Command & Conquer Red Alert Lore

Welcome to the Lore, boys! My name's Ethan Palmer. This is a fake history podcast, and this is maybe the most fake history podcast we've ever done. Joining me today is...

I'm James Miller. Safe in my home. I've trained for this moment. Ever since August 27th, when World of Warcraft Classic came out, I've been ready for this quarantine.

For anyone listening in the future, which is relevant to this episode, we are in the middle of a COVID-19 panic, so James Bunker hit his place all alone with nothing but his dog in his World of Warcraft, and I am trapped in a room with two other adults who may be carrying a deadly infectious disease. For anyone listening in the present day, we hope you're doing your specific duty to protect the elderly and the sick. That's not really... I mean, that's a quick PSA, but...

Peter's gone fighting COVID on the front lines. That's why he's back here tonight. He's got a hose full of hand sanitizer. He's got a spatula.

I don't know what the spatula was for, but he briefly mentioned scraping people's skin. So I don't know. Pete's out there. If you see him on the street, say hi.

Let him scrape your skin, I guess. I wouldn't get too close, if I were to be honest. No, honestly, he's actively going out there looking for people who are sick. Maybe avoid Pete at all costs, like we did, because even in a remote, he can be a bit toxic.

Yeah, he takes that... What's that oath that doctors take, the Hippocratic Oath? Hippocratic Oath. Yeah, you can't let someone go unfixed or whatever, but he doesn't even ask for consent.

He's coming to fix you, you know? Yeah, yeah. He's out there. Oven this is his only protection.

I tried to tell him the virus wouldn't try and burn him, but he wouldn't listen. Yeah, he saw that high temperatures was one of the symptoms, so he probably... Yeah, so sorry for if the sound quality is not up to our usual standard. We'd love to be in person.

I would love to be on my professional mic, or semi-professional mic. Instead, I'm using my 10-year-old gaming headset with flicking bits of vinyl. But we appreciate you guys sticking in. We're doing our best to get you guys' content.

I know we're... For anyone listening, day of, we're a day late as it is, so... In a buck short. Let's get into it.

James, what are we doing today? I guessed Sesame Street, and you said, no, the Muppets? I wasn't sure if you were joking or not. That was full goof, full goof.

I said the Muppet Extended Universe. That turns to be too big to tackle. That would be a good one, to be honest. One day, I'm sure we will do the Muppet Extended Universe.

Jamie, can I ask you a question? You just did, yeah. Okay, can I ask you two more questions? Yes, I'm counting.

That's the first one, yeah. If you could go back in time once, what would you do? Like, go back in time and return to present day. Then, like, things would be changed.

Butterfly effect. Oh, man, that's really hard. I had a real answer, but that's not funny. I mean, it might be.

No, it's definitely not. I would go back, and I'd, um... I'm not so sure about history. What happened before the 90s?

Oh, jeez, you're putting me on block now. The pyramids were, like, 1987, I think. Yeah, I'd go back to the pyramids in 1987. And I'd give the Sphinx a high-five.

Oh, hell yeah, when he was still alive? Yeah. I bet that dude kicked ass. Yeah.

So I would do one of two things. I would go back to last week, when I put a red shirt in my white laundry, and we would have a bunch of undershirts. Or I would travel back to 1890 to meet Alexander Godfrey, the inventor of the modern hairdryer. We're not doing the hairdryer, are we?

Yeah, we're doing the fictional history of the hairdryer. So everyone listening at home, probably knows what we're listening to, of course. But we're going to start with the year 1914. Is that anything to you, James?

1914. 1914, we took a little trip down the Mississippi or something. I know a song about it. No, it's 1814, shit.

Yeah, I think you're a century or so. Fuck. 1914. So a big day in world history.

In world history. Oh, it's when the world was born. We're doing the history of the world, starting in 1914. It's going to do the weird year.

I'm actually really bad at history, so I haven't a clue. Let's get into it. I will outright say it at some point. Oh, you're still not going to.

The year is 1914. A 50-year-old grandson to Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph I, was enjoying the drive with his wife, when a member of young Bosnia, known as Nadejko Kavrinovi, had their car. We're starting with the Great War, so you didn't figure it out. Okay.

That was the world thing, because it was a World War one. So the Bond family needed behind their car, injuring passengers with a nice car in line. Later on, after the royal couple had visited but was injured by the blast in the hospital, the car sold, and another member of young Bosnia, Gavrilo Princip, paused from his sandwich, walked up to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and shot him dead. Dude, he didn't eat a sandwich at the same time.

So there was a watch, and this is a true story about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. They watched it originally. It was Gavrilo and Nadejko, and they tried to assassinate him, and they threw a grenade, and it missed, and they scattered, and later on, he was eating a sandwich, and the routes had changed where the cars were going, but nobody told the drivers, so they were weirdly behind schedule, and the security wasn't there, and Gavrilo had stopped at a cafe to grab a sandwich, and he saw the Archduke driving by, and ran outside and shot him. Oh my god.

