red alert fog

When I was a young boy, about 8 or 9 years old, one of my favorite things was when a friend would invite some of us over to his house to play video games. I had a friend Keith who lived near school, and we would go to his place to play Metal Slug (on a Neo Geo emulator), and Red Alert. Both of those games have a place in my heart, and in this blogpost I’m going to talk a bit about Red Alert.

So Red Alert (1996) is a real-time strategy game produced by the now-defunct Westwood Studios as part of their Command & Conquer franchise. It’s been recently remastered in 2020. (There’s some interesting stuff we could get into about the history of RTS games – this blogpost is about fog, and I was curious to know what the earliest example of fog-of-war in a game is, and it appears to be older than I expected – Empire (1977), by Walter Bright & Mark Baldwin.)

So. There’s a lot to love about Red Alert, and strategy games in general, but I think the thing I love most about it is how simple it begins. Here’s what a single-player skirmish looks like.

You can adjust the settings so that you start with some troops, but you can also start with absolutely nothing except the vehicle that turns into your Construction Yard. (I have a Twitter thread where I walk through what the next steps in the game are, but it’s not really relevant to this particular blogpost).

tbc