Command & Conquer fans spent over a decade wondering whether a mysterious, poorly-rendered tile depicted a crashed UFO. Now, with the release of the remaster of the seminal real-time strategy game, they can see this infamous UFO tile clearly for the first time.
Mission three of the GDI campaign contains an odd-looking tile west of the cliff in the starting area. In the 1995 game, this pixelated piece of virtual battlefield was difficult to identify. Players thought it looked like a crashed UFO, or a Scrin ship (in Command & Conquer, the Scrin are a technologically advanced race suspected to have originally seeded Earth with Tiberium using a meteor). And so for years the tile was thought to be some sort of alien craft.
But it is not a UFO - at least, it was not meant to be. In 2007, 13 years after Command & Conquer came out, developers at Petroglyph, the studio founded by former staff at original developer Westwood Studios and developer of the remaster, revealed the tile was in fact meant to depict a helicopter crash.