I'm sorry, it's not funny, but that's just so wacky. I mean, there's 106 years of separation. I think we can laugh at this point, right? We can laugh now.

When can we laugh? Yeah. So this event, as we've kind of already talked about, is considered by many to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back in kicking off the First World War. Three years later, in 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian provisional government, leading to the eventual formation of the USSR, and I believe 1923 or 1924.

So, another fun fact from real history, there was a Russian revolution, and the Bolsheviks overthrew the standing party, and Lenin would go on to form the USSR. Then in 1920, a young Adolf Hitler is discharged from the army, and begins working full-time for the MSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers' Party in English. Peter, did this for one week, and we're doing Hitler? We're not doing Hitler, we're not doing Hitler.

Everyone knows we're not doing Hitler. Oh my god. What's going on? So, thanks for looking bright for the young Hitler, and his rise to power and eminence seems to be right on track for where it went in real life.

That is, of course, until 1924, when a time-traveling Albert Einstein goes backwards in time and assassinates the would-be Fuhrer. This is what you wanted me to say. It's not Hitler. I mean, that's what everyone, everyone, that's, I guess, the running gag, but the trope, is that if you could do one thing, we'd go back and tell him to kill Hitler.

Oh, I was going to say visit my mom. It was a sad one. That is that. But it's sweet.

It's taken a win out of myself. Yeah, exactly. So, do you really do that, Albert Einstein? Yeah, so we're still in real-world history.

No, this is Command & Conquer Red Alert lore. So, Command & Conquer Red Alert is a real-time strategy computer game produced by Westwood Studios and released by Virgin Interactive in 1996. Nice. It's an RTS game, right?

Yeah, yeah. So, the Red Alert series, I played Red Alert 1. It was a formative game for me. I played it alongside Starcraft Rue War.

The two of them together were like, where I got my keys on RTSs. I never played Warcraft 2 or 3 and why I'm bad at MOBAs today. So, you can really see the ripple effects of one small action 20 years ago. Yeah, wow.

If Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, he might have never picked up this game. Well, in this game, Hitler wasn't a guy. He died shortly after the First World War. So, three years after the death of Hitler, before he was assassinated, if you know what I mean, we're going to get real fucky with timelines and new timelines.

And when you travel back to the past, you fracture the timeline and create a new one kind of thing. Okay, is that kind of time travel? Exactly. So, three years after the would-be death of Hitler, the original timeline when he didn't die, Albert Einstein would attend a scientific conference, known as the Solvay Conference, which is true, we're back to real life history.

And he would use the words there to unlock parts of time travel, but perhaps not in time to stop a war. We're off of real history now. He didn't. Albert Einstein, as far as I know, in all the research I've done for this hazard episode of War Boys, did not invent time travel.

I'm not certain, but... Maybe he proved it was impossible, or potentially possible? I don't know. I'm no physicist.

Somebody write in to contact at warboys.com, or warboyspodcast.gmail.com, and let us know. If that's possible. Tell us if time travel is possible, please. I would love to see.

I would love to see. I would love to see that email. Yeah, please do. So, World War II would happen for Mr.

Einstein, and he would be present through all the wars of it, until, in 1946, he's given a chance to use a time machine located in Trinity, New Mexico. Was it still New Mexico back then, though? Yeah, it was always new. Oh, okay.

It was never old. There was always an old one. There was always an older one, you know? Oh, yeah.

But by the time they... They might have honestly stolen it from the Aztecs. I assume they probably went that far as New Mexico. Yeah.

Yeah, that sounds about right. A lot of... Like, the Mexican border was much higher up than, like, way back when. I know that there's a lot of stolen land.

They reminded me of that when I visited. Everyone asked me if you're American. No, but I was technically just as British as those guys were. Exactly.

Yeah, so, produced by Westwood Studios, released by Virginia Directive. It takes place in the 1950s, where Hitler was assassinated by Albert Einstein, and the Nazis never rose to power. Is that a cutscene? So, the most beautiful thing about all...

There's three Red Alerts. There's three insolubments in the franchise. There's a lot of insolubments in the Command & Conquer franchise, and they all do this. But they have live actors.

Obviously, you know, low-dealists actors. So, they're all live action, and it's truly magical if you just go, because you can find all the cutscenes online. It's, like, an hour and a half long, I think. It's a full movie, really.

But, so, the original game, Command & Conquer, takes place in kind of an alternate future. And then the next game in the franchise, which was Red Alert, goes back and kind of, like, pulls on, like, the factions we know and love, the allies of the Soviets. Okay. That's cool.

