Here's some context that may include apocrypha that might help make this discussion more entertaining.
Renegade was rushed out the door what was, to my recollection, around the time pre-orders came into vogue, bonuses included alternate skins for Havoc in multiplayer. Westwood's initial plan, from what my cabal of pals could determine, was to create a campaign that gave the player the choice of siding with GDI or Nod and incorporated RTS components. But due to technical hurdles and a much reduced deadline we got a twitchy UT wannabe with bases and simplistic bots(That only worked on a couple maps).
Prior to that, Warren Spector was coming off a bout of developing successful games that would later be recognized as some of the first 'Immersive Sims'. He was in talks with EA to sign on and make a C&C action RPG, EA already had a somewhat negative reputation at that point, and John Romero convinced him to join up with Ion Storm instead with the promise of greater creative freedom. That creative freedom resulted in Deus Ex, the first game, and the franchise as a whole. The talent that stayed on with EA pending the cancellation of that project rolled some concepts and assets into their new project.
At some point after the release of Renegade, someone in Westwood's staff presumably wanted to codify C&C's story into a document in preparation for Tiberian Twilight, the followup to Tiberian Sun. This allegedly resulted in the "C&C Bible" which, IMO isn't a very compelling read and paints Kane, the multiple-ion-cannon-strike-surviving savior of humanity as nothing more than a narcissistic megalomaniac with access to knowledge and tech of Martian origin.(This was later re-incorporated into C&C 4, but Kane is implied to actually be alien, and a sort of gestalt of the dead martian race, bearing a fondness for humanity himself) Said document is self-contradictory, riddled with typos, and comes off as cheap fanfic, if it is indeed to be believed it's of official origin. Tiberium is also said to leech "life energy" from a planet, pulling it out of the realm of hard sci-fi if that were to ever to have been confirmed as 'canon', but this did not come to pass as EA would later retcon Tiberium's most basic details with the launch of C&C 3.
