the itch

Nothing ever replaced Command & Conquer, and I have been looking for twenty years

I have bought a lot of real-time strategy games on the strength of a review saying it was “a return to the classics”. None of them were. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out what I was actually missing.

Posted 26 August 2026 · 5 min read

I was ten when I first played Command & Conquer. I did not understand most of it. I did not know what tiberium was for, I put my refinery somewhere idiotic, and I lost repeatedly to an AI that was, in retrospect, barely trying. I have never enjoyed a game more, before or since.

What I did not know then, and would not work out for another two decades, is that I was playing a game that was almost perfectly shaped and about to become very hard to find.

The thing that was actually good

For years I thought I missed the aesthetics — the FMV cutscenes with actors who were clearly enjoying themselves, Frank Klepacki’s soundtrack, the grainy green typeface. And I do. But that is not the load-bearing part, because there are games that copy all of that and they still do not do it.

What I actually missed was the shape of a match.

That is a genuinely excellent piece of design, and it is not obvious. It is a game about logistics that never once mentions logistics. You are not managing supply chains; you are watching a harvester drive somewhere dangerous and hoping it comes back. Every abstract economic decision in the game has been turned into a physical object moving across a map you can see.

What happened to it

The genre did not die. It split, and both halves went somewhere I could not follow.

One half went to esports. StarCraft, and then StarCraft II, are magnificent, and they raised the mechanical floor to a height that quietly excludes most people. When the skill being tested is partly how fast you can physically issue commands, a thirty-four-year-old with a job is not going to have a good time. I do not resent this — it produced some of the finest competitive play in any game. It is just not what I wanted.

The other half went long. Grand strategy and 4X games got extremely good, and they also got extremely large. A match became an evening, and then a campaign became a month. That is a wonderful thing to have available and it is the opposite of a game you can finish before bed.

And the middle — the thirty-five-minute base-builder with an economy you can explain in one sentence — turned out to be commercially awkward. Too slow for the competitive audience, too small for the strategy audience, and far too keyboard-and-mouse for mobile, where all the money went. So it mostly stopped being made by anyone with a budget.

The things that almost work

I want to be fair here, because there are good games doing this, and I have written a whole page listing them. OpenRA is a genuine gift — free, open source, and it fixes the controls without breaking the feeling. The 2020 Remastered Collection was made with obvious care by people who understood what they were handling. Tempest Rising is a real attempt at a successor by people who plainly love the same things. 8-Bit Armies is comfort food made by ex-Westwood staff.

But most of them are the original games again, or a knowing reconstruction of them. What I could not find was somebody making a new small one, on those bones, that was not a museum piece.

So I made one

Not because I thought I could do it better than Westwood — I plainly cannot — but because I wanted to find out whether the thing I loved was really in the mechanics, or whether I had just been ten years old at the right moment.

It is in the mechanics. I am fairly sure of that now, because I rebuilt them one at a time and each one turned out to be doing more work than I expected.

• The harvester is not an economy, it is a story. It goes somewhere, something might happen to it, and it comes back. The moment I had one driving across a map I could see, the map became a place.
• The power grid is the mechanic everyone forgets and it is the best one in the game. It means over-building punishes you, it means your buildings have a relationship with each other, and it means that bombing a power plant is a real strategy rather than a consolation prize. Two of my twelve missions are entirely about it.
• The sidebar — building from a menu rather than from a selected building — is why you can play the game while looking at the battle. It is quietly the reason the whole thing feels calm.

What I did not want to do was make a tribute act. A game that reproduces the grim khaki-and-green look of 1995 is a game competing directly with 1995, and 1995 has a soundtrack I cannot match. So mine looks like something else entirely: stickmen and tanks drawn in marker pen on graph paper, because that is the other place I was playing these games — in the back of an exercise book, badly, during double maths.

If you have the same itch

Go and play OpenRA. I mean that; it is free and it is the best answer for most people, and I would rather you had a good evening than a loyal one.

But if what you want is thirty minutes, right now, in the tab you already have open, with no launcher and no account and no patch — that is the specific hole I built TANKS for. It is free. There is nothing to buy. I made it because nobody else was going to make it for me.

Questions people actually ask

Read next