Command & Conquer: Red Alert is a real-time strategy computer gmaes in the Command & Conquer series, released by Westwood Studios in 1996. The events of Red Alert take place in an alternate history, where Allied Forces battle across Europe against an aggressive Soviet Union. It was initially available for PC (MS-DOS & Windows 95 versions included in one package), and was subsequently ported to PlayStation. The PlayStation version was subsequently re-released as a download for PSP.
gmaes Publisher(s): Virgin Interactive
gmaes Electronic Arts (Win)
gmaes Series: Command & Conquer
gmaes Version: 3.03 (Win) 2.00 (DOS)
gmaes Platform(s): MS-DOS, Windows, PlayStation, PSP
gmaes Release date: November 22, 1996 (DOS)
1998 (Windows)
May 15, 2008 (PSP)
gmaes Genre(s): Real-time strategy
gmaes Mode(s): Single-player, multiplayer
gmaes Rating(s): ELSPA: 15+ ESRB: T (Teen) OFLC: MA 15+
gmaes Media: 2x CD-ROM, Download
gmaes System requirements: Windows 95/98, 75 MHz Pentium Processor (120 MHz recommended), 8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended), 4x CD-ROM, 1 MB video card
Input methods: Keyboard, Mouse (PC)/Gamepad (PlayStation/PSP)
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Setting & story
Red Alert takes place in the 1950s (no exact dates are ever specified) of a parallel universe, inadvertently created by Albert Einstein in a failed attempt to prevent the Second World War.
Starting in the "real world" of 1946 at the Trinity site in New Mexico, America, the opening to Command & Conquer: Red Alert shows Albert Einstein as he prepares to travel backwards through time and space. After his "chronosphere" device is activated, he appears in Landsberg, Germany, in the year 1924, where he finds Adolf Hitler just after his release from Landsberg Prison. Following a brief conversation, Einstein shakes Hitler's hand, with this somehow eliminating the man's existence and returning Einstein to his time of origin.
With the threat of Nazi Germany successfully removed from history, the Soviet Union began to grow increasingly powerful under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Had Adolf Hitler risen to power, Nazi Germany would have emerged as a force standing in the way of Stalin's own ambitions of conquest. Instead, left unchecked, the Soviet Union proceeds by seizing lands from China and then begins invading Eastern Europe in order to achieve Joseph Stalin's vision of a Soviet Union stretching across the entire Eurasian landmass. In response, the nations of Europe form into the Alliance, and begin a grim guerrilla war against the invading Soviets. Over the course of the game's story, the Allies and Soviets fight a devastating conflict for control of the European mainland in what has turned to an alternate Second World War.
Characters
Allies
- Grand Marshal Günther von Esling, German officer, Commander-in-Chief of European forces, and apparent leader of the military governing Europe. Played by Arthur Roberts.
- General Nikos Stavros, Greek officer, Second-in-Command to General von Esling. Played by Barry Kramer.
- Tanya Adams, a special ops. commando. Played by Lynne Litteer.
- Professor Albert Einstein, German physicist. Played by John Milford.
- General Carville, USA officer. The player's commanding officer in Red Alert: Retaliation. Played by Barry Corbin.
Soviet
- Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Played by Eugene Dynarski.
- Nadia, Chief of the NKVD. Played by Andrea C. Robinson.
- General Gradenko, Russian commander. Played by Alan Terry.
- Marshal Georgi Kukov, commander of the Red Army. Played by Craig Cavanah.
- Kane, advisor to Stalin. Played by Joseph D. Kucan.
- General Topolov. High ranked Soviet military mastermind and mentor to the player in Red Alert: Retaliation. Played by Alan Charof.
Allied Campaign
The Soviets quickly overrun Allied front lines, storming past Germany, and overrunning Greece. However, the arrival of General Carville, and the quick actions of European forces quickly destroy the Soviet sarin bio-weapon facilities. They also destroy Soviet missile submarine prototypes. General Carville's forces, in addition to German Army and Greek Army forces under the command of General Stavros then push into Germany, while General Carville also invades via Siberia
The Allies then destroy Stalin's Iron Curtain project, while working on their own Chronosphere. Stalin tries to destroy the Allied Forces using ICBMs, but a defecting Soviet general, Major General Kosygin, reveals the Soviet plan and the Allies destroy them.