I wonder, like, have you watched the cutscenes? Do they remind you all of the Twisted Metal lost endings that I showed you in the back one? Definitely better than the Twisted Metal ultimate endings. Okay.

Definitely higher production value, because they made it to the final game. And the company would eventually, like, get spotted in, I believe, 1998, 1999. I don't know exactly, but they do eventually get spotted by EA. And then, like, all the original developers leave and go for their own studios somewhere else.

So, good for them. But, yeah. The cutscenes, they're not... Like, it's bad.

It's cheesy. It's camp. But it looks like almost like a C-list movie or whatever. You know, like, it looks like a...

You can almost find it on top of the top. Other than the fact that they're addressing you, the player character, still looking directly at the camera in every single scene. It's D-list actors in a C-list movie, dude. I gotta see it.

I'm gonna check that out after. Oh, you're saying it's a couple Ds in a C? I gotcha, I gotcha. Okay, so the game itself opens a black and white cutscene with real actors set in Trinity, New Mexico, in 1946.

It's kind of like this. You never see Albert Einstein's face in the beginning. You just kind of see his, like, iconic hair, and you see him from the back. And you see, like, it's so awkward because he has his head cut off, and he's, like, sitting on a bench waiting for the time travel machine to work.

So he goes back in time. He says, oh, Herr Hitler, which is Mr. Hitler. And he's like, yes, what do you want?

He says something in German. Albert Einstein says something in German. He reaches out to shake his hand, and they shake hands. And then they both turn really staticky and disappear, and I guess that means Hitler's a little different from the timeline.

I don't know. Yeah, yeah, because, like, we couldn't see the timeline ending, right? You gotta... Like, the timeline didn't exist after it ended, so they gotta do something weird like that.

Yeah, presumably. I don't know if Albert Einstein stayed in the past and, like, doubled up, or if he was instantly transported back to his time machine. Oh, no, wait, I think he was transported back to his time machine. I watched it the other day.

He just put a mustache on, and then he pretended to be Hitler from there on out. But I have really good policies, and the world is just a better place. I assume he didn't. You know, they put it like the static.

Like, Hitler turning into static is a way of the way of the way because showing Albert Einstein with, like, a fire axe beating Hitler to death just feels kind of a character. That sounds pretty fucking cool, though. Yeah, I'm not for it, but. Yeah.

This style is more like science-y static. Ooh, made Hitler disappear. Oh, you see, if I read my next paragraph, I could have told you that the physicist returns to modern day where there's been no weird paradox where, like, Hitler was never a person, so he didn't invent the time machine. They just skip all that, and he just jumps right back to another timeline where the time machine is invented, but Hitler never rose to power because he died in 1924.

Okay. The young lab tech who had helped him to travel into the past has to ask if he'd been able to assassinate Hitler, meaning that the lab tech was aware of the Second World War but also didn't know what happened because it didn't happen. I don't know how he's, you know, outside the influences of the timeline fracturing. Yeah, well, it's just like, you've got to get a story out, right?

And it's not all going to make sense, so. No. That's what all the Hollywood great way to say. Mario can't always make sense, you know?

Yeah, I mean, it's obviously, you know, it's a video game. It's not, it wasn't, maybe not intended for the story. I think the idea behind the story was there, but I think the execution was probably missing, so it was probably some nerds, you know, in a garage somewhere coding all this stuff, and they had a good idea and had to get it to print at some point, so. Yeah, to print.

Video game print. You got to put all your papers into, like feed it in, like one of those player pianos. I mean, you joke, but like old school DOS games, you got, like, a book of paper So, uh, Lapjack asks if he was able to assassinate Hitler. He says, yes, I was, and everything's going to be fine.

And then some slamming heavy metal wrists happen, various tanks and jets blow stuff up, and you realize that, you know, there's a new threat on the horizon. Really? So the user can either play the Allied forces or the Soviet forces in Red Alert. Without Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union grew powerful under Stalin, believing that it is the Soviet Union's birthright to take out the world.

Some things never change. Stalin starts his own Second World War. So the Second World War still happens, it's just Stalin starts it, and the Allied forces, he invades the Europe, basically. Just like Hitler did.

It's almost like Stalin was no better than Hitler. Let's not start making comparisons. All right. I just won't touch it then.

Let's move on. The game opens with your introduction to a spy, Kanye Adams, as a general briefs you on the next mission to break into a Soviet base and liberate a captive, Albert Einstein. It's, like I said, the cutscenes are real actors looking at you. If you have, even just watch the first couple, like, it's, It's pretty good for a laugh.

Not as goofy as the Twisted Metal ones, but... I'll watch it, and I'll post one of my favorite moments in the Discord, so you guys can have that. Join the Discord as a night info on our website. We'll have that discussion.

