how I used to play Red Alert multiplayer on friends playstations linked up. Hours and hours of hearing "unit ready" before a massive tank rush would take us both back to square one again. I remember seeing the PC version on a gaming tv program and knew instantly this game was going to be a big part of my life.
Speaking of smells triggering old memories there's this specific febreeze Christmas air freshener that my mum used to always spray around the house when I was around 10-11. Sends me straight back to the days of playing the new games I'd get for Christmas.
