Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines sold 100 times its forecast

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is a real-time tactics game from Pyro Studios in Madrid, published by Eidos Interactive and released in Europe on June 24, 1998. The studio expected about 15,000 sales. By May 2000 the game and its expansion had passed 1.5 million, roughly 100 times that forecast.

A small Madrid team built Commandos in 18 months for about $1 million

Pyro Studios was founded in 1996, two years before Commandos shipped. Designer Gonzalo Suárez said he saw that hardly any tactical action games were being developed and decided to make one. Suárez wanted a squad of five or six people who could solve a situation together. Javier Pérez Dolset proposed moving that idea to World War II. For the look, Suárez imagined a child taken to a World War II diorama exhibition who would only want to play with the little soldiers.

Fellow designer Ignacio Pérez Dolset put the budget at about one million dollars. Lead programmer Jon Beltran de Heredia said the work took around 18 months, with a team of roughly 18 people. The finished source code ran to about 250,000 lines of C++ and assembly. He recalled seven-day weeks near the end. The sequel cost roughly $7 million.

The team wrote its own graphics engine and had to leave behind the tile systems most games used at the time. No mission editor could be built. Every map was put together by hand. Soldiers leave footprints in snow and sand that fade over time, and the height of a wall decides what a guard can see. The score is by David García-Morales.

A MeriStation writer, in a January 1998 preview, saw Spanish software as "slowly re-emerging from its ashes".

One dead commando ends the mission

You command a squad of up to six Allied soldiers: Green Beret, Marine, Driver, Sapper, Sniper and Spy. The 20 missions are spread across occupied Europe and North Africa, from Norwegian snow to the streets of Paris. Each man has his own voice and personality. The Spy can pass as a Nazi officer, but only after he finds a uniform in the field.

The whole map is visible from the start. Enemy vision shows as cones, light green at close range and dark green at long range. The mission fails if any one commando is killed. You can save anywhere during a mission.

The original holds an 81% average on GameRankings. Next Generation praised the graphics and the difficulty. GameSpot gave it 8.4 out of 10, IGN 8.2 and Edge 7. Computer Gaming World gave the lowest score, 2.5 out of 5.

The expansion, Beyond the Call of Duty, came out on March 31, 1999 in North America with eight more missions. It let you throw stones and cigarette packs as distractions and handcuff unconscious guards. It averaged 79% on GameRankings. GameSpot's Greg Kasavin liked the maps but called the missions clumsy. He rated it 6.6 out of 10. The hotkeys could not be changed, which was another of his complaints.

Why a 15,000-copy forecast became 1.5 million

Pyro did little promotion. Suárez credited word of mouth for the sales.

The game spent 16 weeks at number one on the German computer game charts and 15 weeks at number one in the UK. German-speaking countries bought 158,000 copies by the end of September 1998, enough for German Gold and Platinum awards. Worldwide, sales reached 600,000 by November and 706,000 by the end of the year.

The game and expansion together reached 1.3 million by July 1999. In 2001, GameSpot Spain called it the biggest hit in Spanish game history.

The series reached 3.3 million copies before Origins in 2025

Commandos 2: Men of Courage reached Windows in September 2001. It added interiors and underwater areas, a Thief and a dog named Whiskey. Commandos 3: Destination Berlin followed in October 2003, and the shooter Commandos: Strike Force in 2006. The series sold 3.3 million copies.

Pyro merged with Play Wireless in 2012 to form Pyro Mobile, which stopped operating in the second half of 2017. Kalypso Media acquired the series from Pyro in 2018. Yippee! Entertainment built Commandos 2: HD Remaster for Kalypso. It came out on Windows on January 24, 2020, and on PS4 and Xbox One on September 18, 2020. The Switch version followed on December 4, 2020. Reviews were mixed. Critics complained about the controls and the upscaling. The removal of Nazi symbols drew criticism too. A Commandos 3 HD Remaster followed in 2022.

Commandos: Origins arrived on April 9, 2025 from Claymore Game Studios. It is a prequel that follows the sapper Thomas Hancock as he forms the team between 1940 and 1942. Metacritic scores it 71 out of 100. The 1998 game's ideas also live on in the Desperados series and Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, both described as spiritual successors.

Where to play Commandos today

The 1998 original costs €4.99 on Steam under Kalypso Media Digital. On October 23, 2026, 90% of its 1,261 English reviews were positive. A Commandos Pack on the same page has four games for €14.99: Commandos 2, Commandos 3, the original and Beyond the Call of Duty. The store's system requirements still list Windows 95, 98 and ME and a Pentium II.

The Commandos 2 remaster has its own Steam page for Windows and macOS, plus SteamOS and Linux, at €19.99 and a Mixed rating (58% of 1,992 reviews) on the same date. On a Mac it needs an Intel machine; the page lists Apple M1 as unsupported. It is also on PS4 and Xbox One, with a separate Switch version. If you want the newest entry rather than a remaster, Origins is on PC and on the current consoles, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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Questions people ask

Is Commandos on Steam?

Yes. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is on Steam on its own or in the Commandos Pack with the expansion and the next two sequels. Commandos 2 is also there as an HD Remaster.

Does Commandos work on Windows 11?

Often, with some work. In a Steam forum thread on Windows 11 from December 2023, players hit a DirectX 5 error or a black window with sound; two of them reported that updating their AMD graphics driver fixed it.

What order are the Commandos games in?

Behind Enemy Lines (1998), the Beyond the Call of Duty expansion (1999), Commandos 2: Men of Courage (2001), Commandos 3: Destination Berlin (2003) and the shooter Strike Force (2006). Commandos: Origins (2025) is a prequel to all of them.

Why is the game called Commandos?

The squad is modeled on the British Commandos of World War II. Lieutenant-Colonel D. W. Clarke of the British Imperial General Staff suggested the name for the new raiding units, after the Boer commandos whose tactics had frustrated the British army in the Second Boer War.