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⇱ EA Open-Sources Command & Conquer Red Alert - Phoronix


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EA Open-Sources Command & Conquer Red Alert

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 27 February 2025 at 02:44 PM EST. 60 Comments
In a surprising announcement, Electronic Arts announced today that they have open-sourced Command and Conquer Red Alert under the GPL license along with Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and related titles.

EA today open-sourced Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Renegade, and Generals - Zero Hour. The game source code is now under a GPL license and available for the fan community to modify and extend as well as allowing these games to build on platforms moving forward. Over the past year EA has been working to restore the source code from Perforce archives for these classic C&C games.

👁 CnC Open Source


Beyond just making the old source code available, EA has enabled Steam Workshop support for more Command and Conquer titles.

More details on this surprising open-source announcement from EA can be found via SteamPowered.com. The source code for these games are available via ElectronicArts on GitHub.

Command & Conquer Red Alert released back in 1996 and thus requires building against the Microsoft DirectX 5 SDK and other older components. Plus Wacom C/C++ and the Borland Turbo Assembler. To run the games you still need to own the game for all of the game assets. It will be interesting to see what the C&C fan community does with the open-source code and if ultimately there is any modern port to Linux or similar.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.