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Interview: Jon Van Caneghem on Reinventing Command & Conquer

Posted November 24, 2009 by James Brightman

Jon Van Caneghem is known for founding New World Computing and creating the Might and Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic series. Earlier this year, he left Trion World Network, an online focused gaming company he co-founded with Lars Buttler (a former EA vp of global online). Along with the unfortunate Pandemic news, it was revealed last week that Van Caneghem has now joined EA Los Angeles to head up Command & Conquer and other potential RTS titles.   IndustryGamers recently hopped on the phone with Van Caneghem to get his take on C&C and the digital transition.

The C&C franchise has sold over 30 million units in its lifetime and still maintains a very loyal following. Van Caneghem obviously wants to satisfy the existing fan base, but he also would like to broaden the audience for C&C and the RTS genre in general. His overriding goal, however, is to reinvent C&C for the direct to consumer and online environment.

“This is a great opportunity and I'm very excited for it. I've been building strategy games for a very long time, and Command & Conquer has been one of my favorites. Now we see more games moving direct to consumer and online, so what better opportunity than to take one of the most well known franchises and build that transition?” Van Caneghem began. "I can't give too many details on the gameplay or design, but if you think about what online has done for RPGs over the years, I think we'll see it happen for RTS games and I want to be on the leading edge for that."

Command & Conquer 4, shipping next year

The RTS genre has always been very PC-centric, and console gamers have never truly embraced RTS games. While first-person shooters were once strictly in the domain of PCs, they now flourish on consoles, in part thanks to games like GoldenEye and Halo. Van Caneghem believes that he'll be able to reach a console audience and a broader audience overall through social networks, iPhone, etc.

“That's a definite market we're going to address with this new way of building these games," he said referring to consoles. "There's always that core base of RTS fans that wants everything with base building and harvesting, etc. Then you have the consoles which are now connected online and you can go out to other devices too, like iPhone. When you start bringing that all together, especially with the C&C universe, you have a lot of cool background to work with and build on."

He continued, "C&C has a tremendous following and fan base for 15 years now, and we want to meet those players' and future players' expectations on what the next great RTS from the C&C brand would be. That's my primary goal, and then to bring in people who haven't played an RTS before and make something they would enjoy. I think we're starting to see with casual games and whatnot that there are a lot more gamers out there than we ever realized."

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.