Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations

Command & Conquer involves players operating as one of two playable factions on a map - the Global Defense Initiative (GDI), and the Brotherhood of Nod - developing bases, gathering resources and using them to produce troops, and then defeating their opponents by eliminating their army and either destroying or capturing their base. Base production and unit training is funded by gathering Tiberium, the game's sole resource, through the use of harvesting units, and processing them into credits through a refinery structure. Each faction has its own unique types of units, its own superweapon, and its own combat strategy: GDI relies on superior firepower and armour at the expense of greater production costs and slower movement; while Nod relies on a combination of numerical superiority, superior speed, and unconventional tactics, generally at the expense of less firepower and poor durability.

Producing units requires establishing a base through a special unit called a Mobile Construction Vehicle (MCV) - MCVs can only be deployed in open flat land, and structures must be placed within close proximity with each other. Bases can be protected with various defensive structures such as sandbags, gun turrets and concrete walls, and units are produced in production structures (i.e. Barracks for infantry, Factory for vehicles, Helipad for aircraft), with tech buildings helping to unlock more advanced units; construction options function on a tech tree, in that certain buildings must be constructed to unlock new options. Silos can be built to store more resources, as the refinery structures can only hold a finite amount, repair facilities can be built to repair damaged vehicles, and power plants are required to keep the base operational - low power slows down production, stops defensive weapons working, and causes buildings to slowly take damage over time until sufficient power is restored (either by constructing additional power plants, or selling off extra buildings to reduce total power requirements). In total, the game contains around fifty units and structures.

Command & Conquer is set in an alternate history, and begins with a meteor crashing near the river Tiber in Italy in 1995. The meteorite brings with it an alien substance that scientists call Tiberium, named after its impact site, which can absorb and crystallize precious metals from the surrounding soil, but also transform its surroundings and produce extremely toxic gases and radiation that is fatal to humans and animals. An ancient, cultic society called the Brotherhood of Nod, who claims to have foreseen the potentials of this new substance through their self-proclaimed messianic figure known only as Kane, invests in the development of technology to harvest and refine Tiberium crystals, far ahead of the global scientific community's own research, and use the resources it gathers to accumulate a rapidly growing army of followers worldwide.

By the beginning of the game, Tiberium has spread across the planet, with Nod forces gaining control of nearly half of the rapidly growing substance through footholds in some of the poorest nations. This wealth has enabled Nod forces to conduct increasingly ambitious terrorist attacks in wealthy countries. The Global Defense Initiative, initially formed by the United Nations as a multinational peacekeeping force in the aftermath of an alternate version of World War II, has since been repurposed as a global anti-terrorist organization, and makes its new goal the elimination of Nod across the globe. The conflict between the two sides eventually culminates in a world-wide war between GDI and Nod, with the Nod campaign taking place in Africa and the GDI campaign being set in Europe.

Westwood Studios began developing Command & Conquer in early 1993, after conceiving the game near the end of Dune II’s development. The team sought to build on the foundation laid by their earlier game, and Westwood co-founder Brett Sperry later said that "Command & Conquer was the net result of the Dune II wish list". Following the success of Dune II, Sperry believed that "it was time to build the ultimate RTS" with an original intellectual property. He later said that he was "fanatical about calling the game 'Command & Conquer'" because he believed that the title was an ideal summary of the gameplay. The drag-selecting and context sensitive clicking was inspired by Apple's way of navigating on the desktop.

Command & Conquer originally took place in a high fantasy world before being redesigned. The team changed to a modern warfare setting because of the political climate of the mid-1990s, and they later cited the Gulf War as a key influence in this decision. Westwood co-founder Louis Castle said that "war was in the news and the threat of terrorism was on everyone's mind". The setting was further influenced by Sperry's belief that future wars would not be "nation-to-nation", but would rather be "fought between Western society and a kind of anarchistic terror organization that doesn't have a centralized government".

Command & Conquer was a commercial hit. In the United States, PC Data declared it the fourth-best-selling CD-ROM product across all categories for October 1995, and #7 in the computer game category the following month. It was absent from December's top 10 in the country.

By April 1996, Command & Conquer had sold 500,000 copies worldwide, and Westwood Studios reported sales above 1 million units by September of that year. Domestically, the game was the seventh-best-selling computer game for the first half of 1996. The game was particularly popular in France and Germany, and sold 200,000 copies in the latter country by November 1996. Sales across all platforms reached 1.7 million units by February 1997, and the game went on to sell more than three million.

Command & Conquer spawned the Command & Conquer franchise, which sold 30 million copies in total by November 2009. The story of the game continued in the Tiberian series, including an action title Command & Conquer: Renegade that revisits the original game's First Tiberium War. In 1996, Westwood launched the prequel series Red Alert, telling the story of a global conflict between the Western nations and the Soviet Union which took place instead of World War II.

The game has also been cited as a large influence on the real-time strategy genre overall. In 1996, Computer Gaming World ranked Command & Conquer as the 48th best game of all time, opining that despite being not "as complete a design as Warcraft II", the game set "a new standard for great multiplayer play". That same year, Next Generation ranked it as the 49th top game of all time for how "it brought war gaming out of prehistoric, hexagonal mire and made it cool". CVG’s Mallinson wrote in 2002 that "hundreds of other strategy games", from StarCraft to Age of Empires, had borrowed concepts from Command & Conquer and "the RTS genre is still thriving, and that is all thanks to Command & Conquer".