[MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: Command & Conquer. It's one of the most
iconic franchises in all of PC gaming. The original C&C is largely responsible
for the birth of realtime strategy games, while its sequel, Red Alert, is an
alternative universe classic of its very own. So perhaps it's no surprise that these
games became the latest candidates for a remaster. But for fans of
Westwood, C&C, and PC gaming, there are a lot of surprising
things about this story: the unlikely reunion of some legendary
developers with their old code, a wild search for missing tapes
full of joy and heartbreak, and a major publisher who tends to
attract a lot of community heat, including a council of fans in
the process of making this game. The moment this project was announced, I wanted Noclip to get a deeper
look at what went on. And with all of us stuck at
home, talking over video chat, it made sense to cast the
net as wide as possible. So not only did we talk to a handful of
the original developers at Petroglyph, but also the animation house in Malaysia
that worked on updating the graphics and the man who's been shepherding
this project from the beginning. But before we get into all that, let's
travel back in time a little bit. It's 1995. Clinton's in the White House. Coolio's on top of the charts,
and Command & Conquer is taking the world by storm. - So I originally got hired at Westwood
to run their online services, which was basically CompuServe,
Prodigy, America Online, you know, all of those, you know, those things
that don't really even exist anymore. I set up a bulletin board system so we could let people download patches,
and I was customer service. I did a whole bunch of other jobs. The fun thing about working at Westwood
back in the Command & Conquer days was the amount of input that everybody
had on the project. You know, we'd work on it all day, and then we
would play from like five or six o'clock in the evening to like
nine, ten o'clock. You know, you couldn't beat people off with a
stick. It was like, okay, one more game. Especially when the multiplayer
stuff came online, you know, we just, we were just all hanging out. I mean,
kind of hung out at work anyway. You were just hanging out with your
friends, enjoying, you know, being together and
working on stuff together. - Yeah. And for me, I was the senior
composer at Westwood studios. I was part of an audio team,
audio director at the time, Paul Mudra and lead sound designer,
Dwight Okahara. And the three of us had been working together since
I'd started there back in '90, '91, somewhere in there.
We had our respective roles and just worked really super well together.
When we started working on Command & Conquer, you know,
technology was shifting pretty rapidly at the time. And it got to the point where we
were going to be putting games on CD, which was the
big deal at the time 'cause CDs were typically just used
for audio, music, but then, you know, data came into play. And then the idea of
putting the games on disks, you know, where it was a new idea. So then with that was the idea with
streaming audio came with that. And so that was also one of the first
games that we did that utilized that technology. But you know, same
thing went for sound effects, and voiceovers, and videos,
and the whole thing. So it was just, it was like,
felt like the Wild West, you know, video game development,
because, you know, we were utilizing all of this new tech, and
everybody was excited about it, and we were excited to just be
creative with it and figure out how we can tell the story of this game,
you know, with all these new toys. - So gosh, yeah, I mean, I was 12
when I discovered it. It came out in the late summer of 1995. Leading up
to that there had been Doom 2, which many credit as kind of a first
kind of RTS game as, you know, we would know the genre today. Blizzard
had followed up with Warcraft 1. Wasn't as popular as, you know, Warcraft 2 and obviously the
rest of their games became. So they had kind of dabbled in it.
But when C&C came out in 1995, I think a lot of people credit it
with kind of popularizing the genre, kind of defining a lot of the moving
parts and the mechanics that the genre eventually became. I think what was really special about
Command & Conquer is that from the second you install the game,
it just pulls you into this world, this atmospheric world with this
crazy animated installation sequence, these full motion video cinematics
where there's these commanders talking to you and recruiting
you to their side, you know, these kind of branching
missions and objectives. And so I just loved it back
then. And then, you know, it really kind of, Warcraft 2 came out
a few months after that. You know, they did a lot of great things for
the genre. And then you had Red Alert, you know, a year after that.
