Westwood Studios

» see westwood.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

command and conquer was on every other machine in the internet cafes i went to around 2002. red alert was on the rest. that was westwood at peak even if the brand was already six years into being owned by virgin and then ea. dune ii had basically invented the real-time strategy genre a decade earlier on the same engine line.

westwood was founded in 1985 in las vegas by brett sperry and louis castle, originally as westwood associates. the early years were ports and tie-ins for other studios. they hit on dune ii in 1992 with a mouse-driven base-building rts and the genre was named after it. command and conquer (1995) and red alert (1996) made the studio a household name in pc-gaming circles.

virgin interactive owned westwood from 1992 until august 1998, when ea bought the studio for 122.5 million dollars. the deal included the entire command and conquer line plus the lands of lore rpg series and the blade runner adventure-game team. the next four years had the studio shipping at a high pace under ea's banner: tiberian sun in 1999, red alert 2 in 2000. command and conquer generals was being built at the new ea pacific spinoff in irvine when the parent decided to consolidate. in march 2003 ea folded westwood into ea pacific and closed the las vegas office.

about thirty of the original las vegas team founded petroglyph games one month later, in april 2003. petroglyph would go on to ship empire at war and grey goo and a couple of other rts titles, but nobody ever called petroglyph the new westwood. the engineers were the same. the brand and the ip stayed with ea.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ dune ii and the rts genre ~

dune ii: the building of a dynasty came out in december 1992 on dos and amiga. the gameplay loop was not entirely new on consoles, since herzog zwei on the sega genesis had a version of it in 1989. but dune ii put the loop on pc with a clean campaign that taught new players the rhythm of base-building and three playable factions with distinct unit trees. every rts that came after, including blizzard's warcraft and starcraft, was built on the dune ii template.

~ how the cafe scene used it ~

in turkish internet cafes around 2001-2003 command and conquer generals was the lan game when counter-strike 1.6 was already locked into the next room. five cafe machines on one switch and a twenty-minute match clock. that was a category of game that does not really exist any more. the rts-on-lan format died with the cafes themselves around 2008-2010 once everyone had broadband at home and the lan-party idea moved online to dota and starcraft 2.

~ what ea did with the ip ~

ea kept the command and conquer name alive through tiberium wars in 2007 and red alert 3 in 2008. the rest of the 2010s entries were lower-effort, including a free-to-play c&c rivals on mobile in 2018. command and conquer remastered collection in 2020, done by petroglyph under license from ea, was the most affectionate revival the line ever got. it was also the closest thing to an actual reunion of westwood that anyone got after 2003.

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