I can't comment on Red Alert 2 in particular, but many early network multiplayer games predate widespread adoption of the internet so TCP/IP wasn't an option. E

I can't comment on Red Alert 2 in particular, but many early network multiplayer games predate widespread adoption of the internet so TCP/IP wasn't an option. Early online gaming services like Kali were almost a product built around a TCP/IP wrapper for IPX that allowed internet multiplayer on a platform it wasn't initially designed for. But it wasn't long before most people probably didn't even have the IPX protocol installed anymore.