25 years of the N64: Command & Conquer
Command & Conquer didn't originate on Nintendo's fifth-generation console, but this late iteration of the real-time strategy classic was a wonderful addition to the 64's library.
On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
The real-time strategy genre owes a debt to 1995’s Command & Conquer. The Westwood-developed title helped to popularize RTS games in general — it sold over three million copies — while also setting the genre into a form that is still recognizable today. Command & Conquer predates other long-running series like Age of Empires and Starcraft by a couple of years, and even games like the original Warcraft, which released a year earlier, were influenced by Westwood’s own genre predecessor to Command & Conquer, Dune II. It’s Westwood all the way down, is what I’m saying, and Command & Conquer was their release that hit the big time, critically, commercially, and influentially.
So, what are we doing talking about this PC release that came out a full year before the Nintendo 64 arrived in North America? Command & Conquer actually received multiple conversions to consoles, with the first of those being on the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation. It was at first a Saturn exclusive, released in 1996, but the Playstation version came out the next year. Nintendo wouldn’t end up with a version of Command & Conquer on their consoles until 1999, but the wait was worth it. This one wasn’t just ported over by Westwood Studios, but was built by Looking Glass Studios — a developer known for franchises like Thief and System Shock, as well as the precursor to Irrational Games — to take advantage of the Nintendo 64’s controller and the console’s specific perks, like the Expansion Pak upgrade, and was published by Nintendo, to boot.
Sure, there are some facets of the N64 edition of Command & Conquer that lag behind other versions — the cutscenes are static now, instead of acted out videos, for instance, and the sound is a bit more compressed than on the PC edition — but otherwise, it’s really a stellar release. The voice acting remains, both in the missions themselves and in those static cutscenes. The Expansion Pak gives you a high resolution look at a game that easily makes up for the typical PC-to-console downgrade in visual quality, and the N64 edition marked C&C’s first step into 3D units and environments, too. The additional buttons of the N64 controller help ease the transition from keyboard and mouse to game pad, which is no small thing in an RTS. Each of the four C buttons, for instance, can be used to hotkey different groups of units, which can be selected by just pressing that button again, and then ordering them around like usual. It all feels very natural, or, at least, it can feel natural once you’ve played around with the systems a little bit and wrapped your head around what you’re supposed to be doing.
It was also just a wonderful thing to exist at a time before the home computer was necessarily a ubiquitous thing. Back in 1995, my family either didn’t have a computer or the only one there was my mother’s work computer — sorry, I can’t remember where on the time frame my mom working from home was, but there was no material difference, as far as my having access to a PC goes, between her working remotely or in an office at that point in time. A console port of a popular PC game was the only way I would be able to experience that game at that junction, so while I had to wait until I was in junior high to actually play Command & Conquer, it was worth that wait. I would eventually be able to play the PC version of the game as well while I was still living at home — I still have that same PC copy, even — but I didn’t have any real preference between the two versions. The Nintendo 64 one truly kicked ass to that degree.
There really wasn’t anything egregiously wrong with the Saturn and Playstation versions, either, but those feel more like what they are — mostly successful console ports of a PC game — than the N64 edition, which was a bit more built from the ground up, both visually and in terms of the actual game. There were N64-exclusive missions, as well as the inclusion of some omissions from previous console versions, such as the ability to save mid-mission. And graphically, sure, it took a bit of a hit without the Expansion Pak, but that was a $30 upgrade that benefited 60-something games on the system, and sold in bundles with popular titles like Donkey Kong 64, too: it wasn’t particularly difficult to end up playing the superior version of the N64 version of Command & Conquer, is what I’m getting at.
Here’s the setup for Command & Conquer: you are playing in a fictionalized version of the world where, thanks to a meteor strike, there is a newfound resource called Tiberium to harvest. If “Tiberium Wars” sounds familiar, it’s because that was the working title of Command & Conquer, and then eventually a subtitle for this release, too. You can play as either the Global Defense Initiative (the GDI), or the Brotherhood of Nod in the titular Tiberium war: the GDI is basically a United Nations-funded military organization put together for the express purpose of dealing with international terrorist threats, while the Brotherhood of Nod is… well, in this C&C game, anyway, is mostly a militarized cult with access to some really terrifying weapons and an equally terrifying leader, Kane. You haven’t experienced the game in full unless you’ve played both campaigns, as the story is not only different depending on which side you’ve decided to enlist with, but the units and how you are going to play changes, too.
