Command & Conquer (1995)

Command & Conquer (popularly known as Tiberian Dawn) was the first Command and Conquer game, and the starting point of the Tiberium universe. Developed by Westwood Studios in 1995, Tiberian Dawn takes place when a strange crystalline substance called Tiberium starts appearing on Earth. While the Global Defense Initiative attempts to control the situation, a faction called the Brotherhood of Nod rises and attempts to destroy GDI and embrace the "Tiberium Age".

Tiberian Dawn portrayed the events known as the First Tiberium War.

Plot
Tiberian Dawn is set in the late 1990s after a meteorite crashed on the Tiber River, Italy, bringing a mysterious but extremely valuable substance, Tiberium. An ancient secret society, the Brotherhood of Nod, somehow acquired the technology to exploit Tiberium's potential ahead of the mainstream scientific community. Led by a messianic leader known only as Kane (played by Joseph D. Kucan), Nod eventually came to control almost half of the world's Tiberium. Using the immense wealth and power gained from Tiberium, the terrorist organization began to spread its influence around the globe, especially among the disenfranchised people of the Third World. In response to Nod's growing influence and Nod terrorist attacks, the United Nations Security Council tasked a recently-formed global taskforce, the Global Defence Initiative, with destroying the Brotherhood.

Endings
The Nod campaign ends with Nod hijacking a GDI Ion Cannon and the commander choosing one of four world landmarks (Eiffel Tower, the White House, Brandenburg Gate, or Big Ben) to be vapourized by the Ion Cannon strike, dealing a crippling blow to GDI's image and capability.

The GDI campaign wins with the storming of the main Nod compound in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and the destruction of the Temple of Nod. The commander has the choice of whether to use the Ion Cannon or not.

Development
The original concept of the Command & Conquer fiction was created by Brett Sperry, Eydie Laramore and Joseph Bostic. Like its predecessor Dune II, Command & Conquer was originally intended to be a high fantasy game featuring wizards and warriors. However, due to the political climate of the early 1990s, and the events of the Gulf War in particular, the developers felt that a contemporary war environment would be more accessible. According to Westwood co-founder Louis Castle: "War was in the news and the threat of terrorism was on everyone's mind. That definitely had an effect on the fictional world of C&C, though a parallel universe was created to avoid dealing with the sobering issues of a real war. "We wanted to make it a contemporary war for a contemporary world, with contemporary politics. At the time, Brett Sperry had said that it seemed to him that the next wars won't be fought nation-to-nation, but fought between Western society and a kind of anarchistic terror organization that doesn't have a centralized government. It turned out to be very prophetic". In an interview, Kane's actor Joseph D. Kucan mentioned that the Brotherhood of Nod faction was an invention of Eydie Laramore in particular, with the two of them having extensively discussed biblical metaphor and imaged backstory.

The Tiberium substance was introduced to replace the spice from Dune II as the mined resource for building and expanding, with Louis Castle stating: "It solved one of the fundamental problems we had with making an RTS, which was that we wanted to have a central resource that everybody was fighting over. Dune has spice, which made perfect sense - and it was also used when we came to the idea of Tiberium. It became the anchor of the C&C universe because people were arguing over a limited resource that represented wealth and power". The original concept of Tiberium was inspired by the 1957 B-movie "The Monolith Monsters".

Expansion Packs
There was a single expansion pack released, the Covert Operations. It only focused on adding new missions, but other than that, no new content was made.

Released as freeware
To mark the 12th anniversary of Command and Conquer, EA has released Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn for Windows as freeware. The game can be downloaded as a zip file from EA's website.

Fan projects
The unofficial 1.06 patch adds high screen resolution, numerous bug-fixes and a snow theatre to C&C95.

There is also a Tiberian Dawn mod for OpenRA that uses the original game graphics, but is rebalanced and optimised for multiplayer matches.