Interviews, Articles,and Features

1up.com Best Free Games of 2008

Mar 15, 2008 Gaming website 1up.com published their list of the top 101 Best Free Games for 2008, and in the category devoted to FPS/Shooters, RA:APB was listed. This is great news for us of course. Also listed lower on the same page under Strategy games is the original Command & Conquer itself, which was released as freeware by Electronic Arts in celebration of C&C's anniversary a while back. Give it a look here!

CNZNZ Roundtable

Feb 13, 2008 CNCNZ.com, longtime C&C community website and APB supporter, holds a roundtable of community leaders every month to discuss a variety of current topics. For February, on the list of panelists was Chronojam, and one question in particular posed interest: Question 4) Renegade mods. Who's under more pressure to deliver the goods, CNC Reborn with their hype for the infantry only beta or Red Alert - A Path Beyond with their recent recognition and award from ModDB? Other topics included commentary on the newly announce C&C FPS, "Tiberium" and discussion of Kane's Wrath. To read the questions the the spectrum of replies, please go to CNCNZ! Let's Play! Magazine Feb 2, 2008 A Path Beyond was one of the earlier reviews done by Let's Play!, posted a month after the January 3rd, 2008 launch of the online magazine by community members Ryan "Steppo" Stepalavich and Jenelle "Bluesummers" Capelletti. Let's Play! Magazine is "dedicated to hard-hitting and honest reviews for one of the few corners of the gaming community that otherwise gets very little notoriety," faithfully reviewing and highlighting only free games that you can find online, and it was founded partly in response to the prevalence of biased or paid-off game reviews that were catching the ire of gamers at this time. Read all about what they had to say about A Path Beyond at Let's Play!.

ModDb 2007 Indie Game of the Year 2nd Place

Jan 28, 2008 After so long, we managed to finally nab 2nd place in the ModDb annual awards! There were some delays in calculating the results and preparing the materials for it, and unfortunately at this time ModDb was unable to properly encode our trailer, and misplaced the promotional clips we directly emailed to the organizers. The unfortunate result is that in the nearly hour-long winners' video, our trailer from a year ago featuring the old graphics was used. In our own section, however, this was finally corrected after a while. Bluehell Productions, the team developing APB, now has a profile on ModDB. Notably, our second project, RA2:Apocalypse Rising, also won 2nd Place as an Unreleased Indie Game. Unexplainably, this category was cut after voting and tabulation was complete; as a result, they got but a single line shoved into the start of the Indie Games category. Also unexplainably, the rewards for the top two winners in each category disappeared from the pages, and we have not been contacted regarding the prizes. Go here to view the full awards, but please use the Next Page buttons to advance to our category to view our trailer there; the compilation winners' video features the old content due to some mistakes. Aaron Kaufman sent the following email to all C&C community leaders, congratulating us on our achievement: I wanted to personally congratulate the Red Alert: A Path Beyond team for their achievement of being crowned the #2 Indie Mod Game of the Year for 2007 from www.moddb.com! These guys have been working on this mod for what it seems like an eternity, and will keep working on it until its perfect, so this credit is well deserved, especially amongst heavy competition from Battlefield, Half-Life, Counter-strike, Call of Duty, etc. Seeing a Renegade mod inspired from the 2002 hit stand tall next to recent titles is a tremendous achievement. Please join me in congratulating the Red Alert: APB team and lets parade alongside them in 2008. I think they have some special surprises in store for all of us! And congrats to all the other C&C Mods which were nominated, I have no doubt when your games come full circle into demos and release, that you will be recognized just as well. The C&C Mod community is unmatched and stands to be one of the strongest around for a long time to come. Cheers, APOC

Games for Windows

Jan 15, 2007 So soon after the PC Gamer review, the newer-branded magazine Games for Windows wrote a small piece covering us. Despite its size, it still managed to get a shot in regarding Renegade's poor gameplay. Looking at it, you wouldn't expect such a small piece to spark the drama it did, but readers noticed a striking similarity to the PC Gamer review from the month before. The six maps, the classes? Wait a second, that sounds like somebody wrote a review based on a review! Could there be plagiarism afoot? Editor Jeff Green from Ziff Davis looked into it, and it turns out the editor in charge of that article had recently quit and did not have his notes to clarify where he got his information, either. He promised a correction in the next issue, additionally. While it is short, you can take a look right here if you want!

PC Gamer: Mod of the Month

Dec 9, 2007 Beta was great for attracting the attention of a slew of new players, as well as the attention of popular gaming magazines. As each one covered us, it seemed like the next one was writing their own article. PC Gamer was the next, with a favorable review, that naturally began by pointing out Renegade's poor reception. The December article oddly reported that we had a mere six maps available, which is a significant error, and led to some drama later on when we were next covered in print. A scan of the full article is available right here.

EA interviews Chronojam

Nov 6, 2007 The Command & Conquer community manager, Aaron Kaufman (otherwise known as EA Apoc), took some time to make a little bit of history by interviewing lead RA:APB producer Chronojam. This is pretty much the first time that EA advertised a mod like this, displaying it on the front page of CommandAndConquer.com, providing a copy of our updated trailer and offering download links plus the extended interview. If there was any confusion as to whether or not we were on the radar, this cleared up all doubt. They know who we are, and they want you to know, too! A big thanks to Electronic Arts for all their support, naturally. Chronojam reveals his real name, discounts any suggestion of switching engines, and talks about the future of APB in the interview, available at the official C&C site right here.

