In the heady year of 1999, there was only one game I really cared about playing in a multiplayer context. The third “Command & Conquer” game was called “Tiberian Sun,” and I was fully bought into the cheesy FMV and wild sci-fi designs.

I had played the original game and the cold-war-themed “Red Alert” spin-offs, and I liked them just fine, but I was even more drawn to this particular formulation of melodrama and real-time strategy. It’s seemingly a minority opinion, but I have to speak my truth: I like James Earl Jones eating scenery more than I do Tim Curry. Sue me.

I would play through the campaigns over and over, sure, but most of my enjoyment was playing with friends and trying to find the weirdest user-made maps. “Warcraft” and “StarCraft” ended up being the RTS games that were robust enough to spin out entirely new genres through fan maps, but I never much cared for exploring on the Blizzard side.

The “better” games are balanced for competitive play, sure, but the B-movie aesthetics (and production values) of “C&C” kept me coming back time and time again. The “Craft” games take themselves seriously in a way that I have always found mildly off-putting. They have silly moments at times, but you can tell the developers care about things like lore and internal consistency.

No thanks. I’ll take sub-TV movie nonsense instead.

“Tiberian Sun” is also noteworthy for me in that it’s one of the last games I ever really cared to play online for more than a few days. “Phantasy Star Online” and “Mass Effect 3” would both get their hooks into me later, but I kept returning to this game for months on end. And even when other “better” entries in the same series came out, they couldn’t draw me back into the world of multiplayer.

It was the right time and place for me, but I wonder if I’ll ever feel the urge to engage with multiplayer games in the same way now that I’m the oldest man on earth. I certainly don’t mind living that solo campaign life, but I can’t help but wish something could make me feel like I did when I was young.

Who wants to spin up some “C&C” LAN games?

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“Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun” is available on PC.

Image credit: “Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun,” Westwood Studios