OpenRA

Games: Command & Conquer → (DOS, 1995) · Command & Conquer: Red Alert → (DOS, 1996) · Dune 2000 (Windows, 1998)

OpenRA: a free real-time strategy engine, written in C#, that recreates and modernizes three Westwood games: Command & Conquer (Tiberian Dawn), Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and Dune 2000, each as its own “mod”; Tiberian Sun support is still in development and isn’t in the installer. It’s a reimplementation built by reverse engineering the games’ files, without disassembling or patching the original executables. It doesn’t aim to be an exact copy: it adds right-click or classic left-click controls, sidebars with production queues and hotkeys, attack-move and unit stances, fog of war, veterancy, capturable tech structures, replays, and an observer interface. It has online multiplayer, a map editor, Lua-scripted missions, and an SDK for building your own games on the engine, and it runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The latest stable release is release-20250330 (March 30, 2025); playtest-20261011 (October 11) completes the Dune 2000 campaign, moves the engine to .NET 10, and adds Windows on ARM and aarch64 Linux builds. One of its more than 30,000 commits, from October 15, lists Claude as a co-author. On first launch, the content manager offers to download each game’s base files, without music or videos, from the project’s mirror servers: the Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn files come from the releases EA made available as freeware, and the Dune 2000 files, along with its 1.06 patch files, from a mirror of the game’s files. This is optional: it can also copy them, along with the music and videos, from the discs or from an installed copy. The project says it uses those files under the license granted by EA’s C&C Franchise Modding Guidelines.

You needThe original games’ files: on first launch it can download the base files, or copy them from your own discs (mounted ISOs work too) or from a The First Decade, The Ultimate Collection, or Remastered Collection install on Steam or Origin; for Dune 2000, the English disc or the Gruntmods Edition. Campaign music and videos can only be copied from the discs or those installs. Plus Windows 7 or later with DirectX 11 or OpenGL 3, macOS 10.11 or later, or 64-bit Linux (one AppImage per game).

How it gets to PC

Fan reimplementation

Original studio

Westwood Studios / Intelligent Games

Author

OpenRA

Stars

17.7k

Last activity

2026-10-28 · 2 days ago

Latest version

release-20250330 · 2025-03-30

License

GPL-3.0

Language

C#

Vanilla Conquer See all →

Vanilla Conquer See all →