Sure, theres a touch of Julius Caesars veni, vidi, vici in there.
The team was, quite frankly, surprised by how much fun that formula had turned out to be.
And thats when we said, Well, we have to find something else.
That just wont fly.
At the time, Apple was breaking new ground in desktop navigation.
Look at this, hed say.
Look how I just drag-select files.
Look where I drop them, it knows what to do.
Once we did that, we thought, Well, why do we even need an order button?
You know what to do by what you clicked on, Bostic says.
Context-sensitive clicking made such a huge difference to gameplay.
Hats off to Apple in the early 90s, to figure that out.
We were not ashamed to copy a good idea when we saw it.
The team looked around themselves for inspiration when it came to C&Cs setting, too.
The average person might not even care, but everyone knows what a tank is.
Everyone knows what an aeroplane is.
Its in the forefront of peoples minds because its on the news.
Lets make it reality-based, but not handcuffed to reality, says Bostic of the teams thinking.
Lets stretch beyond the boundaries of physics a little bit here and there to make it more fun.
If you jump into a completely science fiction world where nothing is recognisable, people tend to get lost.
It keeps the player wanting to venture out from this little bubble of defence, Bostic says.
In retrospect, Bostic considers Tiberium the secret sauce of Command & Conquer.
We needed that, he says.
It breaks the staticness of the game.
There was no way we could have C&C without resources.
Wed all play around the office, Bostic says.
Our mantra was that there should be enough spinning plates that its really hard to keep them all going.
You have to prioritise where you want to put your focus.
The legacy of that mantra is clear to see in todays esports scene.
We needed someone who was over-the-top in his nefariousness and Bond villain-esque, Bostic says.
She was obsessed with ancient conspiracy theories and secret organisations, Bostic says.
Theres a legend of somebody who can never die, the Wandering Jew, who lives throughout history.
Why dont we call this guy Kane?, Laramore suggested.
Maybe he goes back that far.
Maybe hes never died and has stayed behind the scenes, low profile but pulling strings.
Kane was brought to extremely large life by the director and actor Joe Kucan.
He used to direct local amateur theatre, Bostic says.
Thats why we hired him to direct and cast the FMV videos we were doing.
But sometimes he couldnt find the right people.
In some of the videos, Im in the background wearing a hat, Bostic says.
But Westwood didnt know in the beginning that they were making cheese.
I thought it was really cool, Bostic says.
I didnt know any better back then.
The flaw and the charm was that we didnt know what we were doing.
We cheesed it together, and I think its that cheese that gives C&C FMVs their charm.
If we were trying to make it cheesy, it probably wouldnt have worked.
Thats just how it fell out.
We really cranked it out pretty fast, Bostic says.
I think it was nine months between the release of C&C and the release ofRed Alert.
Thats crazy talk these days.
His world isnt that of international esports championships or greenscreened Hollywood studios.
Thats what a computer games great at being able to answer.