And that started to push missions and all different things
and different examples of them. Then that really just, you know, then you have the genre really
taking off with Age of Empires, Total Annihilation, and StarCraft, and
everything happened thereafter. So it was really kind of that
first game that kind of defined what that RTS genre would be for
at least the next, you know, five to six years. DANNY: Command & Conquer's unique
blend of gameplay and theatrics propelled it into notoriety pretty much immediately.
And as the games pumped out sequels, they got the larger, the videos
more ridiculous, and the stars bigger. In the era of multimedia, Command & Conquer
was king. Soon after, in 1998, Westwood Studios was acquired by
Electronic Arts and as is so often the case with large corporations, it
eventually found itself caught up in a restructuring plan. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Back in 2003, there was a plan at EA to consolidate
all the different studios, all the development into a
central location. And for awhile, they were thinking that
that might be Las Vegas. The short story is that they decided
no, you know what? It makes sense. We're going to send everybody
down to EA LA ,and we're going to get a whole bunch
of people. We're going to get all those Westwood people,
we're going to bring them down, and they're going to work on
Command & Conquer 3 at EA LA. And it's going to be one
big family, you know. I'm sure that they assumed that
that was going to work out great, but we had a large group of
people say, you know what? I'd really prefer to stay here in
Las Vegas at the end of the day. Some handful of people went up to EA LA
and, they started working on Command & Conquer 3. And then I think they
got sucked into Lord of the Rings, the Lord of the rings RTS game instead. And so they never really got back
to Command & Conquer for a while. - I'm escaping to adult one place that
hasn't been corrupted by capitalism. - And at the same time, we had
a handful of people here: Joe Bostic, Mike Legg, and Steve Tall, who were all three programmers. All worked
on the Command & Conquer games. They decided, you know what,
let's start our own studio here. I bet we could get a gig with
somebody making a game, an RTS game, because RTS games at the
time were really hot. And then we just started working on
Star Wars and one game after another. It's been a really fun ride
the whole time. You know, I always wonder, wow, I wonder
what would have happened if I'd gone to EA LA or
Redwood shores. But I really enjoy what we've done at
the last 17 years at Petroglyph. DANNY: Petroglyph Games has 17
years of development behind them, creating games like Star Wars Empire at War,
Guardians of Graxia, and Grey Goo. During those years, EA were developing Command & Conquer
games out of their studio in Los Angeles. It was here that the young developer Jim
Vessella would rise through the ranks, working on games like Command &
Conquer 3, and Red Alert 3, and eventually becoming lead producer
on the expansion, Kane's Wrath. Jim would leave EA but come back some years later to work
out of their studio in the Bay area. At one time or another Petroglyph had
approached EA about doing work on a possible remake, but nothing
ever came of it. The stars hadn't aligned quite yet. To find the
source of this unlikely collaboration, we have to go back to EA's 2018
E3 press conference. - Security clearance verified.
Welcome, commander. The global defense initiative has
received intel of nuclear missile silos across the globe. And we need
your help securing them. - Command & Conquer Rivals, the
mobile version, was announced at EA Play that year. It had a bit of a strong reaction
from the community, let's say. I was talking to some of the
studio leadership, and they were trying to figure out, is there something we can do? We're hearing this feedback
from the community, you know, Jim, you've worked on Command &
Conquer for a long time. What do you think this means?
And I said, well, you know, I think the community really wants the
franchise to come back to PC. It's something that you hear
in the community. And they were like, well, you know, what are some
ways we could potentially do that? And they were throwing out ideas like
the remaster. And they're like, well, how do you approach that,
Jim? I'm like, well, I would have Petroglyph do it. I would go back to the original creators
and see if they wanted to do it. They're like, all right, why don't you
give them a call? And I was like, what, what do you mean? I'm
like, it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to go through like, business development, or legal, or
some? EA, it's big company. We don't just go randomly call some
studio. And they're like, no, just, just go do it. I'm like, okay.
