Photograph: Matthew Smithĭuffy’s employer, Relic Entertainment, was a rare exception.
Microsoft shuttered Ensemble Studios in 2009.Ģ004's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War brought RTS action to a whole new fictional universe. Ensemble’s next RTS, Halo Wars, received scant praise from critics and sold poorly compared to prior Halo titles.
But the studio also pursued several canceled projects, including an MMORPG set in the Halo universe that reportedly had a budget of 90 million dollars. Microsoft acquired the studio in 2001, leading to the successful Age of Empires III. Electronic Arts closed Westwood Studios in 2003 and merged the remaining staff into EA Los Angeles.Įnsemble Studios’ found itself on a similar trajectory. Westwood would go on to release some better received RTS games, like 2000’s Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, but also several duds, like Emperor: Battle for Dune and the Command & Conquer: Renegade, a first-person spin on the franchise. Its much-anticipated 1999 release, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, received mixed reviews and failed to unseat Starcraft from the genre’s throne. Westwood Studios faced a different set of problems. Activision-Blizzard has not released sales figures for the remaster.Ī screenshot from 1999's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, which launched to mixed reviews at the time. It would go on to sell at least 11 million copies, a figure that predates the 2017 release of Starcraft: Remastered.
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Blizzard’s sci-fi RTS rocketed up the charts, selling 1.5 million copies by the end of the year to become the best-selling PC game of 1998. Kim and his friends, like many PC gamers, jumped on board the new game and never looked back. Blizzard Entertainment, which had earned a reputation for quality with its own hit real-time strategy franchise, Warcraft, stormed onto the scene with 1998’s Starcraft. “I really got into it, and we would play after school.” Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Australia were also prime markets for real-time strategy games, with new RTS games frequently topping the charts in these countries.īut the success of Red Alert was the tip of the iceberg. “ Red Alert was the main game everyone played multiplayer,” Kim says.
Photograph: CGW Museumĭavid Kim, lead game designer at the newly formed Uncapped Games and former designer on Starcraft II, was introduced to Red Alert while growing up in South Korea. The market, hungry for RTS games, used to be able to support roundups like this one in Computer Gaming World, with more launching each year. Westwood’s rapid release of two blockbuster titles put real-time strategy on the cover of PC gaming magazines, not only in the United States but across the globe. The studio doubled down on its success with the release of Red Alert in 1996, which sold even more quickly than its predecessor and included an online chat program, Westwood Chat, that players could use to organize online games. Command & Conquer hit stores in 1995 and sold more than a million copies in its first year, establishing Westwood as a leader in a new, breakout genre. Louis Castle, speaking to Computer & Video Games magazine in a 2008 interview, said Westwood “wanted players to imagine that their computer at home was a terminal to a real battlefield that communicated directly with your units in the field.” The team at Westwood took inspiration from media coverage of the Gulf War but added its own sci-fi spin. Sperry, frustrated with the restrictions and costs of licensing an established franchise like Dune, pushed Westwood to gamble on a new, original IP that riffed on modern warfare and the technology that drove it. Yet Dune II didn’t receive a direct sequel. Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features.
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