"We are starting the activation process with a very small pool of testers and will work to ramp this number up to thousands and thousands of Comrades around the world on a weekly basis, likely multiple times a week throughout the rest of this month and August," EALA noted on the game's official site.

The studio expects the next wave to bring in at least 10,000 more participants. At present, the only way to register for the beta is to use the key that was bundled with the PC edition of the C&C3 expansion pack Kane's Wrath.

The full version of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 arrives on PC and Xbox 360 this October. The project was originally slated to hit PlayStation 3 as well, but was later cancelled due to the PS3's "exotic and tough" development environment.