PC Zone Article

Nov 1, 2007 PC Zone wasn't exactly the best reviewer we've ever had, and they focused highly on the negatives of Renegade, compared us to Battlefield, and generally talked more about games that aren't APB instead of actually giving us much discussion or review. At the very least, they got it right that our standalone multiplayer experience effectively gave the W3d engine a second chance to shine in the first person. The screenshots they used were a bit goofy (check the team icon for that Mammoth tank), but at least they had some. To their credit, they included our installer on the enclosed DVD for that month. You can check out the full article here.

Fileplanet Spotlight

Nov 1, 2007 One of our longtime download mirrors, Fileplanet, decided that November made for a good time to highlight us on the front page. They had a short description available and a link to a more detailed one, available at our download profile there. If you want to take a look at it, it's right here. Naturally, we encourage you to vote for us at any of our mirrors and supporters. It was about this time, for Beta's release, that we decided to officially (and publicly) consider ourselves a standalone game, independent from Renegade. Advertising ourselves as a free indie game had its upsides, and helped attract new players who otherwise would hesitate to download a mod for a tired old game they wouldn't be able to find in stores anymore, or had lost their discs to.

Battlecast Primetime

Oct 31, 2007 Electronic Arts got the awesome idea to do an online series about C&C, with a set of programs that would compromise this so-called Command & Conquer TV. The premier show is Battlecast Primetime, which features C&C game news, featured matches, a community corner, and developer interviews. Aaron Kaufman, our favorite contact at EA and the official C&C community manager, gave us a shout-out during his segment of Battlecast Primetime's third episode. If you want to watch it yourself, just click here? to view it from the official C&C TV site (streaming),

October Game Informer

Oct 17, 2007 Getting covered in a print magazine of course is quite the confidence boost. Game Informer wrote a short article about us for their Mod World column, and we spotted it in their magazine in October. Typical of many print reviews to follow, it comments on Renegade's poor reception initially, but points out that we're a great standalone made by fans. You can view a scan of the article here. The image quality is rather poor, however.

eGames German Review & Interview

Sep 28, 2007 German gaming mag eGames decided to post a review of APB's new Beta release, and then conducted an interview with lead dev Chronojam. Command & Conquer has a large German speaking fan base, and it was nice to get to tap into that a little bit here. Our own community member TagDaze translated them for us. For the original articles: Beta Review; Chronojam Interview Translations on our forum: Review; Interview

Planet C&C Interview

Sep 10, 2007 Steppo from Planet C&C interviewed a few APB staff members on September 10, 2007. The full text is available at Planet C&C. Steppo wrote: I recently had the pleasure of hanging out with three of the movers and shakers of Command & Conquer: A Path Beyond. We had a quick fireside session which rapidly turned into over an hour and a half, talking about their up-and-coming release, named "Beta". Here's Community Manager (and Janitor) Drunkill, Executive Producer Chronojam, and Lead Moderator/2D Artist Venompawz, and what they had to say. The coming changes were a hot topic, including how Beta brought a lot of graphical and gameplay changes, and brought in a ton of new features such as the overhauled spy mechanics, the reworked infantry weaponry, and there was also some discussion of EA's stance on APB.

2006 Leipzig Games Convention

Dec, 2006 Surprise! Representatives for RA:APB and CNC:Reborn were at the annual game convention in Leipzig, Germany in September of 2006. At the convention, EA had several monitors displaying various media, including a trailer for RA:APB. In preparation for the convention, we also created our classic APB poster. C&C 3 lead producer Mike Verdu was given a copy, which he had hanging in his office last time we checked. Click for full size versions Leipzig 2006 Trailer Youtube (streaming) High quality (download)

Moddb 2005, 2006

Sep, 2006 For 2006, out of 4,000 competing mods, APB managed to rank in the top 100 (just as had been done in 2005), earning itself a nomination. Unfortunately, we did not manage to win any specific awards for 2005 or 2006. At this point, however, C&C Reborn managed to talk, photoshop, and FRAPS their way into the "Most Hyped" award, a status that has stayed true to this very day. 2005 and 2006 were interesting times. 2005 of course is when the nonsense about "hey, let's go to the Source engine!" really began; 0.993.5 was to be the last version on W3d. Nevertheless, we ended up managing to keep a following, and scoop up nomations for the 2005 and 2006 Mod of the Year awards. The nominations for 2006 are available at ModDb for viewing.

Moddb 2004 MOTY

Jan, 2005 Back in the beginning, ModDB was pretty new and we didn't pay it much interest. We had a profile, we uploaded an old conceptual movie back in 2002, but neither us nor them were organized like today. However, in January of 2005, APB picked up an award for best level design over at Moddb's Golden Spanner Awards for 2004. Since then, we've always managed a nomination for the Mod of the Year Awards at Moddb for something, have bothered keeping our profile up to date, and it's nice to consistently make the Top 100 listings. For the full article, go here.