Happy birthday, Command & Conquer & Geforce! (PCGH Retro August 31)

…1995: Strategy games are sluggish. They usually run in rounds and give the player unlimited time for each move; The tactical possibilities are correspondingly complex, which makes most hex field strategy titles difficult to access tests of patience. A few years ago, a Westwood classic called Dune 2 proved that there is another way: As in most strategy games, the player controls events with the mouse from a bird’s eye view, builds bases, recruits troops and sends them into battle – yes in Dune 2 everything happened in real time, friendly and enemy units acted simultaneously, there were no breaks. Dune 2 combined the strategic depth of a classic military simulation with the frantic pace of an action game – thereby inventing the real-time strategy genre.

However, this game principle is only perfected with another Westwood game: Command & Conquer – The Tiberium Conflict (Tiberian Dawn), which comes out on August 31, 1995 for DOS. The controls are more comfortable than in Dune 2, the graphics are refined, the differences between the parties GDI and Nod increase the tactical variety and the captivating story about the extraterrestrial mineral Tiberium is told in elaborately filmed cutscenes – C&C does everything right and becomes one huge success that finally established the real-time genre and resulted in a flood of imitators. Command & Conquer will receive an add-on and two direct sequels in the following years, with further offshoots such as Red Alert, the C&C series will have a total of nine games by 2009, including a shooter; C&C 4, the conclusion of the Tiberium saga, was released in 2010. But despite all the innovations, the indestructible gameplay of the original still lives on. Happy birthday, Command & Conquer! Also read our special on the legendary game series and the article on the occasion of the 20th birthday of the C&C developers Westwood Studios.

… 1999: It is not the first graphics chip with the hardware TnL technology integrated in DirectX 7, which will be presented on August 31st, this honor was due to S3’s Savage 2000 the day before intended and helps the chip in addition to its 4×1 pipeline configuration to peak performance in customized titles. With the Geforce 256, Nvidia was able to conquer the performance crown in the 3D area and for the first time clearly distanced both 3dfx and Ati – even if the lead below 32-bit color depth was only meager due to the narrow memory bandwidth of the 128-bit wide SDR interface and the TnL unit could initially only be used profitably in isolated DirectX titles and id Software’s Q3 engine. Take a look at our gallery of the most important Nvidia graphics cards for the Geforce 256!