Well, there was a time when bug aliens weren't just, you know, bug aliens
. It's hard to imagine, but back then, the idea of the alien bug swarm wasn't overdone at all.
More than that, there was something timely about it. Science fiction (and not the sophisticated, Phillip K. Dick or Arthur C. Clarke kind of sci-fi, but the pulpy kind) always had a tendency to reflect the "big" worries of the day. You had dozens of "body snatchers" flicks in the 1950s, when the big fear was communist infiltration. You had all those "mutated creature" films in the 1960s, and so on. As I look back on the late 1990s now, I get the impression that the big thing playing out in sci-fi at the time was the fear of an unknown future. The Cold War was over, there were
literally political scientists proclaiming that "haha, democracy has won, it's the best system ever, no one will ever try to fight it, so history must be over" - but on the other hand, common sense told people that... you know, history is never over. So, what's lurking around the corner? And this played out in a great many films - and games. While the first three WC games were busy with the whole "WWII in space" thing, the later games certainly seem to fit the "fear of the unknown evil" concept. But on September 11th 2001, that whole notion expired - and again, you can see this in sci-fi. For example, Steven Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds could only make sense in a post-9/11 world: the aliens who strike New York were
already there? They were
hidden inflitrators? Compare that to Independence Day from a decade earlier. It's the exact same plot, virtually a very loose adaptation of the same novel, but how different the feel of the story, with an emphasis on the aliens unexpectedly coming out of nowhere and on America stepping up to the bat to defend the world...
This, I am certain, is why WCP feels much weaker now than it did back then - and rightly so, but let's give credit where credit is due. It didn't seem so naive and predictable back then, because it was in tune with the times. Today...? Well, let's just say that when StarCraft II finally came out and continued exactly from where the first game had ended, I had a hard time taking the plot seriously: it just felt
sooo 1990s (not to mention being a total ripoff of WarCraft III...).