And so I wrote up this kind of heartfelt email because I never actually
met the team at Petroglyph before. Working on the franchise all these years, I knew all their names, and
I'd heard all the stories, but I never actually worked with them
myself. I wrote their team, but the email that described my background,
and my love for the franchise, and, you know, a lot of the similar people
we know. And I said, hey, we're thinking about doing this.
What do you think? And they wrote back and said, you know,
this is music to our ears. Let's talk. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Yes sir, not a problem. - Vehicle reporting, sir. DANNY: There's a lot to talk about
when it comes to remastering a game like C&C, but we're going to focus
on five areas of development that I think are the most interesting: remastering the FMV video, how the team made
decisions over altering gameplay, Frank's work on remastering
all of the audio and music, how a team of 50 artists in Malaysia
remastered the graphics, and how the developers included a community of
diehard fans during this entire process. But first up, well, you
know, I'm a fan of video, so let's chat about the
missing tapes, shall we? - So you're the new addition
to the brotherhood. - So you know, we've been
engaged with the community super closely since the day we
kind of greenlit the project. And one of them tipped me off
to this old Westwood Betacam video archive stash
that had been around in EA LA for many years,
but it had kind of gotten lost. And then there was a rumor
that it all got thrown out when Victory Games was
shut down. And I reached out to the community manager,
who said, yeah, we sent it all to the dumpster.
And I almost cried. But I reached out to a colleague
of mine who works at EA LA still, and was working
there during that time. And she says that she actually
rescued all the tapes and put them into a storage
closet down at EA LA like five years ago.
And I'm like, oh my gosh. And this was in December of 2018.
So I booked a ticket. I flew down there like the
first thing after holiday break, like January 3rd or something,
met up with the facilities team. They unlocked this old storage closet,
and I went digging through there. And had I found it,
I found this giant shelf of old Betacam video
tapes from the Westwood days and, you know, spent an entire
afternoon sorting through all these tapes. And there were, there were hundreds of these Betacam tapes and some
stuff that was related to the C&Cs. And I was so excited cause
they looked all, I mean, they looked like the official, you know, things. And it turns out that
they were just the old, crappy, compressed stuff that had been copied
onto a video tape for backup. And I was just like, oh no. And I was so sad, and it kind
of cemented the fact that like, they just don't exist anywhere. - Set three, take one. - But did find, we found all this extra B-roll
footage from the shoots. So we got over like four hours of old
B-roll footage of them filming against a green screen and them
doing all the takes, that had never been seen before. And that stuff
was actually restored pretty well. And that's actually almost better quality
than some of the other stuff we have. And we've put all of that into the remastered
collections. We kind of edited it all, chopped it all up kind of
per mission and everything. And whenever you beat
a mission in the remaster, now you're gonna unlock
a piece of this content. You can kind of watch through the
filming of the scenes. But, you know, for the actual FMVs, we were kind of
back to the beginning at that point. And again, it was kind of the community
who said, hey, you know, we've dabbled in kind of up-resing some
of this stuff with like AI algorithms and things like that. Can we help out
in any way? And so Joe, who I mentioned, Joe kind
of loved this stuff as well. So he actually partnered
with the community. They were riffing on algorithms
and trying to, you know, fine tune the best way to get
the lighting better. And Joe kind of put together a
final algorithm that he used to essentially up-res all of the
FMVs. You know, there's hours of it. So you know, we were able to
increase the base resolution, we're able to increase the frame rate. And then because we have
Frank on our team, he was able to go back and do kind of an
audio touch up on everything. - We spent about two months
reviewing all the video and trying different methods
of up-resing it so that, you know, it was more acceptable
on a high res monitor. And during that process, I had a good number of
people approaching us, trying to audition for roles
in the videos because they thought we were going
to reshoot everything. - It is kind of remastered in
a sense to kind of the best that we think you could do with
the source footage that we had. We're able to use actually
console versions as a base 'cause it provided like an MPEG foundation,
which was a little bit better. It's been a fascinating journey. And
it's one of those things where we just never know where the
road is going to take us - As a reward for your service
to the people, I wish to promote you. DANNY: Despite all the work
that the team put in and the obvious improvements over the
original versions, there are already Steam reviews criticizing
the quality of the FMV. Back when I talked to Jim,
before the game's launch, he talked about something similar
during internal play tests at EA. Some players came away unimpressed while
others who remember the older versions a little bit better were
shocked by the improvement. - I can't tell you how POed that'll
make a lot of people around here. DANNY: Remasters sound like tricky business.
