EA Open-Sources Command & Conquer Red Alert

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 title.

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.