The GDI features more military-style heavy-hitting units — elite attack helicopters, massive tanks, air support you can call in to bomb buildings or enemy units, a satellite hookup that lets you shoot a giant laser from space — while the forces of Nod are a little less stuck in convention and cutting-edge military research. They have more of a shock trooper thing going on, and are built for speed and infiltration. So, smaller tanks, more of an emphasis on fast-moving vehicles, and some darker options to choose from, like flamethrower units or flamethrower tanks. The flamethrowers are dangerous, not just for those with one pointed at them, but for any soldiers around those units, too: when someone wielding a flamethrower goes down, they can take down everyone around them in a burst of flames.
With the GDI, you can build up a smaller force of units and get by, assuming you build the hardest-hitting ones. You can do a whole lot of damage with a small group of mammoth tanks, for instance, since they can both take and inflict a pounding. You don’t have that luxury with Nod, though: you’ll have to do things like build small artillery units that can’t take a hit, but can sure deliver one, often using them as a distraction in one area so you can swiftly move in with your infiltration units elsewhere and start taking out key GDI buildings. Or, capturing them for yourself with an engineer, so that you, as Nod, can suddenly start producing your own mammoth tanks or what have you.
In some stages, you have a set amount of cash to work with, or just the units you’re given at the start of the level. In others, you’ll be building up an entire base from scratch, and bringing in additional funds to help you and your forces continue to grow. Tiberium is collected and refined by a special truck and factory, and you can then use money earned from this harvesting of the resource to build up your forces. There’s a whole section of the GDI story where funding from the UN is cut off, so you have to make your way through those missions with a bunch of busted-ass vehicles and buildings in need of repair, with your only source of cash coming from the Tiberium you can harvest — and it’s often heavily guarded, by Nod forces in much better shape than the GDI is.
It’s impressive how compelling the voice work is considering there is just one trained actor in the whole endeavor, with the rest of the work being done by Westwood’s own employees, but it’s a credit to the writing here, too. It all feels real, you know? Not like the goofy (but enjoyable) dialogue you would read in another military game like Jungle Strike. It helps sell the missions you’re about to partake in, and the fact that you get to choose your path throughout the game — you’re often given the choice between multiple areas of conflict during a given mission, which means a different map and scenario to work through — helps give you plenty of reasons to replay and experience it more than once, too. You can have two active saves for each faction, as well, so you’re not stuck with playing all the way through the GDI campaign before giving Nod a shot, or vice versa, either.
Of course, there is goofy dialogue here, too, it’s just in the missions themselves. If you’ve played Command & Conquer, then surely, I am about to get “I’ve got a present for ya!” and the boastful sound of “That was left-handed” stuck in your head for the rest of the day, just by typing them out.
The sound is compressed on the N64 to make sure there was room for all of the graphical bits and saving-to-the-cartridge, as mentioned, but the music is still just so, so good even in this lesser form. It’s incredibly 1990s, in the way that the various wrestling games like WCW vs. nWo Revenge or WrestleMania 2000 are incredibly 1990s, but it works so well. I’ve embedded one particular ear worm below, but that video leads to the entire soundtrack as well.
It’s been 26 years since Command & Conquer, and 22 since its release on the Nintendo 64, but the game still holds up to this day: it’s pretty easy to see why it was so significant for real-time strategy back in the day, just like it’s easy to see why it made sense to take the original game and give it a Nintendo 64-flavored update four years after the original release, even though, at that point, Command & Conquer was already a few years into its Red Alert phase. The “when” of playing the original Command & Conquer is a lot less important than the “what” of it, since the game just flat-out kicks ass regardless of the context of the first of those. There was certainly disagreement with this sentiment back in 1999 from some reviewers, because the RTS genre had made some additional strides since 1995 beyond what Looking Glass Studios incorporated into their version of C&C, but considering it’s all this time later and the game is still a lot of fun to play, you can imagine how much stock I put into the idea that this 1999 release should be criticized overly much because other games came out after 1995.
By May of 1999, when the N64 version of Command & Conquer released, the fifth-generation console war had already been decided: the Playstation had won handily, with the only remaining question being how much Sony was going to win by, and Sega, which had it far worse than Nintendo at this time, was months away from debuting their sixth-generation console and the successor to the Saturn, the Dreamcast, in North America. Still, releases like Command & Conquer — especially when played with the Expansion Pak — helped to show that there was certainly life yet in what was looking like, at that point, the last home console that would utilize cartridges. It remains loads of fun to this day, and can be played easily without having to make the kind of adjustments and tweaks to your computer that often comes with attempting to load up a game from decades ago, too. If you’re into RTS games at all, and haven’t experienced Command & Conquer, well, it is for all intents and purposes the progenitor RTS: you’d probably like it! The N64 edition of this PC classic is no exception to that idea.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.
Very nice article. I stumbled upon it while doing some research for my own C&C review. I had actually forgotten about the N64 version, but now I kind of want to give it a go.