Four classic Command & Conquer titles are now open source

In an uncharacteristically charitable move, EA has just made the source code for four of its legacy Command & Conquer titles freely available to the public under the GPL license. This includes the restored original source code for both Command & Conquer and Red Alert, as well as the SAGE-powered Command & Conquer: Renegade and Command & Conquer: Generals. While fan projects like OpenRA and OpenSAGE have produced their own approximations of the code that powered these titles, having free versions of the original code to work with is a huge benefit to video game preservation and future developers.

Recovering and restoring the source code for these titles was made possible through the combined efforts of EA technical director Brian Barnes, Respawn producer Jim Vessella, and Luke Feenan, a long-standing member of the C&C community who was involved in the development of the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection in 2020 and bringing the C&C Ultimate Collection to Steam last March.

In addition to the source code for its legacy titles, EA is bringing Steam Workshop support to its more contemporary Command & Conquer titles, complete with a modding support pack. This collection of assets contains the source XML, Schema, Script, Shader, and map files for all of the C&C titles that use the SAGE engine:

These modding tools will let users make new maps and assets along with more fundamental changes to these older titles, such as potentially adding support for higher refresh rates or ultrawide resolutions. Features that currently need to be shoehorned in with tools like Sage Meta.

Finally, to cap off this announcement, EA released a 35-minute video containing alpha gameplay and previously unused archival footage from Command & Conquer: Generals and Renegade (below).

While I’m not holding my breath for a new Command & Conquer title to appear any time soon, hopefully, making these assets and tools available will inspire the development of some new RTS titles in the grand tradition of the classics.