The Allies then use the Chronosphere in the assault on Moscow, and as retribution for the destruction of Greece, General Stavros kills Stalin personally.
gmaes play
Red Alert was praised for its user interface, which claimed to be more developed than the competing gmaes of its time. Players could queue commands, create unit groups that could be selected by a number key, and control numerous units at a time. The gmaes was known to be easy to control, simple to learn and responsive to users commands. It also featured two factions that had differing styles of play. Red Alert is also hailed as one of the first gmaes to feature competitive online play. The single player campaign also received high praise for its detailed story line and missions which often required the player to defeat the enemy with various sets of circumstances before continuing. The single player campaign was also complemented by live action cinematic sequences that are a feature of all Command and Conquer games since the original.
gmaes balancing
The game balance between the forces of the Allied and Soviet armies differed from other gmaes at its time. Like the 'rock-paper-scissors' balancing of modern gmaes , Red Alert required each player to use their side's strengths in order to compensate for their weaknesses. This stood in contrast to games such as Total Annihilation or Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, in which both sides had units with similar abilities and relied on outnumbering your opponent with more units of a certain kind.
The Soviets' vehicles have more hit points and firepower than Allied vehicles but are often slower moving. The Soviets also have superior defensive capabilities against both ground attacks (the devastating Tesla Coil) and air attacks (the long-ranged SAM). In online play and computer skirmish, they have access to two of the Allied side's most useful infantry: the Rocket Trooper and Tanya, a commando capable of easily killing infantry and destroying structures. They also have a wide selection of air units, and could deploy infantry by air through paratroops or by the Chinook transport helicopter (the latter only present in multiplayer). The Soviet "tank rush" was a popular strategy online, involving building many heavy tanks and overwhelming the opponent with sheer numbers.
The Allies' forces are generally cheaper, faster to build and are more agile. Their mine layers destroy enemy armor and their infantry can survive longer with good use of their Medic unit. The Allies possess an advantage in naval power thanks to the cruiser, which has the longest-ranged and most powerful surface-to-surface attack in the gmaes , and the destroyer, which is capable of adeptly taking on any type of unit type in the game, including submarines, air units and targets on land. The only offensive naval unit the Soviets have is the submarine, which cannot attack land-based targets or aircraft, and while normally invisible except when surfacing to attack, it can be detected by destroyers and gunboats. When heavily damaged it is not able to submerge. The Allies also possess several other tools, such as stealing enemy resources, hiding their own units and structures, or revealing the game map with satellite technology.
Expansion packs
Counterstrike & Aftermath (1997)
In 1997, two expansion packs for Red Alert were released for the PC, Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Counterstrike, and Command & Conquer: Red Alert: The Aftermath. The expansion packs were designed by Westwood Studios with the "apprenticeship" of Intelligent gmaes , a London based gmaes developer. Much of the development on multiplayer maps was undertaken by players from the Compuserve Red Alert ladder. New units, missions, maps, and music were included in the expansions.
Of particular note with the Counterstrike add-on is the addition of the secret Ant Missions titled "It came from Red Alert" to this add-on, where the player battles against giant red ants with Allied Forces and Soviet units. The Secret Ant Missions themselves can be accessed by pressing the SHIFT key and left-clicking simultaneously on the speaker in the top right corner of the main menu.
The Aftermath add-on, however, added many new units available in single and multi player modes. New Allied units include the Field Mechanic and the Chrono Tank. New Soviet units include the Missile Sub, the Shock Trooper, the M.A.D Tank and the Tesla Tank. Also, both sides receive the Demolition Truck. The add-on also includes hundreds of new maps as well as maps with huge map sizes.
A cited difficulty with the add-ons is that the Counterstrike and Aftermath missions are put into a single list in the gmaes menu, which makes it hard to see which missions are from which expansion. This issue is fixed with the Red Alert v3.03 (beta) patch, which separates the single "New Missions" list into two lists; one for each expansion.
Retaliation (1998)
On August 28, 1998, Westwood Studios released Red Alert Retaliation for the Sony PlayStation, this was a compilation of the two PC expansion packs. It even retained the secret Ant Missions.
It included 19 exclusive FMV (full-motion video) clips that were not in any of the PC expansion packs, which virtually had none as instead a text briefing was presented for the missions. The FMVs had a general (for both sides) telling you what your objectives were. The Allied General was General Carville who would later appear in Red Alert 2, the Soviet General known as General Topolov on the other hand is not seen afterwards.
The Retaliation videos are available for the PC Red Alert in the Red Alert modification Red Alert: The Lost Files. This modification adds the Retaliation videos to the Counterstrike and Aftermath missions. It requires Red Alert patch v3.03 or Red Alert patch v3.03 TFD (for the Red Alert version of the C&C The First Decade package).
Compatibility issues
Command & Conquer: Red Alert cannot be directly installed on either Windows XP or Windows Vista, with the notice "Red Alert can only be installed on Windows 95" appearing if an installation is attempted on either of the two operating systems. It however remains possible to manually install the game and its expansion packs, by running Red Alert's executables in Windows 95 compatibility mode, and by replacing the "Thipx32.dll" file which the gmaes installs within its main directory with an updated version. On the other hand, EA Games had released Command & Conquer: First Decade on two double layer DVDs which consists of all of the C&C games except Tiberium Wars released in 2007. This compilation of all C&C games is the easiest way to install even the original C&C Tiberian Dawn, which came out when Windows 95 was popular.
