Playing Command and Conquer: Red Alert at 7 Years in German Foster Care
It’s 1999. Kinderheim Bregenz. You’re seven. You don’t really know what Red Alert is.
You just know it’s a disc — silver and black — that sometimes, if no one’s using the TV and nobody’s yelling that day, you get to play for an hour. Maybe two, if the mood stays quiet. It boots up. That title screen. That music. The deep red glow of a world divided.
You don’t understand it’s about war. You don’t even know who Stalin is. What you do know is that you can build things. You can move the little units around, make them drive, shoot, die. And even though you’re struggling with the medium missions — failing more often than not — grown men sometimes stop and stare. They laugh. Not in a cruel way, but in disbelief.
“He’s seven,” you hear one of them say. “Doesn’t even speak English.”
And it’s true. You don’t. Not a single sentence. But you know exactly what “Mission Accomplished,” “Reinforcements have arrived,” and “Nuclear launch detected” mean. You repeat them under your breath. Sometimes out loud. In the hallway. In the kitchen. Once, you say it during breakfast and someone chokes on their coffee.
There’s something about the game that cuts through everything. The never-ending Wurstbrot. The punishments. The forced farm work, even in the rain. The long hours cleaning cars with ice water in your gloves. The way no one ever explained why some beds suddenly stayed empty. Red Alert didn’t explain anything either — but it didn’t need to. It showed you.
You learned the value of resources. You needed ore. Ore became credits. Credits built tanks. Simple math, but more useful than anything the staff ever taught you. You learned that ore runs out. That you have to expand, scout, protect your harvesters or lose everything. No second chances. That’s how it was with food, too. And trust.
Sometimes you watched the grainy cutscenes where people lied, smiled, betrayed each other — and it felt oddly familiar. Like watching a distorted version of the people you grew up around. The fake praise. The backhanded punishments. The illusion of control.
There was one Allied mission that broke something open. Tanya, escaping from a Soviet prison. You remember gripping the controller too tight. You didn’t know what “escape” really meant yet, but something in your chest ached.
You thought: this is me.
Of course, you never got out like Tanya Adams, the commando of the allies. Not then. Every time you tried — every tiny rebellion, every refusal to obey — something would go wrong. You’d be caught. Punished. And slowly, always, you’d drift back into that silent routine. Into acceptance.
But not forever.
One day, you finished the mission. Tanya got out. And you knew — without telling anyone, without even needing words — that you would too.
I can’t explain how. Or when. Only that it happened.
And the mission was accomplished.