So the premise of Red Alert is simple. Had a all-set the risk of power, now to see Germany what emerges before standing in the way of Stalin's own ambitions of conquest. Instead, left unweakened, the USSR proceeds by seizing lines from China and then begins invading Eastern Europe, in order to achieve just a solid division, a Soviet Union stretching across the entire Eurasian landmass. In response, the nations of Europe form into the alliance instead of grim and desperate guerrilla war against the invading Soviet army.

Over the course of the game's story, the Allies and Soviets fight out a devastating conflict for control over the European mainland in what has become an alternate World War II. Indeed, in Red Alert, the Germans, led by Grand Muscle Gunther von Essling, are on the side of the Allies and help to repel the nefarious threats. So I guess they ignore the fact that the only reason Germany had an army is because the Treaty of Versailles was shipped, and he was the only one willing to stand up to it and militarize, and the Germans legally weren't allowed to build a military, but because of this they were. I remember in history class them talking about how crazy inflation was after the Treaty of Versailles.

I'd like to buy a loaf of bread, you have to bring a wheelbarrow full of money because their currency was just worth nothing, and everything stuck there. The Wehrmarch experienced hyperinflation, much like in Zimbabwe in 2000-something, when the Zimbabwean Mint printed an official trillion-dollar bill because the currency was so inflated that you just needed so much to buy anything. I don't know anything about currency, but I don't know. How do you get out of that?

How do you get into that? That's crazy, man. Keep an eye on current events, and we'll see where the Canadian dollar ends up after all this. I didn't want to say it, but yeah.

We're having fun here, though. We're having fun before the end of the world. Yeah, you know what? If our money is worth nothing, then my loans are non-existent.

Yeah, wait, does the value of your loan change if we experience hyperinflation? It can't, right? No, I don't think it does. It's got to be a static amount.

It's not a good set. A really handy just like two years of hyperinflation where everyone's destitute and poor, and everyone loses everything, and you just get to pay off student loans? Hey, man, I'm already destitute and poor. We're fine.

That's what I call a win-lose. They've actually waived interest on student loans right now, so that's cool for me. That is cool for you. Congratulations, because you're still making money.

Exactly, yeah. Okay, so there's two playable campaigns in the game. So there's two innings. You can play as the Allies, and you can play as the Soviets.

I always played as the Soviets as a kid. They were sick. I did the research on this. I played this game a lot as a kid.

I didn't know the story at all. I remembered none of this when I was doing the research. I was fucking... I was catching myself.

I played as the Soviets. They had Nikola Tesla on their side, where the Allies had Albert Einstein. So you got defensive structures that were Tesla coils. I was going to ask that.

You got straight up their giant Christmas trees that were Tesla coils, and they just cast lightning at everybody that came at you. They also had much stronger tanks, but they were a lot slower, which for me, as a child, not able to micro very well. I didn't want the faster tanks. I wanted the ones that I could just A-move across the map, and they'd win.

Yeah, and I like the big damage hits, too. The big, chunky hits are a lot more fun than a bunch of little hits to me. Yeah, exactly. So, we're going to jump right to the end of the game because stuff happens.

It's not super relevant. You know, you go on missions. They invade Czechoslovakia. The Allies show up and repel the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In the Allied ending, the player destroys the Soviet stronghold, and an Allied hit squad discovers Stalin buried alive in the rubble. As they begin to remove the rubble, General Nikos Stavros, a Greek officer and second in command of the Allied forces, approaches and orders the men to stop. Oh, man. I worked with a guy with the last name Stavros.

Yep. He was at a Greek restaurant. Did you ever ask him if he found Stalin buried alive in the rubble? Maybe he traveled back in time after all this was done and, you know, destroyed the time machine or something.

Maybe he traveled back in time and killed Albert Einstein. Yeah. I said it before on the podcast, but if you want a fun, watch Primer, if you want a fun movie with a bunch of crazy time fowl, you have to watch three times and you catch something every time. You told me to watch this movie for the past 10-ish years.

I got into it in 2013, so almost 10 years. Okay, 7-ish years. 10 years, yeah. Way to date the podcast.

No, we got to do that. We got to do that. Okay, so in the Allied ending, the Allies find Justin Stalin, leader of the USSR, buried in rubble in like a ruin in Moscow. Stavros convinces the GIs that had found him, that they did not find a living Stalin there and fits them to leave.

He then stuffs Stalin's mouth with a handkerchief and places a rock on top of his head, burying him once more and walks away. Just one rock? A big rock. Somebody had just pulled one rock off of Stalin's face.

I was like, yeah, Stalin. I was trying to take a hole to take a pee. There's a little face down there. That's it.

Oh, come on, there's going to be some of that Russian gold down here. I mean, you could probably make a pretty penny off of Stalin in Russia back then. No, so Russia was extremely poor and the Soviets were extremely poor and I'm pretty sure they experienced a massive famine right before the war broke out and they still just had so many men. They had a great scene in the movie, I'm not going to remember the name.