Most players want the game to feel like how they remembered it
but without all the inconveniences that so many older games carry. For C&C,
this meant a lot of work on interface, quality of life elements
like a multiplayer browser. But what happens when you encounter
bugs that shipped with the game, exploits that players use to
complete tough levels? I asked the team how they decided
when to change something and when to let it be. - Well, there were certainly
a lot of challenges. I mean, the first thing that we had to do was kind of
wrestle with what a remaster is versus a remake, the remaster
of course taking the original game and updating it too with new graphics
and maybe a new, a few new features here and there.
A remake is, hey, let's scrap it all. Let's start over. Let's re-envision
it as it would be made today. - The remaster was the thing that was on
the books that everybody had in mind. It's been kind of proven out that
remasters are working and that people are really enjoying going back and playing,
you know, the Age of Empires games, World of Warcraft type stuff. And when we started talking about the
project about what was it going to be and what could we do with it,
there was a lot of discussion about whether we
should make it 3D, and we should use the
Petroglyph RTS engine, which we've been working on
for like last 17 years, or should we try and update the
existing engine with all of its antiquities and flaws, you know? Because of course you go back and
look at that code, and it's a little stale these days, you know. And then of course
there was the UI too. When you go back and you play the
original game, it's pretty good. It still holds up, but it's not as convenient as
the new RTS games that are out there. And so it's a bit of a challenge.
It's a bit of a slog to use that UI. And we knew that we needed to do something
a little bit different and update that. We could have
made a few balance changes. We certainly had a lot of
opinions come in like, oh, hey, you should make this better.
You should make that better. But when you're doing a remaster, you can't make too many changes
because it's like jello, right? You poke it in one spot, it's going
to pop out on the other spot. And let's say we made a mammoth tanks
just a little more deadly, right? That could impact how the AI performs in a certain mission later on.
It might make that mission unplayable, or it might make it so that the AI can't
perform a certain task to advance the mission. We were running into all
those kinds of things. And so we basically stuck to the script as
much as we could, where we could. We did make some improvements
along the way though. You know, we integrated the Red Alert AI into the
Command & Conquer engine because they were basically,
there were so many similarities between the two that that
was possible. We made a few, few very minor changes to balance
in a couple of spots where it made sense to fix bugs that the
community had identified for us. You know, Joe was really good about
shepherding us through that process. And of course we were conferring
with the community council, the community council,
all the way too, and they helped us for quite a bit of that. - Moving out. [GUNFIRE] [SCREAMS] - Mission accomplished. - Yeah, well, I can tell you there's like a flashback moment, like
every other day or so around the studio, right. It's like, oh, I remember that.
Oh yeah, that was super annoying. You know, I mean, think about how
silly the harvesters were and you know, how the videos put together a story. And I have to admit it all did come
rushing back because when we went back, we were like, oh yeah, we forgot about
that. And oh yeah, that's, that was a problem. We should
do something about that. I think Joe was kind of
summarizing it best. He said, if it's a bug that we should have fixed but didn't, we need to look at that
very closely and figure out why we didn't fix that bug. And if we were releasing this game
today and we noticed that was an issue, would we fix it today? And
then we try and, I don't know, reconcile those two and determine a
course of action on whether we should or shouldn't make a change to the game.
