I have played Dark Reign and even completed it around 2002 (the game came out in ’97). But I didn’t know it was actually quite the financial success, selling over 300K copied, when the authors expected 30K to break even.
Also, turns out it was initially developed by just two guys. And that their approach was to build the game engine, and then use it to build the game, which was groundbreaking in 1997. One of the lead developers later went to work at Blizzard, and I wonder if that had any influence on a very similar approach of StarCraft.
Also, turns out Dark Reign 2 was developed by a different team, because most of the developers of the original relocated from Australia to USA, to work for Activision, which paid x4.