It says something about the nature of the PC gaming industry that so few franchises can put out classic compilations. And what it says is that the industry is still young. In fact, there are few properties in PC gaming that could truly support a decent compilation. Command & Conquer is one of those proud few. There may be only three Doom games, five Wing Commander games, nine Ultimas, but there are 12 C&C titles.

C&C has been a staple of PC gaming for a decade. The eponymous first game defined the shape of RTS to come, and while Blizzard may dominate when it comes to international gaming competitions and sheer number of players, there's a kind of Ford vs Holden debate that rages between Westwood and Blizzard fans.

Westwood may be no more, but C&C lives on. EA's acquisition of the brand, and the announcement of the third game in the Tiberium sequence, ensures we can expect another decade of commanding and conquering our way across a definitive RTS landscape.

So how did it all begin? For gamers who joined the hobby post the release of Windows XP, C&C is all about the latest game - Generals. Generals is a new franchise, a sort of cartoonish take on modern warfare, and has no relationship to C&C's other two universes.

The Tiberium universe, in which C&C 3 will be set, deals with a near-future Earth overrun by an alien substance. The Red Alert universe deals with a comic alternate history where WW2 never happened and instead Soviet Russia invaded first Europe and then the US.

But technically, C&C began a long way from Earth. In orbit around the start we know as Canopus, actually, on a world a man named Frank Herbert called Arrakis, or Dune.

Dune 2 - so named because an adventure game called Dune already existed - was the progenitor of the Westwood brand of RTS. A game dominated by mechanised warfare, where tanks formed the backbone of any force, and superweapons tipped the balance of play in the late-game.