Retrospective: Command & Conquer - The Tiberian Saga

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007)

Once again, by the end of Tiberian Sun, the GDI believes it's killed Kane off. Once again, it's wrong, but players would have to wait the best part of a decade to find out why. "With Tiberium Wars, we were bringing the series back nine years after the last one, but we wanted to pick up the story where it left off," says Bass. "The main thing we wanted to do was introduce the Scrin properly. There was fan fiction and internet theories - some of which were awesome - and we wanted to make them real."

It all kicks off with the return of Kane. "15 years after Firestorm, Kane leads a Nod invasion of the Eastern Seaboard," says Bass. "What he returns to is very different. We'd taken the stratified society of Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun further, and the world is literally divided into zones - blue zones, which are utopian futuristic GDI areas where the rich and happy live, and yellow zones, post-apocalyptic areas where the downtrodden live. That's where Nod exists. They've effectively made a terrorist nation state: they bring food and medicine but they also use the yellow zones for recruiting. And the yellow zones are being encroached upon by red zones: uninhabitable Tiberium areas, which are effectively an alien environment."

Kane's attack destroys the Philadelphia, the space station that played a crucial part in Tiberian Sun. "They're not trying to conquer GDI but to lure them into attacking," says Bass. "The GDI launch an ion cannon attack on Nod Temple Prime in Sarajevo, not realising Kane's constructed a liquid Tiberium device inside, which creates an enormous explosion. That in turn alerts the Scrin, in dormant form in a mining fleet outside of Pluto, waiting for Earth to turn into a green harvestable ball.

Their assumption is they would either find cavemen or that everyone would be dead, but they instead find two heavily armoured militaristic factions who, with the Tacitus and Tiberium, have become a fairly advanced race. The Scrin think, 'Oh crap,' essentially, but their job is to get the Tiberium, so they're sent in. They invade the Earth and build portal towers. The GDI repels the Scrin and destroys all but one of the towers - only one has been completed - but it's dormant and it doesn't appear to be doing anything."

Guess what? In the aftermath of the Temple Prime explosion, everyone assumes Kane's dead. Again. "But Kane doesn't die a lot," laughs Bass. "In the expansion, Kane's Wrath, we see that he's gone underground and wants to get the Tacitus back. He's built a new AI called LEGION, a kind of CABAL 2.0, and with that, he finally reclaims the alien archive."

The first C&C title designed with consoles in mind from the word go, Tiberium Wars featured surprisingly effective controller mapping, and was also the first Tiberian game to boast a fully 3D engine. Along with a third playable faction in the form of the Scrin, the FMV took another leap forward, at least in C-list star power, with Billy Dee Williams propping up the wonky sets, while, on the gameplay side, the arms race continued when Kane's Wrath introduced Epic units, such as the GDI's Mammoth Armed Reclamation Vehicle, and the Nod's Redeemer. As the names suggest, these were not dainty additions to the battlefield. You tended to notice when they were around.

And in amongst all the chaos, the C&C team has quietly put the pieces in place for the concluding chapter: the Earth is riddled with Tiberium, a Scrin tower stands dormant in amidst the wreckage, and, somewhere, presumably in an underground lair complete with pulpit and mood lighting, Kane has the Tacitus back in his mono-gloved hands. The question now, then, is simple: What comes next?