24 years ago, I came home from medical school with a borrowed CD-ROM of the real-time strategy (RTS) game Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun. I got home at 4pm, put the CD in the Creative CD-ROM drive tray and suddenly it was 4am in the morning.

I am not a big fan of RTS games but they are incredibly addictive and fun. Just recently that I found out that older Command & Conquer games are being kept alive by the free/open source OpenRA project. This makes it possible to play Dune 2000, Command & Conquer Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn on Linux, Mac and Windows. The game works very well with modern screen resolutions and hardware.

I slept for 3 hours. I kept hearing the game sounds in my sleep. I went back to the university and gave the CD-ROM back to my friend, telling him that I couldn't trust myself with that drug.

🕹️ The New Players Guide to OpenRA

Few pointers if you are going to play OpenRA:

• The AI is very hard. Much harder than the original games. I set its handicap to 50% or 75%.
• You can download the ISOs of the original games (legally as they were made freeware by EA) and this will enable OpenRA to include game assets, music and videos from the original.
• The game doesn't need too much resources, so it will probably run on any computer.