I'm going to school to be later. Land before time seven. I think it was land before time seven where Jude Law is defending Stalingrad and they're basically, he's like a Russian soldier and they're defending Stalingrad from the Nazis and they're handing out a rifle to the first soldier in line and then the second soldier in line they just hand him a clip because they don't have enough rifles and they say, when somebody dies, grab his rifle. And just like, move along.

Don't know how factual that is but it's probably pretty close to the financial situation in Moscow at the time. So they find Stalingrad and they decide not to mention finding him alive to anyone and just bury him to presumably die. For the Soviet ending, the Reds are celebrating their victory and it's like, fucking hell, I'm at us. Stalingrad's commending the commander because you're the commander as a player character.

Sorry, I'm still caught up on this. They didn't kill him. They put a handkerchief in his mouth and a rock on his head and left him for a little dirt nap. Yeah.

So presumably it's like, I don't know if it's a, I don't want to get my hands as dirty by shooting him if somebody finds him with a bullet wound when he's buried in a rebel is he going to look bad for the second command of the allied forces or if it's just like a, this is the worst way for you to die, dude. You're an asshole. I don't know. It might just be a, you know what?

It might just be bad writing. To be honest. We haven't established it yet but there might be some problems with the writing. Well, it's easy for us to say.

We just get to look it up and critique it, right? Yeah, that is true. Don't have a look as hard to write these scripts. It's not a pretty script.

You can do it, but please don't. Okay, so for the Soviet ending, that's the ally ending and we won't get back to the ending itself, but the ally ending is the canonical ending. For the Soviet ending, the Reds are celebrating their victory inside Buckingham Palace, which is, Jamie, where's Buckingham Palace? In Britland.

In Britland, you guys. Stalin commits a commander for a job well done while enjoying a nice cup of tea because when you're in Britland, wouldn't you have a cup of tea? Yeah, for sure. If you just invaded Britland?

They don't even have cups of joe around there. Coffee's illegal, dude. That sounds like an American term, that cup of joe. Cup of joe?

Yeah. All very American. So it seems one of Stalin's closest confidants, his personal aid and lover, would take this opportunity to poison Stalin's tea. So Stalin dies in both endings.

In the allied ending, a Greek man lets him remain buried with a rags of dirty canker stuffed in his mouth, and in the other ending, his personal aid and lover poisons his tea. I guess the winners get to write how the history goes, huh? They read the history books, so either way, the West wins. Yeah.

So Nadia Zelinkov, a recurring character of the Soviet campaign, will reveal that she's been working for another organization, one known as the Brotherhood of Nod. She poisons Stalin, then is seen shooting his dying body repeatedly. Shortly after, her handler and the leader of the Brotherhood of Nod, an abusive figure named Kane, shoots her in the back of the head. Then some guy named Bill comes in and shoots him in the back of the head.

Oh my god. That ends with Kane. Isn't Kane the name of one of the guys in Twisted Metal? Maybe it's the same universe.

Yeah. World War II started because Stalin wanted to, the old least of man, not the old least of man, but Man Black. Oh yeah. The Man of Black the greatest wish, and the Man of Black said, it's not a war worthy of the world, bring me more drivers.

I'll bring you tank drivers, and he sent hundreds of tank drivers. Dude, I forgot about the Man of Black. You remember my own scripts better than I do? We're not a cute That's a good Russian impression, by the way.

That wasn't me saying Russian. That was me faking a white, a Western person faking a Russian accent. Oh man, you're a good actor. I got death.

I got a range. Yeah, a couple levels there. Wow. It's like Tropic Thunder dude kind of levels up there, man.

So the Brotherhood of Nod, also often shortened to Nod, was an ancient secret society claiming to have originated prior to 1800 B. Before the world was born. That's impressive. Like well before the world was born, I do.

Yeah. Well. 112 years. I was going to ask if you wanted to do the math.

Did you hear what I said? Yeah, and then we're talking about 1912 is when the world was born. I said 1800 B.C., my dude. Oh.

You want to do a quick math for me? You already figured out the hard part. Was that the hard part really though? Yeah, now it's the difference between positive 1800 and minus 1800, which is 1800 times 2.

Which is 3600. Plus? 112, which is 3712. You nailed it, dude.

Peter's usually the one that says math shows are so wrong. If only he was here. Yeah, so they introduced Cain throughout the story kind of as an aide to Stalin, one of his advisors. The reason why he's relevant is because the Brotherhood of Nod and Cain are in the original Command & Conquer, which takes place sometime after 1995 when the original game was released.