You know, we're going through the code. We're noticing comments, you know, from the old programmers who work at
the new company, work for Petroglyph. And we're like, oh my gosh, I typed
this 23 years ago, you know? I put a comment, don't touch this
code under penalty of death, you know, come talk to me first. And so there's all these little snippets
of history within the code itself. - Building. - You know, by today's audio standards, like we would have been throwing audio
one-to-one against every single thing in the game. But, you know, there was things that were not
playing audio in the game. But like for example, like
vehicle engines, right? Like you don't hear vehicle
engine sounds, you just, you have the acknowledgement of
the guy's voice, you know, whatever the unit's voice is when you
move or, you know, tell them what to do. But you don't hear them, you
know, the engines constantly going, which is something that would be
more common in today's games. - Yes, sir? Acknowledged. - So I was just like, gosh, should I take some liberties here and
put that in? I'm like, no, I shouldn't. You know, because there's a certain, I think that the way that the audio
worked in those games was that things were allowed to stand out, right? You had
the voices which stood out to people You had the music which
stood out to people. Obviously the weapon sounds
stood out to people, and the signature structures and things like
that. And of course the HUD voice, you know, the EVA voices
and all of those things, those should still be allowed to stand
out the way they did those many years ago. I did, so I wrestled
with that for a while. And I came to the conclusion like, you
know what, this is the way it was. Let it be, you know? Let's
make what's there better, but let's not add things that are
unnecessary because there's a part of that charm that might go away if we do that.
That was one thing, and then of course one of the things we did was we
brought back the original voice of EVA, which was Kia Huntzinger. EVA: New construction options. Building. - She happens to live not that
far away from EA Redwood shores. So that was a great coincidence
there. And, and, you know, she still sounds exactly the same. EVA: Building. - She came in,
she was willing to do it. And for the remastered version, we have her exact voice reading
those exact same lines again, but just in much higher quality
now versus the padded closet, which we had recorded in back in 1995. One of the reasons C&C became an instant
classic is that it was a great game in almost every sense. DANNY: It was laying the foundations
for real time strategy game play. It looked fantastic, had cutscenes
with full motion video in them, and with a bit of work, you
could even play it online. But another massive feather in
Command & Conquer's cap was its terrific soundtrack. Legendary composer Frank Klepacki has been with Westwood
and Petroglyph this entire time. He joined Westwood early, composing
the music for Eye of the Beholder 2 and Dune 2 before moving onto C&C. He's been loyal to the Las Vegas group
ever since, working on Petroglyph's games for almost two decades. When
the remaster came along, Frank said he was delighted to have an
excuse to work on all the music again, having already planned a collaboration
with the video game band The Tiberian Sons. But on the original
C&C, Frank was the composer, not the sound designer.
So outside of remastering the music, cleaning up and
rerecording the FMV audio, he also had to worry about sound effects. - So I had to do a bit of research. I had
to, you know, get in my former audio colleagues' brains there and just kind of do a deep dive
into it and pay homage to that, and to their work and honor that work. Okay.
What did we have available back then? What were we actually using? You
know, what tools and what, you know, libraries and all of these things.
And so I researched that stuff. And fortunately, you know, I've kept
a lot of my own personal copies over the years of, you
know, I used to mirror my home studio with my work studio.
So I bought the same libraries. So I had my own license and I
bought the same audio hardware. So it had that mirrored in case I would
come up with an idea that I thought was cool and then bring it
into work or vice versa. And I was also able to locate the
original mixes of the majority of the music. There were some things I had
to recreate from scratch though. I think five themes, five songs actually, that I absolutely
could not find for the life of me. So with that in mind, I was like, alright,
well, I'm going to dust off those old, you know, synthesizers that I got. And I can't tell you how many hours and
even days that I spent in the office just auditioning sounds and instruments
because there's just too many of them to go through. So it's just like, is this it?
