Almost missed the window for this and only read it by accident while on a C&C binge I started earlier in the week. It was released on August 27th 1999 in North America but apparently came out a few days earlier internationally. I vaguely recall Westwood boasting about it being the first PC game with a worldwide simultaneous release but that doesn't seem to be entirely true, then. It was the fastest selling non-sports EA published game at the time with 1.5 million sold within its first month.
I have a complicated relationship with this game. This was my first case of being burned by overhype. It was my most anticipated title I was waiting for in the late 90's. Westwood got the ball rolling really, really early by including a CGI teaser in the first Command & Conquer in 1995. It was around 1997 and 1998 when we started getting the first actual screenshots and information in magazine previews. The previews got me really excited over all the amazing features they were putting in the game. I remember them talking about stuff like how unit visibility was going to be affected by the dynamic lighting system and day/night cycle, and how this added a new tactical element by including lightposts/spotlights in the base building tied to your power. There was going to be a system for wind direction which would affect the spread of toxic gas and even spread forest fires. Units would be able to level up from gaining experience. You could zoom and rotate the map. Mutants were going to be their own faction with ingame agency responding in emergent ways to how either GDI or Nod treated them. Cities/villages with neutral factions were basically being hyped up as some kind of precursor to Oblivion's infamous Radiant AI. Ultimately, a lot of these ideas were either scrapped or implemented in a pretty half-baked way.
The previews were also the first instance where I noticed in hindsight some pretty blatant "bullshots", ie screenshots being doctored in post (not just tech being downgraded for release like Watch Dogs), with units, explosions, etc being composited on top.
There was also this CGI trailer I got on a PC Gamer CD-Rom which was just the coolest shit:
The track played (Stomp) didn't make it into the final game (was instead recycled for Renegade in 2002), though the motifs were reused in other tracks. This will always be the actual TibSun theme for me and the equivalent to Red Alert's Hell March.
The live action FMVs took a departure from the standard C&C formula of the cast addressing the player in first person and instead gave them actual protagonist actors implied to be the players. This was the only C&C in which they did this AFAIK, and they even dropped it for the Firestorm expansion's FMVs going back to the tried and true formula. They went big with the casting for this game, getting Michael Biehn and James Earl Jones for GDI. While Nod got the main cast of Frank Zagarino and Monika Schnarre (alongside Joe Kucan as Kane, of course).
The final product ended with most reviews in the 8/10 range. While still a very enjoyable game, the troubled years long dev cycle since Red Alert in 1996 had left its mark, and in the interim Blizzard had released Starcraft and radically changed the expectations for the RTS market. While mechs and all were cool, the pivot in the setting from near future to all out sci fi (to the point where they lifted units/tech straight out of their Dune games) also seemed to be a bit divisive. I think C&C3 dialing it back a bit for something inbetween TibDawn and TibSun was ultimately a good decision.
I think this might also have been the last RTS to have been fully developed by Westwood internally. Red Alert 2 was made by their Pacific subsidiary which got turned into EALA after the shutdown of the Las Vegas studio. There was also Emperor: Battle for Dune in 2001 but I'm pretty sure development of that was outsourced as well. The live action FMV and Frank Klepacki's music was most of what the actual Westwood did for those games AFAIK.
Tiberian Sun has been available for free since 2010. If you want to play TS today I think the better option is to use one of the modern engine enhancements to make it run better in a modern OS. The modding scene is quite active to this day, and unlike something like Doom source ports, since all of TS is free you can get a modern client with the full package included.
For vanilla TS the go-to seems to be Tiberian Sun Client. For mods actually changing the game content there's also no shortage of total conversions available at moddb.com. 2 of the most popular are Twisted Insurrection and Dawn of the Tiberium Age (these also run in their own dedicated clients so you don't have to bother with managing mods overriding the vanilla game. Very convenient.).