So we have Command & Conquer Red Alert, which takes place in the past. We have Command & Conquer the Tiberium universe, which takes place in 60 plus years of the future. We're going to talk about the Red Alert franchise specifically on this episode. We're going to get to the end of Red Alert 1, Red Alert 2, Red Alert 3, where we are going to go through three different timelines.

Three timelines? Show me with your fingers. That's the only way I could know. So at the end of Red Alert 1, the timeline is going to split in two.

One of them goes to Tiberium Dawn, which is the original Command & Conquer game. Then another timeline goes to Red Alert 2, because the events of Red Alert 2 are not supported in Tiberium Dawn, which is a game already developed by Westwood Studios. So I count two timelines so far. Is there an additional split within one of those, I'm guessing?

Yeah, we'll eventually get to what Red Alert 3 does, and we'll briefly talk about why it does. Remember when I said they were bought by EA? Things got a little weird. Oh, yeah.

EA, like, they have some studios I'm okay with, like Respawn, but as a whole, why aren't those guys just some frickers? They sure can frick, my dear. They're like the Joseph Stalin of the video game world. Oh, my God.

I don't know if I go that far, but... I mean, no, there's no video game company that's as bad as Joseph Stalin. I think that's implied, right? We can all agree with that.

Yeah, I don't know. If you take money out of people's pockets who can't afford things because you make something so addictive and, like, microtransaction-induced, or involved, like, that's bad. It's not Joseph Stalin bad, but it's bad. Yeah, remember when I said the rest of the population had a fan in before the war broke out?

That may or may not have been engineered by Stalin himself. Oh, thank you. It's engineered by EA. Thank goodness.

EA stands for E-ass holes. It's in the game. It's in the game. EA Sports.

EA Games was challenged everything I did. Oh, you're right. I played a lot more sins than I played Madden, so... Because your brother always played Madden and shouted at the TV.

I mean, I did play Madden. I played a lot of NFL Street, too, but I always played more sins, so... Okay. So now in the script, I have it written.

Now, Kier, I hear you saying Tiberian Dawn. What the heck is that? Kier, shut up. You're not here.

Go spray people's skin or something. Yeah, or go do a squat or whatever you're doing. Squat out of coronavirus, my dude. Okay, so like I said, Tiberian Dawn is the original game of the franchise.

I wanted to originally kind of get into the original Tiberian series, but if we want to go into it, that'll be its own episode. One day. It'll be my next episode. But honestly, I was having a lot of fun with this one.

Cool. But we'll see. It's fun when it's mixed into real-world history a little bit. Yeah.

I love to do that whenever we're talking about indie games and getting into the history of indie game devs because it's fun when it's grounded. Exactly. And this one, it's not indie game devs, but real-life dictators. Don't forget to support your real-life dictators.

Oh, man. A little nod for anyone listening who knows the Command & Conquer franchise. The other in the 5th have seen in Red Alert. The player views a news anchor, which mentions the United Nations working on a unique task force aimed at preventing future globalized conflicts.

So pretty much, it's Easter egg saying, hey, the GDI, which is the good guys in the Tiberian universe, they're being developed. So it's kind of like, oh, hey, where did the GDI come from? They were developed by the UN to fight the Brotherhood of Nod, which we can get into in the next episode. Okay.

So if the Allied campaign were completed, the Allies emerge victorious in the timeline that the events I've ever looked to in our Lower Boys canon here. Our Lower Boys canon cave, where we're only looking at, we're not looking at the Tiberian timeline. Our Lower Boys canon cave, where we only see the shadows of what's outside the cave. Not the reality, yeah.

And these shadows show Soviets, not alien races and asteroids containing a rare and precious crystal. If you're out there, that's really good art. All three of us just looking at a wall and there's shadows for soldiers, but what's casting the shadows is aliens. And James said it on air now, so it's locked in.

Yeah, that's like a hard one. Yeah, and then there's like a million of the aliens. Yeah, they're all completely unique and independent. None of them looks anything like any of the other ones.

And everyone to the left has double legs and everyone to the right has half the arms. Yeah, and there's five different factions that are all fighting at the same time and every single, canonically speaking, they can't be seen apart. So you have to drive for all five factions. Anyway, so according to, just to kind of dip into the timeline here for a sec, according to former Command & Conquer designer Adam Isgreen, Tabirian Don follows on the conclusion of Red Alert's Alive campaign, Red Alert 2 and your revenge take place in a second parallel universe created by a new attempt to alter history of Tiberian Incursion, the working title of Westwood Studios' cancelled version of Command & Conquer 3.

So Red Alert 2 splits off the timeline. It doesn't make sense in terms of Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn, the first Command & Conquer game, but Westwood Studios was working on a game which would retcon, or would complete the story in a way that would make sense for Tiberian Dawn. Okay, do you know what retcon, like if there's a long version to that? It's retroactive continuity.