Nope, next. Is this it? Nope, next. Is this is it? Nope, next. Until I finally
would find that one instrument. Yes! This is the one. It's exactly it. Cool. Now let's go to the next track and
repeat the process. So it was a, it was very tedious and very detail
oriented, but, you know, I thought it was worth doing
for the sake of, you know, retaining the authenticity of everything.
Same thing with the sound effects. I went through every single sound in
the sound libraries that I had and made sure I found the exact sound
or the exact closest thing to it. And most of the time I would nail
it. There were a few things that I updated with the high fidelity
now exposing what quality was there. I wanted
things to be consistent. And when you're remastering
something in an audio context especially, the whole thing
is about consistency, balancing EQs and levels
and all that sort of thing. So I did that with all of the
sounds, and did it all with the music so that the entire collection of music
for that matter was remastered to that standard as well. So it
wasn't just from game to game, we're doing a collection
of games here. - (SPEAKING GERMAN) Mr. Hitler. - Yes, what's happening?
I have no time to stand around. - Yes. I understand. [ZAPPING SOUNDS] - And when it came down to actually
the German version of the game, we ran into some obstacles there
because back then they censored it. They had actually left things out, or cut
videos or edited them like completely different than what we had originally. And we were running into these
as we were going along and checking every video.
And I was just like, you realize that we're missing a
whole part of Stalin's speech here, or we're missing the whole part of Einstein finding Hitler and all of these
things, you know, and even like the sounds of soldiers dying was
removed and replaced with robots in the original. So we had to
redo that to keep it across the board. 'Cause we're, now we're in a different age
and that's allowed now to be, you know, the original version. So we tried to restore that as much
as possible while retaining the German dialogue and all of that. So
it was, it was a challenge to cut and edit and redo some
of those things to make it work. But we managed to pull that off.
And yeah, that was a very, very interesting audio journey there
with regard to the remasters. DANNY: While Frank worried about audio,
on the other side of the world, a team in Malaysia was doing the work
on remastering C&C's beloved sprites. Lemon Sky, an animation studio
working in both games and television, had somewhere between 50
artists working on this project. The time difference between Malaysia
and Nevada meant that the two studios basically didn't share any working hours. Perhaps this ended up being
a blessing, as Lemon Sky said they spent very little time in meetings,
instead posting updates directly to the game's build and checking in on feedback
and revisions the following morning via Slack and JIRA. And some of the team are even old
enough to remember playing the original. - So we're Lemon Sky.
So we're located in Malaysia. We're leading art and animation
studio in Southeast Asia. We're mostly doing CG animation
production work. We provide services for a game developer. - We started with the concept art, do the
concept art based on the legacy art, you know, because the
resolution is very, very small. We will add on details
for concept art, you know, but we were still based on the
legacy art for the colors. So if you see that there's three colors, then we
have to maintain the three colors. But we also add on the details on
top of that. So after that, then we will go to the process for 3D. - So in 3D we will match all the angles.
So in the sprite in legacy, we know that there's some distortion on every angle.
