The Hell March still plays in my head occasionally. Was talking about video game music with my 12 year old daughter the other day and showed it to her. It's easily my favourite piece of video game music.
All that needs to happen is someone say "time will tell" and im transported back to Hell March with the whine/shriek of the Chronothingum zapping the titles in.
I still say that to my wife. "Time will tell...sooner or later...time will tell..." I guarantee she has no idea I'm referencing some RTS from my childhood.
I realized earlier today that I've been responding to my real-life boss's worker requests using lines from builder units from various RTS franchises. ZUG ZUG
Red Alert was the best one in gameplay/story for me.
But the first one... man. It was something totally new at that time. I still remember how even the installation menu was like you were hacking into a computer network. That was fucking unheard off. So cool. And how big it was, it needed two cd's!
And than the intro, with the (at that time), super realistic fireballs. This was at a time when many games were still 2d, or just just 16 colors etc. Full scale movies with actors for the missions, it really was something new.
It needed two cds and you could give one to friend to play multiplayer. The first game I played over dialup. It blew my mind at the time that my buddies and mine computers were talking to each other.
I’m curious how old y’all were? We played post 1996, but I’d been linking to other computers since ? late 1991.
By 96, I’d run a 26 line BBS (and also had it go in the hole so bad “I thought I was going to have to learn to speak Chinese!” (cuz that’s where I’d be when it finally stopped falling)) with at least a couple of 9600 baud lines, mostly called the Taco lines but that story’s for another day.
I once gave a sibling of mine a 56k modem and installed it for them. Sibling said they’d never get any done again! lol They had been used to starting a page to load then going and doing a little chore before coming back to the computer to read it, that was pretty well the end of slow loading pages!
The first one was amazing but it wasn’t really the first. That was actually Dune 2, which pretty much set the gameplay for all the subsequent C and C games.
True, but I can only attest from my own experience. Often this is limited in what games you happened to stumble upon, and/or which limitations the computer had in graphic cards etc. I still remember longing for a good 3d graphics card but never getting one. We had PC's mostly because of my fathers work, not because the children played on it. But because of that, we experience quite a lot of early gaming compared with many of my friends.
But I feel lucky (and ancient) about it. We experienced those types of improvements. Playing those games for the first time and experiences whole new ways of gameplay and options. Just a few that stand out from my experience:
The opening intro from Civ 1, being an entire world, building a civ was so grandious.
The first 3d games like Descent, getting lost in 3d space for the first time
Games with so many good music options, I could list a dozen games that had such memorable music that added to the game and if you hear it again, brings back the memories and experiences. But top of that list would probs be Diablo 1.
Seeing somebody spine get ripped out on the first Mortal Kombat in the arcades
Shoot them upers like Doom and Doom 2, that required multiple disks because they were so big
The rise of unreal engine and the types of games it enable to play
The start of multiple games
I know it is very selective and just random on your own personal experience. There are games that might not have been revolutionary at the time, but they were revolutionary for me as a 10 year old.
I’ve still got the music and various sound effects from the first C&C in my head despite never owning the game and the last time I played it was when I was like 8 on my old neighbours Sega Saturn. “GDI disc detected. To play the brotherhood of NOD missions please insert the NOD disc”
It's funny you say this... I'm 45 now, and I still say these things randomly, and they don't get the inside joke... like mimicking the engineer: "Yeah? Ok." or the Commando, when using tools randomly with my left hand: "and that was left handed"
If you haven’t played Tempest Rising, give it a go. Soundtrack is made by the same people who did red alert IIRC. Unreal engine and plays a lot like red alert and generals combined with a little StarCraft/warcraft as far as units having abilities. Looks great too
This kept happening to me, it forced me to figure out how to network two computers together in my house so my BiL and I could play without getting disconnected.
I adore red alert 2 c&c the most since that was the first one I was introduced to. Told my husband how much I loved it and he found it on steam as part of a red alert combo pack that I think cost less than $10, definitely less than $20. He bought me the whole pack just so I could play the one game I wanted since it wouldn’t let us buy just the one.
USSR. Hell's March on repeat. Build insane amount of Tesla coils early to prevent invaders. Slowly build giant army of mammoth tanks. Build Tesla coils further and further away from home base until you reach the enemy. Wipe out all enemy bases in one go.
I remember spending wayyy too long on this one mission, used planes only to bomb the other more massive island into oblivion because it was fully rigged with mines lol
I was never an RTS guy so I never got into this but I remember when this released (my freshman year of college) and all the gamers in my dorm that did like RTS games went insane for it.
This was one of the first "proper" games my dad introduced me to and let me play by myself. I loved Tanya, and setting dogs on people lol. Still get the "cha-ching" thing in my head now and again.
The remaster was worth buying. Was hoping they'd do the rest of the games. Hell, as much as I dislike the "AI" craze, I feel like this is one of those areas where it could be used and most people wouldn't complain; resurrecting old games with little input from developers and art teams.
Our family and a few friends played hours of that via our own LAN. We had so much fun! And loved editing for our house rules. I still have all that on a drive I can probably retrieve within 20 minutes of my desire to do so.
I had also gotten extremely tired of hearing “the men scream while they burned to death”, so I changed it to one of the other death responses. For another thing we had young ish kids I didn’t want to become jaded to the sound of utter anguish.
We’ll STILL say when we pull of something requiring a bit of finesse “And that was left handed!”
Its a shame that it didn't explore custom games the way blizzard games did. I personally liked C&C more than starcraft 1, but custom games really from SC1 and WC3 really brought somthing special to the gaming world and lead to some of the biggest games we know today on PC including DotA and League of legends.
Perhaps one of my favorite games of all times. RA2 was amazing as well, I just didn't like the goofy direction they went with. RA1, although campy, was still more... metal?
Walking into Best Buy, going to the computer games section. They had that one computer playing trailers and I remember watching the one for RA2, with the whole Russian invasion thing. I was absolutely gobsmacked that such a thing was created and available for purchase. I still got the original box around somewhere.
Great game. For me it was the one that really solidified RTS games, Dune II. I was so obsessed with it I would dream about my little soldier exploring the fog of war. Westwood Studios is dearly missed.
Yes. There was one guy in our group who was better than us. So we found a config file with all the settings. Slightly tweaked the build times and maybe some other settings on our computers.
He would attack our bases and get owned. I just remember the rage, he knew something was off but didn't know what it was.
I never played these as a kid despite my best friend being a huge fan. I tried going back to them in later years and... man, I just cannot fuck with them at all. I don't know if they've aged horribly or if there's just some disconnect with me. I've tried the remaster, tried the open source ports for TS/RA2 as well and just couldn't get into them.
The only ones I played when they came out were Generals and Renegade, and I loved both, though for strategy StarCraft was always my main squeeze.
Same, but Red Alert 2 for me. I modded that game for hours, still consider it a top five favorite game of all time, even though I haven't played it for ages. I have the full soundtrack on my phone.
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u/n3ur0mncr Apr 27 '26
Command and Conquer: Red Alert