Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 turned me from a gamer into an insane person.

For me, one of the most exciting and dynamic aspects of producing and consuming content about video games, on the internet or otherwise, is its diversity. If you ask 10 different people what it is they particularly love about video games, you’re liable to get 10 different answers that stretch across consoles, genres, controls, and iterative generations both old and new. This incredible and unique variability is at the core of what’s the most fun about the KEVIN AND MATTHEW'S TOP TEN MOST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME list. Take any game from this list and you can draw a connective tissue back toward what it is within the Kevin lore that keeps me not just playing and loving games still, but streaming and writing about them as a shared experience. With the desire to map that connective tissue in mind, I am reminded of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, what it meant to me as a young gamer, and as a formative part of my identity as a matured gaming degenerate.

Like any imaginative youth inclined to prod legions of green plastic army men across fantasy battlefields of play, I was always particularly struck with the promise of strategy games. I remember as a nine-year-old begging my dad to grab me a copy of the early RTS 7th Legion simply because of the badass Space Marine astride the gun-toting velociraptor on the cover of the box. I remember taking it home and its depth of mechanics going so far over my head as to make it basically unplayable to my young sensibilities. I remember watching in impotent frustration as my legions of warriors died in the first and second missions of the single player campaign, with me as a powerless overseer, failing at every turn to avert destruction. It was not until my introduction to Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 at a friend's house that the promise of the appeal of strategy games really started to click.

There were key differences in the way that Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 was presented that not only ingratiated me to its own unique world, but to strategy games overall, in a way that would stick with me to this day. It was, by far, the funniest and most campy video game I had ever seen in my entire life up until that point. The way this game delivered and its story and narrative similarly caused me to redefine what video games were capable of, storytelling-wise. This was the first game I can remember actually enjoying getting crushed at. Where other, earlier forays into strategy games had been met with frustration and failure, the learning curve in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 was such that I was able to discover the reward of persistence for the first time in a strategy game on the PC. I would become addicted, even obsessed with the feeling of success this kind of unique gaming experience offered. Where once I thought the coolest thing you could do in a video game was make Spider-Man run from left to right across a screen and punch a guy in the head (which still rules, to be honest), now I was consumed with waking fantasies of Kirov gunships filling the skies or impenetrable rings of flak cannon arrays or impossibly efficient models for power plant construction in my bases in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2's skirmish mode. This was one of the first games I can remember “playing in my head” all day long whenever I wasn’t playing it. It will always stick out as a formative memory for me of not just what that game could do, which it did very well, but the ways in which it completely changed what I thought was possible from gaming. It offered me a completely different way to think about video games: as this grand sweeping strategic experience. It also offered me a host of new and unique challenges that saw me develop a taste for games that carried a wicked but rewarding learning curve. Furthermore, my obsession with Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 would utterly convince me that the most profoundly unique gaming experiences were to be found on the Personal Computer and nowhere else. As a new gamer finding their footing in the '90s and early '00s, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 represented an expansion in so many things that I found interesting about not just video games, but computers, writing and storytelling.

Can you remember one of the first games that played itself over and over again in your head when you weren't playing it? This was an experience for me that happened early and often. I can still to this day vividly remember my earliest memories of seeing Tetris on my gray brick Game Boy, or the first time I saw the polygonal figure of Mario in Super Mario 64 dashing around the castle courtyard, or even more recent “firsts”, like the first time I saw a grunt go flying from the startlingly realistic explosion physics of a plasma grenade in the first Halo. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 had no shortage of those standout moments to be sure, but it was one of the first games I can recall creating imaginative scenarios for, unbidden, constantly. As much as I was thinking about Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, I was thinking about a myriad of different strategies and combinations of factions, units, play styles, environmental maneuvers and endgame weapons that all played out far more coherently in my imagination then I was ever able to pull off in-game. The point being, I had played a lot of games by this point in the early '00s, but this was maybe the first that truly altered the way in which I thought about video games. I had acquired a new language with which to communicate with the part of my brain that solved problems in terms of massive armies, logistical support lines, perfect defences, and desperate sallying charges.

It’s Tim Curry vs. Albert Einstein for the fate of the world. At 10 years old, I don’t know if I’d known what you were talking about if you tried to explain “camp” to me, but if you showed me the performances of the legendary Tim Curry in anything from The Wild Thornberries to The Rocky Horror Picture Show I’d say, “I know it when I see it.” In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the forces of the Soviet Union square off with a time traveling Albert Einstein in a series of full motion video cutscenes that are so corny and over the top they absolutely devour the scenery of not just their own cutscenes but also the real space around them. Imagine going to this from the stilted, polygonal cutscenes of Tomb Raider. Not only was I being introduced to a style of gameplay that was absolutely consuming my limited problem solving, and powerfully ADHD burgeoning young brain, it was being delivered to me in a fashion so hilarious and over the top I was delighted and confused in equal measure. I had a sense that these games were telling some joke far more sophisticated than I could grasp, and probably wouldn't until I was old enough to no longer get smashed in the game itself. Luckily, in the meantime, it was always fun to watch the over-the-top on screen hijinks unfold storytelling-wise alongside my haphazard gameplay attempts.

I think part of what made those attempts so haphazard was how isolated I was in my newfound love for strategy gaming. While all my friends were becoming further entrenched in their respective Mario/Sonic/Crash Bandicoot enclaves, the original friend who introduced me to Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 lived far away and I only saw them once every summer or so. This was years before I would ever even conceive to play video games on the internet with other people. And so, I was sort of solidified in a kind of self-alienating niche area of appeal. From a young age, I was obsessed with a kind of game I barely understood, on a platform that no one else I knew had any interest in. This would be a formative period in my love for PC gaming. While I had one friend who always had the newest Nintendo offering, and another who could say the same about Sony and the Playstation, I always enjoyed being able to say that about myself with the PC. I loved that PC gaming was its own weird, unique thing, and felt like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 was the prime unique example of the time. Not only had it drawn me irreversibly deep into the world of strategy gaming, I was now wholly convinced of how cool PC gaming was because it was so different and weird.

The funny thing about nostalgia is that sometimes it can hit harder than the thing it’s actually connected to. In this case, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 remains an absolutely fantastic game to this day. It’s a fast-paced, explosive RTS with an almost perfect split between micromanagement/economy/base building and rock-paper-scissors large-scale combat between infantry, vehicles, air and naval units. There are tons of factions and unique superweapons to mix things up, and I can happily recommend this game to anyone, even if they don't have the nostalgic connection that I do. It is for these reasons that among ONLY nine other entries in all the annals of gaming is THIS game an entry on

KEVIN AND MATTHEW’S LIST OF THE TOP TEN MOST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME.