Platform Online: The charismatic Joe Kucan is now a cult figure. Do you think C&C would be recognised as it is now if he wasn’t the face of the series?
Louis Castle: I think it’s very difficult to take anything as complex as a hit franchise and take out one element. People would say: “It wasn’t a success, except for (blank).” But I think you could say it might not have been a success if it didn’t have everything. So, I don’t know that C&C would have been what it was without Joe. Probably not, and maybe without the full motion video stuff it wouldn’t even have been successful as a game. Who knows? It’s very difficult to say. Clearly, it added something to it that I thought was very valuable. Based on what we saw with Generals as a franchise and Red Alert and C&C, the FMVs, the actors, they brought something to the game and to the story that I think was quite enchanting. Until such time that we can do games that look as good as Benjamin Button… and even then you’ll still need actors, but maybe you could go to full CG. But CG characters still feel pretty obviously non-human. So, yeah, I think he had a huge contribution and without him it wouldn’t be the same.

Platform Online:EA released C&C4 earlier this year as the final chapter to the Tiberium arc. How do you feel about the ending to C&C4?
Louis Castle: I think that the team they had doing it was a very talented team, they worked on a lot of the other C&C products. They were seriously resource constrained when it came to trying to make the product they wanted to make. I’m a little disappointed by the product at the end of the day. Not because the team didn’t do a good job with what they had, I just think it was under resourced to be the finale. I thought the story was interesting. It wasn’t the way we had originally envisioned it, but that’s OK. They were the ones who were in charge of the canon at that point, so it’s up to them to decide how it ends.

Freeplay Game Festival - 2010, Good Welcome Citizens
On the 14-15th of August those lucky enough to visit the Freeplay Independent Games Festival in Australia, Melbourne. Got the first public hands-on of Tiberian Sun Rising multilayer, the event was a blast! we got some fantastic feedback and some very interesting match's where played. So we took on board what we learned from watching people play to make TS:Rising even better! but the key thing we took back from the people who played TSR. Was that it was fun! it was a two-day event and we had people coming back from the first day to play more. Which I was delighted to witness, I David "Assassin" Thompson (Game Designer/Producer on TSRising) was on-site at the event. Here are some photo's from Freeplay! 2010, if you were there dont be a stranger and post in some comments here on our ModDb! This is probably our single largest update to date so please enjoy!

Welcome back, Commander. It's been far too long. Thus echo the immortal words. It's been years in the planning, and today, finally, you will get a taste of what is to come, but not quite in the manner in which you would have envisaged - your enemies today are your own countrymen. Our base is under attack, not from any visible enemy, but instead, from hostile forces within our own faction. This could get nasty. We have established satellite feeds of the amassing hostile forces within our borders - they are moving, and they are moving in force. Early attempts to quell the rebellions were utterly annihilated - it would appear the enemy has complete access to our technology, and is not just some rag-tag band of rebels, but an army forming against us from within. The feeds below show early surveillance of a few key points of military importance - but the enemy is thick upon the ground and in the air.