Command & Conquer will forever be one of my favorite game franchises. The original Command & Conquer was the first game I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash and is to this day the game I have purchased more times than I care to admit. Ok, it was 13 times across PC and console across multiple variations of the game… Soon to be 14 when this remaster lands… Anyways, I love CnC!
Jim Vassella, producer of the upcoming Command & Conquer Remaster has released a behind the scenes video diving into the details of one aspect to the remastering process, FMV’s. For those of you out there who played the original CnC, you are more than familiar with the old live-action FMV’s. They were corny, they were ridiculous, they were awesome. They are also, unfortunately, super low-res and only played at 15 FPS. Vassella details the journey the team went through to get the FMV’s ready for the remaster including a journey to LA to try and find the original archive footage.
Unfortunately, the originals have been lost to the sands of time but the search wasn’t without its merits as loads of old behind the scenes footage has been found and will be released alongside the game in a new bonus archive mode. As for the FMV’s of the remaster, they will be using footage from the PlayStation releases of the games as they are in the MPEG format which is higher quality than the VQA format used in the original PC release. This also has the added benefit of meaning that the former PlayStation exclusive scenes will now officially be a part of the remaster! Each scene is put through an AI upscaling algorithm to increase resolution and the framerate is also raised to 30 FPS thanks to interpolation. you can check out the results in the video above starting around 11:20.
It is cool to see the amount of work and dedication going into the remaster of these classic titles and I can’t wait until we can finally play them ourselves.
