The Legacy Continues
OpenRA, fan total conversions, the C&C Remastered, and the community that has refused to let Westwood's work disappear.
Westwood Studios closed in 2003. Two decades later, the community it left behind remains active across multiple platforms — playing online, modding, building new content on the original engines, and producing total conversions that use Westwood's mechanics to tell entirely new stories. The studio is gone; the work persists.
The preservation of Westwood's catalogue has been primarily a community effort. EA's 2020 C&C Remastered Collection — developed with former Westwood staff through Petroglyph Games — represents a rare instance of official investment in the legacy. But OpenRA, CNCNet, the Blade Runner ScummVM restoration, and dozens of fan total conversions predate it by years.
OpenRA is an open-source real-time strategy game engine that recreates the classic Command & Conquer experience with modern platform support. It provides high-resolution display support, cross-platform online multiplayer, and active development. Three shipped mods: Tiberian Dawn (C&C), Red Alert, and Dune 2000. The project also hosts community-developed mods including Tiberian Sun in OpenRA and custom campaigns.
openra.netCNCNet provides free online multiplayer for the original C&C game executables — Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Tiberian Sun, Dune 2000. Active player communities across all titles. The platform has maintained C&C online play for over fifteen years, bridging the gap between the games' shutdown and the modern era.
cncnet.orgRenegade-X is a fan-made remake of Command & Conquer: Renegade built in Unreal Engine 3, available free. It preserves and modernises the asymmetric FPS/RTS hybrid gameplay of the original while adding contemporary graphics, physics, and online infrastructure. Actively maintained with regular updates and an online player base.
renegade-x.comThe Tiberian Sun community has produced a series of unofficial patches addressing the performance issues that plagued the game at launch. These patches enable Tiberian Sun to run at modern resolutions and frame rates, finally allowing the game's genuine technical ambitions to be appreciated without the hardware constraints of 1999.
The C&C engine has supported a modding ecosystem since the late 1990s. Project Perfect Mod hosts hundreds of total conversions using the RA2/Yuri's Revenge engine: original campaigns, entirely new settings, and experimental gameplay modifications. The modding community remains one of the most active in strategy gaming.
ppmsite.comThe ScummVM team's multi-year project to restore the 1997 Blade Runner game produced compatibility with modern operating systems, improved rendering, and bug corrections. Now part of the official ScummVM distribution. The work preserved one of Westwood's most singular and inaccessible titles.
scummvm.orgPetroglyph Games was founded in 2003 by former Westwood staff immediately following the studio's closure. The founding team included key engineers and designers from the Westwood era, making Petroglyph the most direct continuation of the Westwood development tradition.
Petroglyph's catalogue includes original RTS titles (Star Wars: Empire at War, Universe at War), independent projects, and — most significantly — the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection (2020), developed in partnership with EA. The Remastered Collection was the first official acknowledgment of the franchise's legacy to involve people who had actually created it.
Petroglyph remains active. Their continued development represents the most direct living thread from the Westwood Studios that closed in 2003.