So you retroactively change the continuity for it to make sense. I thought it was a place where people would hang out. I think Red. Yeah, they just really want to retaliate.

But they want to retreat to the retcon. Yeah, so we would have had, this would have made more sense, we wouldn't have had three timelines in three games if, allegedly, Westwood Studios could have finished their title, County Conquer 3. So let's move on from that for that game. Let's get into Red Alert 2.

The game starts right where the first canonically ends with the Allies having defeated the USSR. Alexander Romanov was installed by Allied leaders in the position of Soviet Premier and was tasked with keeping the USSR in peaceful relations with the West. They didn't dissolve the USSR, they didn't give the countries that were, you know, under the Iron Curtain back. Anything like that.

They were just like, let's put a new guy there. This will work out. So this lasts from the campaigns opening cutscene to the first missions opening cutscene. After spotting some Allied spies fraternizing with the Reds, those commune bastards invaded the Allies without warning once more kicking off the Third World War.

So in Red Alert 2, we canonically have World War 3. I'm going to ask you to keep that in mind because when we get to World War 3, it's going to be coming in relevant. When did the World War 3 happen in real history? 2021.

2021, okay. Oh, wait, what year are we in? Oh, shit, never mind. Let's cut that.

I noticed this episode you have long curly hair, some spectacles. Oh, okay. That's great. I keep saying E equals MC squared.

Only when we went remote do you look like this, too. That's fishy. Wait, wait, let me just give my roommate a handshake here. Oh, wait.

He's the statusized. He's the statusized. Okay. So the Reds invade, the Reds kick off World War 3, excuse me, by invading the USA, baby.

They skip right over Europe this time. They have nukes. They say we don't need to stop in Europe. The final frontier.

Europe's under, yeah, exactly. The USA, the final frontier. Hold on one second. I fucked up my place on my sheet.

So when does a joke become a dad joke? When it becomes a parent? Oh, very good. Very good.

Okay. Phew. Phew. So American President Michael Dugan, wasting no time, orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

So are you familiar with the Cold War, James? Yeah, yeah. There wasn't a lot of fighting. No, yeah.

It wasn't like coronavirus, which is hot, so hot and you need oven mitts to touch someone who's suffering from it. This is more like something that's cold, like an ice cube. In real life, like you said, there's no fighting. But World War 3 in the Red Alert 2 video game seems to be like if the Cold War kicked off.

So if there was no fighting, the USSR had nukes and the USA had nukes and they were both like, if anyone tries anything, we're just going to send nukes and it's going to be the end of the world. So thankfully it never happened in real life. There's a bunch of cool stories of it almost happening but one guy stepping up and not pressing the launch button and stuff. Yeah, I mean, he was on a nuclear sub and his radio broke in the last transmission or they got a false signal that the USA had launched nukes and he tried to radio Moscow and they never got back to him and he decided not to launch the nukes in return even though it might have just meant that Russia died and not all of humanity.

He's a hero. He's a Soviet and neither of us remembers his name. Yeah, that's why you played as him. Yeah, exactly.

That's why I played as the Russians not for the Tesla coils which could evaporate allied soldiers using lightning forces but because they probably had a hero or two among them. So in this alternate universe, Europe doesn't respond to the Soviets kicking off the war because Europe doesn't have nukes. Russia has nukes. But they invade the USA and the USA says, okay, well, fuck you.

We're nukes striking you. This is what we agreed on. This is what we said. We said, we said, we're sending nukes.

So American President of Mexico's doing where does the nukes strike? When silo operator, nuclear silo operator, not like a regular farm silo. Nuclear silo operator, Jerry Boyd. Dude, regular farm silos have operators?

They must. Surely they must. Yep, still breathing there. How do you get it to do the thing that it needs to do?

You know the... Siling? Is it milk? Milk's like I was right.

No, Jerry Boyd was a nuclear silo operator who received the order. When he received that order, the missiles detonate on closed doors. The silo doors never opened. They don't go anywhere.

They destroyed the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. Frick, dude. That's like...

They should have installed the push doors, not the pull doors on those ones. They put the valve on wrong. It just didn't open. They wanted to keep them in.

So, we'll get into the actual fault of these doors. Was it a fault in the doors or was it a fault in the operator? Maybe it was a fault by owning nukes in the first place. It was a fault in our stars by John Green.

So in the lead-up to the Third World War, Premier Romanov had closely kept an advisor named Yuri. Not too much is known about Yuri. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution. The guy who was left under a rock?

No, that's Stalin. Oh, Stalin, sorry. Lenin came before Stalin and Stalin deposed Lenin in the 1920s and took over the USSR. So he resembles Vladimir Lenin who was a Bolshevik who originally kicked off the party, kind of implying that, hey, maybe Lenin didn't get deposed but just kind of faded to the background and became a mysterious figure.