So what we do is we need to reanimate it. DANNY: So you did them in 3D. - Yeah. - But like you said, the camera angle is
like this weird oblique thing which distorts the distance on those
original sprites. So if you looked at that from a different angle, would it
look really strange? - Yes. - Mhm. Yeah, yeah. True. Yes. Sometimes you would need to manually
adjust model with different angles to get the right angle, looked familiar
with the light in legacy in that. - So at first we thought that we're gonna
rebuild everything by 3D and then reintegrate everything into new
engines. But, I mean, throughout the productions, we have decided to just reuse the same
method, so render the things by using sprite as well. So for the animations,
of course, when we're checking up, for the legacy stock image, a series of the JPEGs of
those animations and up, we're starting with just recapturing
by looking at the pixel. So all the time it's squeezing our eye
and looking at the monitor, oh, this, this most likely is this pose. So we
just try to match it. And then and animate all the key pose. - Chew on this! [GUNSHOTS] [GROANING] Let's rock! - It could have been a lot of
pain and suffering really, but they have done an extraordinarily
good job of working with us within the constraints of the old code. We originally hired them to
potentially do the game in 3D. We kind of switched gears with them
like two months into the project. Hey, you know what, we're
going to 2D instead, because by going 2D we can
retain more of the original feel. We can also switch back and forth
between the old and the new graphics, and it will just feel much
more Command & Conquer. Their attention to detail was
really, really high on this project. I mean, pixel perfect in a
lot of cases, where, you know, it truly looks like the unit or unit, or the structure, or the train
has been up-resed. We didn't just make, again, a copy. It is that, it
is that thing in 4K now. [MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: One interesting problem
the team ran into was trying to come to terms with what a C&C
fan wanted in 2020. Many of the original Westwood team hadn't played
Command & Conquer in years. Meanwhile, fan communities had been
keeping the game alive this entire time, organizing tournaments, setting up ways
to play it online. In an effort to get their feedback on the project early
and likely to win over the trust of the Command & Conquer community at large,
EA decided to operate as transparently as possible, posting frequent updates on Reddit
and creating a small community council who would give feedback for the
duration of the project. - Feedback on the subreddit
has been super valuable 'cause sometimes we put stuff out there,
and they're like this isn't working. And we'll react to that. Other times, it's a great tool to get kind of validation
on something that we're really nervous about, like when we first put
out some of our just art. But when you get that kind
of validation you get like a, like a 98% upvote rating on post, you
just get a little sense of like, okay, I think, I think we're heading in the
right direction on this. And it can, it gives you that confidence to
keep, to keep pushing forward. So it's been a fun interaction
with kind of the greater community, but we felt we needed that
really deep knowledge to help us on a lot of the
details throughout the way. So I kind of recruited like it's 14 of the top C&C, you know,
community members in the world. So these are the guys who've written the
top mods that have kept the franchise alive for the past 15 years, the
people who have ran the top fan sites, the people who run the subreddit, some of the top competitive
players and shoutcasters. And I kind of asked
permission from EA, like, can I develop the game alongside these
people and just give them complete transparency into everything we're
doing each day? And they said yes. And so we have a Discord with
them where literally every day probably, for the past year and
a half, we're talking to them. We share with them to build
at every single stage. We've shown them super early concept
art, super early audio stuff. They give us feedback on
it. They help guide us. It's been some crazy back
and forth collaboration. They have such deep insight also
into like the source code 'cause they've been modding
these games for 15 years, that they can help advise us on like
how to fix certain bugs. They wrote up, several hundred bugs in this giant
spreadsheet about here's all the bugs in the legacy game. And, you know, we then
regressed those against the remaster. Some of which were already fixed,
'cause they might have been some old rendering error or something, but there was a lot that were
still happening. And, you know, we'll show them art and
they'll be giving us, you know, finite feedback on the shape of
the turret and the, you know, the rendering angle of the Orca.
And it's been the most incredible, like, engagement that I've been able
to experience in my 15 year career of working with them. There was a
community member who designed our box. So the box that millions
of people are seeing right now, guy with the crossed goggles, like
that was made by a community member. And we commissioned it from him to use
as like our formal marketing art for the entire game. We had to hear some really tough community
feedback over the past 10 years on the franchise to finally get to
that point of understanding that, we needed, we needed some help. And I don't think we would've been
able to make the game without that. And definitely not to the authenticity
and to the quality that I think we're going to be able to deliver. [MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: We've covered a handful of the biggest
features the team have to work on for this remaster, but there was a lot
of other work going on elsewhere too. Now we don't often let interviews just
rattle off a bunch of features in an effort to sell the game. But honestly, I can't really think of a better way to
demonstrate the breadth of work that was required to ensure a game from
1995 felt like a substantial project in 2020. So I guess we'll make an exception
for you, EA. Jim, the floor is yours. - Yeah, yeah. So the, the Command & Conquer
remastered collection includes the complete original Command & Conquer,
also known as Tiberian Dawn. It also includes the complete Red
Alert and all three expansion packs, so the Covert Operations,
Counterstrike and The Aftermath. So that combines into over, I think a
hundred campaign missions, you know, couple hundred multiplayer maps. We have been able to bring
the console missions that were onto the PC for the first time. So those
are also playful, which is great. We've added in bonus galleries.
