The Unofficial Command and Conquer Strategy FAQ

Or, what I love about Smallnet

One of my all-time favourite computer games is Command and Conquer. Sometimes called Tiberian Dawn, sometimes called "Original C&C", sometimes called (as I knew it) C&C 95, it's the first entry in the series and for me remains the best. Although playing on Windows 95 meant that you didn't get to experience the awesome DOS multimedia installer (remember, this was the era of DOS installation and setup programs that were usually ugly blue and white ASCII text menus), the game ran in glorious 640x480 resolution, the interlaced FMV videos looked great, and the soundtrack was stellar. On top of that, it came on two CDs, so you could loan one to a friend and play head to head over dial up.

Being on the world wide web, naturally I would use search engines like Infoseek and Altavista to search for webpages related to the games I was playing, and C&C was no exception. Somehow, somewhere, I came up on Roger Wong's Unofficial Command and Conquer FAQ. Having gone through twelve revisions, the latest and final version of the FAQ was released on April 20, 1996. Not just on the www, but also on Usenet, BBS, IRC, and FTP.

The C&C FAQ remains a fun piece of internet and gaming history. Nowadays something like this would never get written, it would get uploaded into one of those borderline unusable (at least, without an adblocker) Fandom wikipedia pages, or lost on an internet discussion board somewhere, or be a series of videos on Youtube. A document like this would be written from a place of monetization first, it would be loaded down with advertisements and it's value would be based upon how many views, clicks, likes, and shares it generates.

Instead, the C&C FAQ was written as a community piece. People who were enthusiasts about the game just started chatting about it online, trading tips and discussing strategies. Eventually someone came along with a hex editor (I assume) and hacked the data files. People emailed the author their takes on the game and many of those contributions were included. I may be having a bit of a Mandela effect but I think the final 7.01 revision culled a bunch of contributions that were essentially duplicates, but nonetheless many community contributions remain. Contributors could have their name or just their internet handle and their email address alongside their particular strategem, so you could reach out to them and talk C&C if you felt so inclined.

This is what Geminispace reminds me of. You can read through somebody's capsule, write your own response, send them an email if you feel like it. I like that there is no concept of asking "how do we monetize this". I like that I will never load somebody's capsule and see a little video playing in the bottom corner. I like that whomever reads this is probably a real person, and not some AI Skynet thing. People post whatever interests them on their pages, and the community just grows on its own. I know there is a smallnet movement on the www, but I like that Gemspace is its own little area separate from the chaos of what the internet has become.

I still load up Command and Conquer every once in a while and click through the campaign, I think mostly for the trip down memory lane. I've beaten every mission, saved the world or destroyed the world many times over, and the multiplayer scene has long since ceased to interest me (I was always more of a single player gamer anyways). Sometimes I open up the FAQ and read through it and just enjoy being transported back in time thirty years.