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Comment by mikekhusid | Hacker News Reader

I loved both of these games when they came out, but I'm completely shocked that enough people still play this game to make open sourcing the code 25 years later a newsworthy event.

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Unfortunately, even though these games were really popular, there's nothing reasonably current with their style of RTS gameplay. I think the Age of Empires franchise was probably the last one that had the same feel to me. SC3 is more of a twitchy high-speed reflex game that's too hardcore for a casual like me. Modern mobile games go with the town + battles setup, probably because games need to keep drawing you in (and getting you to pay) and not just be a session when you want it.

It's probably that combined with the nostalgia of 'old folks' like me. I'd love to relive the Wilhelm scream and cheesy futurism of C&C. And I will always love the wololo of AoE.

Bingo - this genre as a whole has kinda died out. I played all the C&Cs religiously so I'm squarely in their target market and will probably pay for the remastered.

I wonder if the demands of their control scheme had something to do with it. Other genres of games translate pretty well to consoles and mobile. RTS games (of the classic sort such as C&C, TA, WC1&2) seem to demand enough precision that keyboard & mouse are essentially required to play. So many people have consoles, phones, iPads, and laptops now. These games would not be very playable on any of them unless you could connect a mouse.

Check out the OpenRA project https://www.openra.net/

They are not open sourcing the 25 year old games, they are open sourcing a small part of the enhanced edition (now in presale) to enable modding.

This news has me more stoked than I'd like to admit.

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