Mankind is at war with the Strogg, a hostile alien race planning an invasion of Earth. In response, we launched a preemptive strike...it failed. Outnumbered and outgunned, you must fight to shut down the enemy's war machine. Only then will the fate of humanity be known.
It wasn't a "preemptive strike". The Strogg went to Earth and fucked our shit up. We just happened to survive long enough to reverse engineer their technology and fly back to their homeworld to kick their asses.
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The game manual covers this.
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The intro cinematic covers this.
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Quake Wars lets you actually play through the Earth invasion (albeit as a class-based team multiplayer game).
Someone really phoned in the summary for this thing, and maybe i shouldn't be as irritated as i am but this game was a huge part of my youth and it's kinda baffling to me how someone can get a summary so dead-ass wrong for a game that barely has a story at all