If Command and Conquer was the game that really put Westwood on the map, Red Alert solidified the company's reputation as a triple-A PC developer. C&C was polished and addictive, but Red Alert took the foundation of what made C&C great and added a zany new storyline and interesting units (dogs and spies come to mind), not to mention a lot of snowy terrain.

Westwood took a hiatus from RTS games for a few years after Red Alert, and when it returned to the genre with last year's Tiberian Sun, the reaction to C&C's sequel was mixed.  The game sold blockbuster numbers at retail, but die-hard C&Cites viewed it as somewhat disappointing given the long delays.   So, as can be imagined, when Westwood announced the pending release of Red Alert 2, fans braced for the worst, given the fact that RA2 was scheduled to utilize the Tiberian Sun engine.

But Westwood knew what it was doing.  If Red Alert 2 looked somewhat questionable on paper, all jitters were put to rest when the game completely dazzled the crowds at its world premiere in April.  While the game does use the Tiberian Sun engine, there's a freshness to the storyline, units, missions and gameplay that literally revives the entire C&C brand before your eyes.  Red Alert 2 wowed the masses at E3 and those who have played a near-final version claim it's even better than they expected.

So, on the heels of the game's October 25^th release, we sat down with executive producer Mark Skaggs to discuss what it is like developing the sequel to one of the PC's greatest real-time-strategy games.

GameSlice: Here it is a few weeks before release and Red Alert II doesn’t appear to have the hype that was attached to Tiberian Sun, which could be a very good thing.  Did you consciously want to downplay the game this time considering all the perceived disappointment surrounding TibSun?

Mark: Not at all. The development time on this project was very short, and rather than hyping it right away, we wanted to have a good firm ship date. We also wanted show people a stable, playable version of the game during demos. Overall, RA2 received very close to the same amount of coverage that T-Sun did. There have been exactly two stories in each of the three PC gaming magazines, and three or more hits on the major online gaming sites. It has just had a shorter window than T-Sun, which is why it might seem like there’s less hype this time around.