Historically, EA has not been kind to the franchises it has acquired over the years. Dungeon Keeper languished for years before being re-released as a shameless cash grab on mobile devices. Sim City and the shenanigans regarding the “always-on” connection were a complete fiasco.
Of all the properties it has plundered, the mobile game Command & Conquer: Rivals might well have been the most unsubtle middle finger to a fan base ever produced.
When EA announced they were releasing a remaster of the original Command & Conquer and its alternate history spinoff Red Alert, the fans were probably about as well-conditioned to disappointment as one could imagine. This is why an announcement in the r/commandandconquer subreddit is currently making fans squeal with an emotion they have not previously connected with EA: joy.
Producer Jim Vessella went on Reddit with the following announcement:
Today we are proud to announce that alongside the launch of the Remastered Collection, Electronic Arts will be releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license. This is a key moment for Electronic Arts, the C&C community, and the gaming industry, as we believe this will be one of the first major RTS franchises to open source their source code under the GPL.
With the DLLs and their source code being open source, the ability of the mod community to make significant changes to the games cannot be overstated. Anything from new units to total conversions is now significantly easier to accomplish because the code can be accessed.
Vessella mentioned in a reply that the developers had already made their own little contribution to the mod community by modifying the GDI Mammoth Tank to fire Brotherhood of NOD Nuclear Weapons, creating the Nuke Tank. In the same post, Vessella indicated that the Petroglyph team had not been able to get LAN functionality working in time for the release, but they were still working on getting it to put together.
Command & Conquer Remastered releases for PC on June 5.
