Looking back on the real-time strategy boom of the late 90s, it's unsurprising that modern audiences tend to celebrate Age of Empires, Starcraft and Warcraft. Beyond being great games, these titles also told stories that feel unproblematic. They are set in either the distant past, the distant future or in the distant recesses of our minds. The Command & Conquer series, however, played with a parallel version of the real world heavily influenced by post-Cold War international relations. In 1999 Westwood Studios took that plausible real-world setting further with Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Set in 2030, Tiberian Sun asks two difficult but important questions: are we better off if the "good guys" win? And, is this version of Earth, on the verge of ecological disaster, even worth fighting over? These questions, like the game's FMV sequences, could easily be laughed off by players in the halcyon days of the 1990s. Players in 2019, however, must wonder if Tiberian Sun represents a schlocky relic of a bygone era or a prescient prediction of an impending reality.
The first Command & Conquer, released in 1995, didn't just reflect post-Cold War international relations, it was enthusiastic about them. Although you could play through the campaign as either the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) or the Brotherhood of Nod, only the GDI victory was considered canon. And what kind of message did the GDI victory impart on players in the mid-90s? A Western led, United Nations-sanctioned multilateral force using superior technology destroys an anachro-terrorist cult led by a charismatic madman based in the Third World in order to secure control over precious energy resources. The game might as well have been called The Gulf War, but with alien crystals. Or, with a more succinct 90s twist, The Gulf War: Part Deux.
All kidding aside, there's a real earnestness to the depiction of the world in Command & Conquer. Coming out of the Cold War, GDI represents a real hope held by many in the West in the 1990s for a return to the old idea of collective security first explored by the League of Nations in the Interwar Period. What if international peacekeepers had the power to actually maintain peace and spread freedom? What if dictators like Saddam Hussein, or his fictional stand-in Kane, could be swiftly dealt with through cooperation rather than the grandstanding, acrimonious and often pointless politics of the UN Security Council? You could rightly argue this sort of idea represents nothing more than a neoliberal dream, best consigned to the waste bin of history. But in a world not yet burdened by the War on Terror or the Iraq War, such dreams were seen by many as not only worthwhile, but desirable.