Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert, rebuilt for tablets
A Family Passion Project — Built for Touch
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (1995) and Red Alert (1996), rebuilt from the ground up for modern tablets. Both games share one engine here, so you can mix them however you like.
These were built for a mouse and a desktop PC. We’ve rebuilt the controls around a screen you hold: two-tap building placement, drag-scrolling sidebar strips, buttons sized for thumbs. But we didn’t touch the rules. When we weren’t sure how something should work, we read EA’s released source code for both games. A Mammoth Tank still fights like a Mammoth Tank.
It’s built on the same engine work as UM Classic, our Ultima Online tribute, and it works the same way: you bring your own game files.
We’re not remaking these games or reimagining them. We want the game you remember, on the tablet you carry around. Any time we hit a question about how something should behave, we went and read EA’s released source code instead of guessing.
Back in 1995 and 1996 these were two separate games with their own rules and their own files. Here they’re one game with different skins and maps. Every unit, building, and ship from both eras sits in the same catalog.
That’s what makes the fun part possible. Since both games share one catalog, the editor can show you Tiberian Dawn only, Red Alert only, or everything at once, and you can build a match out of whichever half you want.
If you played C&C in the nineties you probably remember TibEd — the tool you used to give a Rifle Infantry the health of a Mammoth Tank just to see what would happen. We built that right into the game, on the device. No separate program, no editing files by hand.
We’re building multiplayer two ways, and we want both. Either way it’s one player per device — no hot-seat, no crowding around one screen.
Same deal as UM Classic, and it’s the whole reason this project can exist.
C&C Mobile doesn’t ship any game content. No art, no audio, no movies, no maps. It’s an engine that reads the files you already own, from your own copy of the games — the Remastered Collection, or your original discs. On first run you point it at your files and it takes care of the rest.
If you don’t own a copy of the games, there’s nothing here for you yet. We’ll ask you to confirm you own one before anything downloads, same as UM Classic.
It’s a beta rather than a finished game, but it is playable today on Android and iOS. We play it on real tablets most days.
What works right now: the Tiberian Dawn campaign plays through with the real tech tree, economy, combat, and briefing movies. The sidebar and HUD are built from genuine game art. The editor runs on-device with both eras merged. LAN play connects devices with no server at all.
Still on the list: video performance on a couple of Android tablets, the rest of the campaign content, and hardening the network layer.
Want to know when there’s something to play? Or have opinions about how it should work? We’d love to hear them.
Desktop builds are not ready yet. Questions, or something broken? Get in touch — we read every message.
Command & Conquer landed in 1995, and Red Alert followed a year later. For a lot of us they were the first games where you had to think three moves ahead, and the first ones we played against a friend over a cable strung between two PCs.
C&C Mobile is a fan project, from the same family that built UM Classic. We’re not affiliated with Electronic Arts or Westwood Studios, and they haven’t endorsed this. We just wanted it to exist.
We check our work against the Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source that EA released publicly under the GPL in 2020. That’s the only reason we can get the details right instead of guessing. Full credit and thanks to Westwood Studios, to everyone who built the originals, and to EA for opening the source. ♥