As much as Command & Conquer matters for its contributions to the development of the real-time strategy genre, I’m going to make the controversial claim that its best part is that rippin’ CD audio soundtrack. The folks behind the C&C Remastered know it, too – that’s why original composer Frank Klepacki is back on board, and we’ve now got an idea of what to expect from all those tracks in the upcoming collection.
Command & Conquer: Remastered will feature every track in both C&C and Red Alert in a multitude of version. On Reddit, producer Jim Vessella it will include “the classic low fidelity versions (without voices), the original soundtrack versions now remastered (with voices), and then of course the Remastered versions of all classic tracks.”
The soundtrack will total over 10 hours of music spread across 175 individual tracks, and there’ll even be a jukebox feature to let you listen to it all – complete with support for custom playlists and quick search filters to comb through all that music.
It wasn’t an easy process getting everything together for the new OST, though. “After combing all possible archives,” Klepacki says, “a handful of tracks were just nowhere to be found – this included ‘Snake’ and ‘Fogger’ from C&C Red Alert. One thing that I did back in the Westwood era, was mirror my home studio with the same gear I had at work, and fortunately I had kept much of it all these years.
“So I started there, and I went to painstaking detail and trial and error to track down and match as much of the exact original sounds and instrumentation I could find, to recreate these songs from scratch in order to have the best high quality versions once again for the remaster. Hearing these new versions, especially in stereo now, is a whole new experience.”
You can hear some of those new versions – and their classic counterparts – in the video above.
All our updates on C&C Remastered have come from the earliest stages of development, which is why we still haven’t gotten any gameplay footage yet. The devs are saying all the right things, though – whenever the new version lands, it should be an excellent trip down memory lane.