walk into the hand of nod

What C&C Renegade got right

Renegade is the Command & Conquer game people apologise for liking. They should not. Its multiplayer did something no strategy game and no shooter had done before, and very few have done since.

Posted 11 October 2026 · 3 min read

On paper Renegade looked like the thing it was accused of being: a famous strategy series turned into a corridor shooter, because shooters sold. The single-player campaign did not do much to argue otherwise. Havoc was a square-jawed commando with a line for every occasion, and the levels were the levels of 2002.

Then you played a match of C&C mode, and it turned out the shooter was the disguise.

A strategy game with nobody in charge

Each team had a base, and the base worked. The harvester drove out to the Tiberium field on its own and came home, and every time it did, everybody on the team got paid. The power plant kept the defences up. The barracks sold better infantry and the factory sold tanks. Nobody was commanding any of it. It was simply there, running, the way a base runs in the RTS — and you were one of the little men standing in it.

That meant every decision a commander would make was made instead by a crowd of individual soldiers, each with their own credits. Do I buy a tank now, or save for a better one? Do I go and kill their harvester, or defend ours? Should somebody — anybody — be repairing the power plant? Strategy happened, but it happened as a negotiation between twelve people with headsets, and that was far more interesting than one person clicking.

Buildings were places

The single best idea in the game was that buildings had insides. You could walk into the enemy’s barracks. In the middle of it was a console, the Master Control Terminal, and C4 on that console did more than any number of tank shells on the walls. A good tank push could take a base down from the outside over five minutes. One engineer who got through the door could do it in thirty seconds.

That single rule made every match two games at once: a loud vehicle war in the field, and a quiet game of infiltration around it. Everybody has a story about the one time they sneaked into the power plant while the whole enemy team was out fighting. Most people have the story from the other side, too.

Every building lost took something off the menu. Lose the power and everything cost double. Lose the factory and your team walked for the rest of the game. The economy was not a number in a corner — it was a building you could run into.

Why nobody quite remade it

The fans did — Renegade X is a lovingly faithful free remake, and the W3D Hub games carried the same rules into Red Alert and Tiberian Sun. But commercial games mostly split the idea in half. The FPS–RTS hybrids added a commander, which made the base somebody’s job. The big military shooters kept the vehicles and the scale and quietly dropped the economy, so no building ever falls because one man got past the door. What made Renegade itself was that the base was everyone’s and no one’s at the same time, and that is a strange thing to pitch in a meeting.

I have written a fuller list of games like Renegade, with what each one keeps and what it drops.

So I built one on graph paper

Frontline started as an experiment: what does the 2D game look like if you stand up inside it? The answer was Renegade, almost immediately. The bases were already there, already working. The harvester was already driving home. All it needed was a purchase terminal by the door and a master control terminal in the middle of every building.

It is much smaller than Renegade, it is single player for now — your squad and theirs are AI — and it runs in a browser tab with nothing to install. But the rules are the ones above: buy with what the harvester earns, lose what your buildings sold when they fall, prices double in the dark, and C4 on the MCT is the thing that counts. If you remember the feeling of standing inside the enemy’s power plant with a charge ticking, that is still the best thing in it.

Questions people actually ask

Read next