Back in 2003, FinalMoon, the TiberiumSun.com webmaster, challenged RVMECH and Yoshi, who were two of the most respected TS mappers to a map competition with the objective of helping to keep the Tiberian Sun community alive. The event was called: "The Great Map Competition", but it wasn't all that great, as Yoshi resigned and FinalMoon left the community and had to be replaced by The DvD, who eventually made the best map (Cracks In The Sand), according to SMIFFGIG, the replacement Judge.

Finalmoon's idea inspired people to make a competition where everyone could send in their Tiberian Sun maps and get recognition for their mapping skills. Few weeks later, february 2004, both TiberiumSun.com and Project Perfect Mod organized the first edition of the Open Map Competition. The contest lasted till april 2004. It was successfull and some high quality maps were submitted. Some of the best maps were made by people who were (relatively) unknown in the community. The first winner was Tesla7zap (from Gaming Eye and CnC: Unleashed) with the map Tiber River 2356. Tratos (from Savage War) came in second with the map Trauma.

The second Open Map Competition was organized some months later, and ran from october to december 2004. The hosts this time were again Tiberium Sun, Project Perfect Mod, but also TS: Savage War and Strategy Gaming Source (which no longer exists). The idea was to have 4 judges this time, so we would have a more balanced rating system. Although the competition was delayed several times due to some of the sites being offline, it worked out well. The quality of the maps improved considerably. However, only 3 judges rated the maps because the fourth had problems. The winner this time was Wes.com (well known mapper, forum member at PPM and TiberiumSun) with the map Smokey's Valley. Clazzy (from Savage War) won the second place with the map Primeval, which is featured on his mod Clazzy's Rules.

In 2005, the Open Map Competition 3 has brought some new challenges: Instead of only one game, it also covered Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge and Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour and it's also an event that is being organized by lots of CnC Community sites and hosted at CnCCommunity.Net, which is a neutral site to unite webmasters from C&C sites. Each game had 5 judges. Winners got real prizes like games, thanks to several webmasters who contributed with prizes and Electronic Arts, who sponsored the event with several C&C items such as collection edition games, renegade mousemats and game soundtracks. The event was very sucessfull, but it was far from being perfect. The Tiberian Sun maps submitted to the event were better than in the older events, although the style of RA2 and Generals maps were fairly different, which made them to be judged in a lighter way. Relying on many people caused several inconveniences. Some judges delayed their reviews or gave up and they had to be replaced by others who didn't submited maps or reviewed maps for other games. One of the game organizers left due to real life issues. It took a while to negotiate and renegotiate the prizes and, when EA sent them, it took some other good months to collect money to send to the winners. The veteran Tesla7zap has won again, at the Tiberian Sun part of the contest with FS: Contagius. Oredragon won the RA2 part with Sillyanas Deep scoring 87.33 points, which was the highest final rate of a map in all OMC editions. Bhones won the Generals part with Temple Mesa, which scored 85.33 points.

This set of events made us think twice before starting another contest with more than one game. In 2007, with Command & Conquer 3 being released, we would need to support 4 games, however, in this fourth edition of the Open Map Competition, we were only supporting Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, and carrying the experience from the previous edition. There were more prizes for each top 3 than the previous edition, however, now we took the care of gathering the money to cover the shipping costs before the event started. Most of the rules of the last Open Map Competition is being applied at this edition, but few changes were made to motivate the submission of more creative maps. Command & Conquer 3 was released with too many symmetrical maps, to focus perfect ballance as part of their RTS As Sport feature. Symmetrical maps are predictable, since you don't need to scout the whole map to see all the tactical possibilities of your enemy, it is unrealistic and not creative. For these reasons, we no longer accepted symmetrical map submissions. The other changes includes the submission of multiples entries per candidate and more detailed judging guideliness. The main prize offered by EA was the possibility of the best maps being included on Command & Conquer 3 expansion pack Kane's Wrath, which gave the OMC4 the honour to be the first fan contest to trully influence a C&C game with the top 2 maps being included in the first patch of the expansion. This edition was also the first edition where a software called Open Map Competition Manager was developped specially for it, and, with it, the scores were calculated and published few hours after the last judge sent his review of the maps. And few hours later, all non top ten maps were published, with reports including all judge scores and comments, since the maps that scores 60 points or better are always posted separately and slowly. Even after three editions of the contest and so many maps submitted so far, it was actually surprising that all submitters from this edition did not sent any maps to the previous OMC editions. The winner was JBV3737 with the map Wind Of Desolation, scoring 80 points, followed by KingBase's map Corrupted State, with 73 points. Both visitors of CNCDEN. JBV3737 has also got the 5th, 6th and 12th with his other submissions, while King Base became the mapper with the highest amount of submissions for OMCs, with 6 valid maps sent in only one edition.