Search the Community

To me Tiberian Sun is the C&C game that stands out the most as the most artistically complete and unique. Two years ago I wrote an essay on the way the future is depicted in the game, and it still captures my attention more than any other RTS on an artistic level. Tiberian sun to me is a slower and more meditative game than most, even when it's a frantic firefight; the sheer oppressiveness, of the apocalyptic setting oozes from the sprites and the audio, and flows over the action masking it and slowing it. It is this game, and it's soundtrack, that has caused me uncomfortable day-dreams of a blighted landscape, and that inspired my apocalyptic art-y student film. The theme, setting, and execution blend better than any other post-apocalyptic text I've ever come across, and form what is to me a genuinely haunting and simultaneously beautiful image of a human world. The game's simple sprites and storyline are almost sidelines to the world it presents, which causes its own imagined scenes to take place. Images of soldiers patrolling in a dusty blighted landscape, the distant lights of their base obscured and dimmed by ionic clouds and dust. A large metal door seals shut at night, leaving a lone troop stuck in the wasteland outside, the stars above are motionless as his breathing echoes in his helmet. The cover image of the soldier, his eyes obscured by a cyber-punk mask, itself oppressive and built from necessity, staring out with an expression of stoic duty or patience, but perhaps his eyes are tearful and he stands alone in a field of fatal crystals? Tiberian Sun to me is a hauntingly perfect depiction of a desperate world and humanities place on it.