The first installment, Command & Conquer, was released worldwide by Westwood on August 31, 1995 and featured the Earth becoming infected by a mysterious resource known only as Tiberium.

Developed as the prequel to the original, the Red Alert series was spun-off into a separate, lighthearted and comic series, while the original game and its sequels became known as the " Tiberium " series, retaining its sci-fi and serious tone.

The full motion video is also scripted differently ; while the cutscenes of Command & Conquer and Red Alert were filmed from a first-person perspective, Tiberium Sun used traditional cinematic shots for its FMVs featuring well known Hollywood actors such as James Earl Jones of the original Star Wars trilogy and Michael Biehn of Terminator and Aliens.

This speculation is borne out in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, when the alien force known as the Scrin arrive at Earth to mass-harvest Tiberium ( which they name Ichor ).

The period in which these events transpired, which would increasingly come to be known as the First Tiberium War, was marked by the Brotherhood of Nod openly starting to preach to many of the third world nations to throw off their " shackles of slavery " under the industrialized countries, while at the same time preaching an ideology of a Tiberium revolution to the entire world.

Kane had knowledge that a liquid Tiberium explosion of tremendous magnitude would attract the attention of an alien species known as the Scrin.

The factions become locked in a mortal struggle for control over a mysterious resource known as Tiberium that is slowly spreading and infecting the world.

An ancient and quasi-religious secret society, known as the Brotherhood of Nod, proves to somehow have foreseen the potentials of this new substance, and reveals itself to have been investing in the development of technology to harvest the Tiberium crystals ahead of the established scientific communities.

It is later revealed that Tiberium was introduced to Earth by the Scrin, an extremely advanced race of Tiberium-based aliens bent on mining the planet after the Tiberium deposits have reached maturity.

As a direct sequel to Tiberium Sun, Tiberium Wars is set approximately 17 years after the events of Tiberium Sun and features the introduction of a third faction, the Scrin.

* Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: The Scrin Faction's spaceships and ground units are all biomechanical.

* In Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and its Expansion Kane's Wrath the Scrin make extensive use of plasma weapons.

In each game the player can choose one of two campaigns whose storyline follows either the Global Defense Initiative or the Brotherhood of Nod-with the extra option in Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars where the Scrin have a playable storyline.

Soon after the detonation, the alien Scrin arrived on Earth in order to begin large-scale harvesting of the world's Tiberium deposits.

During the Scrin campaign in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, it is revealed that the alien species quickly became aware their premature awakening was a deliberate act by someone or something on Earth.

Isgreen also implied that Nikola Tesla may have been responsible for inadvertently having attracted the attention of the Scrin through his experiments, and thus for the arrival of Tiberium on Earth.

It is extremely similar in color and build Tiberium War's Scrin.

Earth creatures ( such as animals, plants and even humans ) exposed to Tiberium can either be killed because of the radiation or be transformed into Tiberium-based life-forms, to whom Tiberium radiation is curative rather than toxic.

* In the Command and Conquer universe, the Third Tiberium War is started when the Brotherhood of Nod destroys the Global Defense Initiative's orbital command centre, the Philadelphia, using a nuclear missile.

Command & Conquer: Tiberium Dawn, released on August 31, 1995, was the first game in the series and is widely considered as the title which originally defined and popularized the real-time strategy genre.

It is a direct sequel to Kane's Wrath ( however not directly following on from its storyline ), and is set 10 years after the game's final events, a time when Tiberium has advanced to its next evolutionary stage, and is rapidly spreading across Earth making it soon to be uninhabitable.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert, released on October 31, 1996, is set in an alternate universe 1950s and was originally made to be the prequel to Command & Conquer establishing Red Alert as the prologue of the entire Tiberium series of games.

On December 14, it was also announced that a new browser-based, free-to-play MMO Command & Conquer game is currently under development, under the name Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances.

Tiberium is presented as a double-edged sword within the context of the story arc of the respective video games.

While it is the greatest mineral resource ever encountered, conveniently gathering many potent elements into an easily harvestable form, it also brings with it considerable hazards: areas rich with the rapidly spreading Tiberium substance are eventually exhausted of their native ecosystems, and become too toxic to support normal carbon-based life.

Tiberium is a commodity, with everything that one builds in the game costing Tiberium-based credits.

As a currency, Tiberium is collected to build structures and to train units.

In Tiberian Dawn, Tiberium is said to be composed of 42. 5 % phosphorus, 32. 5 % iron, 15. 25 % calcium, 5. 75 % copper, 2. 5 % silica, and 1. 5 % unknown substances.

Verdu describes Tiberium as being at the center of the fictional C & C universe as well: " This enigmatic crystal is at the core of our gameplay as well as our fiction.

[...] Tiberium is our Force, our Spice, our One Ring, and our Matrix.

Everything in our game world is defined by its relationship to Tiberium.

* Tiberium, a fictional material from the series above

In the fictional C & C chronology, The Second Tiberium War begins on 2 September 2030 when Kane, who was presumed dead after Nod's defeat in Command & Conquer almost 35 years earlier, reappears in a live broadcast to General James Solomon ( the GDI player character from the original game, portrayed by James Earl Jones ), aboard the GDSS Philadelphia space station.

For the development of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, Electronic Arts decided to radically alter its composition, and commissioned scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide a white paper describing the biophysics of Tiberium, its atomic structure, its method of transmutation, the form of the radiation that it emits, and the way to harness it for powering machinery and weapons — giving it the same treatment as would be suitable for a scientific journal article on a real substance.

Tiberium also spreads by infecting trees and mutating them into so-called " Blossom Trees ", which seed the substance across large areas of land.

Under his direction, the now emerged Brotherhood of Nod began researching the alien substance of Tiberium almost immediately after its arrival on Earth through a meteorite impact in the year 1995, stating that it had the potential to bring about the next stage in humanity's evolution.

The impact introduces an alien substance to the world dubbed Tiberium, which becomes of unprecedented value due to its unique property of leeching precious metals from the surrounding soil and crystallizing them.

The Tiberium substance was introduced to replace the spice from Dune II as the mined resource for building and expanding, with Louis Castle stating: " It solved one of the fundamental problems we had with making an RTS, which was that we wanted to have a central resource that everybody was fighting over.

The GDI Commander Michael McNeil is tasked with objectives to prevent the world from falling into the hands of Nod, this time with the very means of the extraterrestrial Tiberium substance.

While the original Command & Conquers plot was centered around an allegorical world politics setting, Tiberium Sun shifted this to a more sci-fi-like setting against the apocalyptic background of Tiberium beginning to assimilate vast portions of the Earth's ecosystems.

The plot worked, as under the order of Acting Director Redmond Boyle the ion cannon was fired directly upon " Temple Prime " in Sarajevo in an eerie repetition of historical events, which detonated a liquid Tiberium deposit purposely hidden deep underneath the Temple Prime and causing a cataclysmic explosion across south-eastern Europe.