The "Black Sheep" Generals Interview

[Sonic 297]

An interview has been posted on the Official C&C Site about "Black Sheep - The Lost Mission of C&C Generals" that was released last month for anyone to download and play. In this interview both Jason Bender and Todd Owens, who were C&C Generals designers, discuss the development of "Black Sheep" and why it originally got the chop from the game. Here's a sample.

 

How did this mission become the unreleased "lost" mission? And how did you keep it in hiding from the Generals community for so long?

 

Todd Owens: We've thought about doing this over the years, but it was only recently that our C&C Community Manager Aaron "APOC" Kaufman pushed the greenlight buttons a little harder to make it happen. Even though the mission was "cut" from Generals, we still kept an archive of it. I think we always hoped it would see the light of the day somehow in an official capacity. It's great to see it finally unearthed for the Generals fans. It really is a "lost" mission.

 

And here is a short testimony from Designer Jason Bender, a reflection on Generals:

 

Jason Bender: Generals was my first game at EA, and one of my favorites. The units and powers were especially satisfying and elegant, but also mirrored real life military technology. There is even a theory that the U.S. government was feeding us information so we could launch the game as a propaganda device when we invaded Iraq, since we finished the game right at the start of the actual war. This is certainly not true. The idea was that we’d allow you to play in the world you were reading about in the headlines, but in an over-the-top action-movie sort of way. We may have done that a little too well.

The full interview can be found here. You can download "Black Sheep - The Lost Mission of C&C Generals" from the CNCNZ.com Downloads section.