In Twilight: 2000's version of 1995, a series of Sino-Soviet border conflicts expands into general war between the Soviet Union and China.

The Sino-Soviet war rapidly escalates from conventional warfare into exchanges of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

During Thanksgiving of 1997, the Soviet Union launches a surprise first strike against targets in the United States and Europe.

Several divisions and corps on each side are virtually eliminated, supply lines are lost, high level command breaks down, and armies in the European theater lose cohesion beyond the platoon unit.

Some go "native" and integrate with the militias of independent free cities, others turn into gangs of marauding bandits, and some small groups of surviving soldiers seek to find their way home.

To create 300 years of background history for their science-fiction RPG 2300 AD, GDW staff members participated in an in-house simulation called "The Great Game", with Frank Chadwick as referee.

Starting with the world situation in 2000 following the Twilight War, players controlled one or more countries and guided them through 300 years of development, including the discovery of faster-than-light space travel, colonization of other Earthlike planets, and contact with a variety of sentient aliens.

Version 2.2, GDW's final edition of the game, was published in 1993 and featured a background in which the KGB's Alpha Group obeys the coup leaders in the August 1991 Soviet coup attempt and storms the Russian White House, killing Boris Yeltsin and effectively preserving communist control.

Versions 2.0 and 2.2, both using the system that became standard for GDW's games, are currently available in watermarked PDF format online (as are the first edition rules).

In 1991, GDW licensees Paragon developed the Twilight 2000 computer game adaptation (complete with expansion, "the Colonel") depicting a squad of 20 soldiers stranded behind enemy lines in Poland, struggling against the despot Baron Czarny.

[4] The game has a new ruleset based on the Year Zero Engine, and background where the Soviet Union survives the fall of the Berlin Wall and battle in central Europe is joined in 1998.

Merc: 2000 characters are confronted there with aliens as the world turns into the near-future setting of Dark Conspiracy.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs used the second edition Twilight: 2000 rules and was set in Mark Schultz's underground comic book series Xenozoic Tales.

[10] Swan commented that "Whether or not Twilight: 2000 becomes a standard remains to be seen, but it certainly fills a niche and does so successfully; I hope it finds an audience with role-players and wargamers alike.

The nice concept and character generation system are completely overrun by innumerable flaws and hopeless violations of the laws of physics.

Swan thought the character generation system was "the game's weakest feature ... the procedure takes forever, involving innumerable modifiers and convoluted formulas."

"[12] Marcus L. Rowland reviewed Twilight: 2000 for White Dwarf #68, giving it an overall rating of 5 out of 10, and stated that "it's evident that this game has been written by and for Americans, with little or no understanding of European attitudes or desires.

Editor Paul Pettengale commented: "Pretty much all the previous 'post-apocalyptic' RPGs had been fairly fantastical, and had been set some time after the apocalypse.