That's got, as I mentioned, like four hours of kind of B-roll behind
the scenes footage that you unlock as you go through. Frank Klepacki has
remastered the entire soundtrack, which is over seven hours
long, includes over 20 tracks we recorded by The Tiberian Sons. And he's also found some unreleased
music that never came out, that we've been able to include the
remaster. We've completely rebuilt multiplayer from scratch. So now it runs
on dedicated servers. We've added in, you know, quick match, 1v1. We added
in a leaderboard, you know, custom games, replayed, observer modes,
all these things that, you know, were not even thought about back in 1995. And then everything has been
remastered in 4K ready. So all the in game, you know,
animations, VFX, units, terrain has all been remastered,
all those menus. And then you can real time switch
with the graphics between the legacy and the remastered graphics.
Yeah, and skirmish and campaign. So it will be available on both Origin
and Steam, so we're bringing the game to Steam for the first time,
which is very exciting. It's actually kind of got native Steam
support so that we get, you know, achievements on both platforms. We
have a map editor that we built, so you can actually utilize and build
your own maps and utilize some of the distribution tools. And so yeah,
we're really excited about bringing it to kind of where people are and get their communities and their friends
lists going and have them play there. - It's been a few weeks since the launch
of Command & Conquer remastered, and it's reviewed incredibly well by
both the press and users on Steam. So EA are sure to be pleased
by the reaction from fans, but perhaps what's most exciting about
all of this is the doors it now opens. We talked to the folks at Petroglyph
about Command & Conquer and how they'd love to make another one.
And with the C&C community, re-energized and the momentum
behind the series that so often felt like it was stuck in time, perhaps we'll
see more from this collaboration in the future. With a company the
size of EA, you have to imagine that this game will have to sell a certain
amount to justify it, but at least as an outsider looking in, the
Command & Conquer revival that we've all been hoping and praying
for has never seemed more likely. - In general, the entire EA organization
has been excited and very, very supportive. I mean,
you know, this, the support we're getting right now is
better than the support we got when we were Westwood studios
sometimes, you know. It's just, they are so behind us right now and
want to make this such a success. And so I'm really happy to be working with
them, and hopefully we can do it again sometime soon. - I can't believe we're actually about to
launch this thing. And, you know, as I'm sure you hear
from a lot of developers, making games is hard, and there are so
many things that could go sideways on a project. And so we hope we deliver
what they're looking for. We're eager to get more of that
feedback as we launch and hopeful about where
the franchise can go. - The grain trade center in Vienna was
the 17th urban bombing in four weeks blamed on Nod terrorists. [STATIC] - The security commission remains
in closed session tonight following Nod terrorist
actions in Slovenia. [STATIC] - At least your mother tipped well. - New Tiberium harvesting methods instituted
by the Brotherhood of Nod increased profitability by 49%. - Nod Tiberium holdings now account for
almost half of the world's known supply, giving the quasi terrorist group incredible
leverage in the London gold exchange. On the domestic side, [STATIC] [MUSIC PLAYING] [STATIC] - ...of Tiberium ignored reporters
at Hong Kong Second World Siberia Economic Impact Summit. Mobius is expected
to refute charges from the scientific community that Tiberium
might be dangerous. [STATIC] - (NON-ENGLISH SPEECH) [STATIC] [MUSIC PLAYING] As the GDI forces take off in another
non assault, the free world holds its breath. - This is Greg Burdette, WWN,
somewhere in the Mediterranean. [STATIC] Are you picking this up? [LOUD STATIC]