He looks kind of like King, too, the leader of the Brotherhood of Nod but that might just be like he might have been intended to be and they didn't have the right actor or something. Nod is like N-O-D? N-O-D. Okay.

The symbol is a triangle with a scorpion tail on it. Ooh, badass. And Yuri has the Hebrew letters Resh, Vav, and Yod tattooed to his head. Later in the game it's translated by Albert Einstein to mean hostess humani generis in old Italian and you know old Italian.

What do you think? Hostess humani generis means. Average human home. No.

Generic human home. I like where you went with it. It's the enemy of mankind. Hostess.

Hostess being enemy. Like hostile. Sure. Oh, hostile, yeah.

I think hostile like a place of backpackers looking for herself in Europe. That was my first impression but now I'm thinking hostile, yeah. Okay, okay. And then humani generis meaning mankind.

Which seems like you'd think if there was one person who could read Hebrew they'd be like, hey, that's that guy. What are we doing? You know? It could have been just like edgy clout points for his social media or whatever though.

No regrets tattooed in old Hebrew. Yeah. What is no regrets in Hebrew? I mean, we'll have to ask somebody who speaks Hebrew.

Jamie, I don't know how to say this but I don't speak Hebrew. Yeah. Okay, so we know Yuri is of Romanian ancestry and inherited a castle in Transylvania from his family. Not saying he's Dracula but maybe Dracula.

During the Second World War he took part in Stalin's secret project whose aim was to create an army of psychically gifted soldiers to guarantee victory. The goal wasn't achieved during Stalin's reign but there's no indication of the death of one death but slowed Yuri down. Indeed, whatever health and safety regulations Stalin had imposed may have slowed Yuri down because he clearly cracked his whole mind-control thing and when Michael Dugan gave the order to turn the USSR into glass Yuri was there to take care of the man with the keys to the kingdom. He mind-controlled what's the guy's name?

Jerry Boyd and had him fire the nukes but not open the Bombay doors. Oh my god. So this psychic operator destroyed the US nuclear arsenal in one fell swoop. Jerry Boyd sounds like a real dingus, doesn't he?

I mean, I still hope we have one listener named Jerry Boyd who's going to write in now. It's a very American name and I will give you that. I couldn't imagine anybody named Jerry Boyd and they weren't American. There's not very many hard syllables.

There's no harshness to that name. It's all very soft and like, Jerry Boyd. Well, we've had this discussion before where I think B makes a hard-sounding syllable and you don't. It doesn't exist.

We only take a couple of fights on the podcast. Think of a T, think of a K, think of a B. Bs are so soft. They could just fall out of your mouth.

Bombastic. I need a pop filter for all these Bs. Come on. Well, it's just because you talk weird.

Okay, so the first rally of the game kicks off with a player defending New York City especially if Tanya running through the streets pistol to Kimbo. I don't know if I mentioned before you can play as Tanya in the game and she's just like a kick-ass soldier that does flips and has two pistols and runs around and just blows up tanks with two pistols. Yeah, actually, that's a sharp name. Tanya.

It's like a baby's first words. That's not a word, but noises. That's very easy to make, you know? You don't see a baby go tenacity right off the back.

A what? A baby. Okay, sorry. I thought you said baby for a second.

All right, so Tanya's kick-ass. Yeah, Tanya's kick-ass. She's defending New York. The Reds are invading New York.

The operation was a smokescreen, however. They realized, after liberating Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, the commander learns that the Soviets have deployed something known as a psychic beacon in Washington, D.C., mind-controlling the president and most of the members of U.S. Congress and also the rest of the city of Washington, D.C. Crazy.

So they have this Nikolai Tesla-esque device that allows someone to protect their psychic powers to mind-control a whole city. 5G. Yeah, exactly. That's finally the LTE the United States has been waiting for for the past four years or however long we've had in Canada.

It's been so long at this point. So the president of the United States promptly surrenders the U.S. to the Soviets until, in the very next mission, the player counter-attacks, destroys the beacon, frees the president from the effects of the mind-control. The president goes to Canada to the shelter when the player learns, oh no, the Soviets have deployed another mind-control device in Chicago.

Not Chicago. The game goes back and forth like this for a while where it's like, Natalie planted this one with this name in this city. You're like, go, blow that one up now. Go, blow that one up.

What about Nolens? They planted a psychic crawdad machine in that city. Build a psychic crawdad. It's the easiest final game.

You just step on him. He's very smart. Is this real? No, no, no.

No, it's psychic crawdad. I mean, as far as I know, so I played a lot of Rattler 1. I played a lot of Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn. No, not Tiberian Dawn.

Tiberian Sun, which was like the, I don't know, like the 4th or 5th. I think it was after Rattler 2, maybe just before Rattler 2. But I never played Rattler 2. If I did, I played it very briefly when I downloaded it as an adult.