The Scientific Gamer

I’m going to do something slightly more long-form here, both because I have insomnia and because the Red Alert series is something I remember through a rose-tinged nostalgic fog. I’ve mentioned before how watching Joe Kucan ham things up in Command and Conquer is as inseparable from my childhood as scraped knees in the playground are for normal kids. I was eleven years old at the time and had no disposable income, so my experience of it was via the highly convoluted method of the GDI disc being borrowed from one of my brother’s friends and played on a Risc PC - which my parents had bought in the charmingly deluded belief that it would be used for educational purposes – that could only emulate an IBM PC operating environment and consequently had no sound. I didn’t care. For somebody whose previous gaming experiences consisted of some pirated Atari ST games (the Atari ST was the poor man’s Amiga, although I didn’t know that at the time) and some stuff for the Archimedes that was coded by one guy working out of his bedroom, watching full-motion video featuring actual live actors intercut with primitive CGI was a damn-near religious experience, even if the actors were curiously mute.

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