All versions of Red Alert, as well as the demo, are rated silver in wine.
Soundtrack
The game's original score was composed by Frank Klepacki and was voted the best video game soundtrack of 1996 by PC Gamer and Gameslice magazines. Among his most famous songs from the series is the theme of Red Alert, titled "Hell March", which accents the style of the game with adrenalized riffs of electric guitar, the sounds of marching feet, and synthesizers to a dramatic chant. It alone has enlisted itself as a staple in the Red Alert series, and a second version of Hell March was specifically created for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.
When playing the single-player campaign, a limited number of tracks are initially available, and more are unlocked as the player progresses through missions. When playing in a multiplayer or 'skirmish' game, however, all tracks are available from the start. More tracks were included in the Red Alert expansion packs: Counterstrike, The Aftermath and Retaliation.
An official soundtrack was released containing all 15 songs plus a hidden bonus track:
Half a minute after the end of track 15 plays an unnamed bonus track. Its melodramatic opening was used in the secret campaign, and the track itself is a tribute to Misirlou, using the rhythm of an earlier C&C music piece; "No Mercy". In the media player on Frank Klepacki's website, the track is titled "Surf No Mercy".
Connections to the Tiberian series
Westwood Studios designed Command & Conquer: Red Alert as the prequel to Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, and by proxy of the Tiberian series as a whole.
Throughout the Soviet's campaign, Kane is seen to make infrequent appearances as a mysterious counselor to Joseph Stalin, and the story subtly implies he may in fact have been instigating the world war between the Soviet Union and the Allied nations in order to further the Brotherhood of Nod's long-term goals. Indeed -- Nadia, one of Stalin's other closest advisers and evidently a member of the Brotherhood herself as early as the 1950s, instructs the player to "keep the peace" until Nod would "tire of the USSR in the early 1990s" upon the campaign's successful conclusion. Kane however then shoots her without warning, and proclaims to the player that he "[is] the future". Moreover, during the fifth cutscene of the Allied campaign, a news announcer reporting on the Allies' loss of Greece is suddenly heard stating that the United Nations are in the process of bringing about a unique military task force in order to prevent future globalized conflicts. This task force is heavily implied to have been "Special Operations Group Echo: Black Ops 9" -- the covert and international peace enforcing unit of the United Nations and the precursor of the Global Defense Initiative, one of the two main and iconic factions of the Tiberian series along with the Brotherhood of Nod.
A much debated theory intended to resolve the apparent time line error which came to exist between Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 is to consider Red Alert as the genesis of two parallel story lines. If the Soviet campaign were to be successfully completed in Red Alert, then the USSR would emerge as the dominant Eurasian power and Kane and the Brotherhood of Nod would subsequently take control of this new empire. Conversely, if the Allied campaign were to be completed in Red Alert, the Allies would emerge victorious and the time line would instead lead into the events of Red Alert 2. It should be noted however that this theory is in direct contradiction to the original Tiberian Dawn manual, which states that Nod is an African group in its origin, making no mention of the Soviet Union whatsoever. Additionally, a GDI FMV mission briefing sequence in Tiberian Dawn features a map with all of the GDI member states of the time, with one of them being Russia itself. Also, during Red Alert's Allied campaign a newscaster refers to the United Nations having approved "a unique military funding initiative", calling for the formation of a "global defense agency", both vociferous references to the international military alliance of identical naming in Tiberian Dawn, which nonetheless is not featured in Red Alert 2 in any form. A further apparent flaw of this theory is that if the Allies had been defeated by the Soviet Union in Red Alert, the future Group of Eight would not have existed to have first set up the Global Defense Initiative by becoming its primary founding nations.
According to former C&C designer Adam "Ishmael" Isgreen, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn follows the events of Red Alert's Allied campaign,while Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge take place in a parallel universe created by an attempt to alter the past in "Tiberian Incursion", which was known to be the working title of Westwood's cancelled sequel to Tiberian Sun: Firestorm. Isgreen also implied that Nikola Tesla was responsible for inadvertently having attracted the attention of the Scrin through his experiments, and thus for the arrival of Tiberium on Earth.
When the Command & Conquer: The First Decade compilation was released in February of 2006, Electronic Arts divided the Command & Conquer series into three distinct universes, with this apparently violating the storyline connections between Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn initially established by Westwood Studios. With the subsequent release of the title Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars in March 2007, however, Electronic Arts published a document pertaining to C&C 3's storyline in which a reference to Kane's appearances in the 1950s of Command & Conquer: Red Alert was made.
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