32 years ago, this Dune video game created a genre: it even inspired Blizzard's famous Warcraft saga

Game news 32 years ago, this Dune video game created a genre: it even inspired Blizzard's famous Warcraft saga

The mainstay of the RTS genre

Dune 2: The Battle of Arrakis is a game released in 1992, developed by Westwood, and published by Virgin Interactive. When Westwood Associates became Westwood Studios, the company released two games in the same year: the point & click The Legend of Kyrandia and Dune 2, which will become a reference for RTS. This sets up several phases of gameplay. First the exploration and collection of resources, notably Spice. Then, the battles where the player organizes his own troops and chooses to conquer this or that territory from a map. Finally, players manage the ecology, among other things by terraforming and building traps. The plot is based on the story written by Frank Herbert.

The player plays the hero, Paul Atreides, who must face the Harkonnens of Dune (planet Arrakis) to maintain the exploitation of the Spice, a rare commodity used to guide space navigators while extending their life expectancy. Even if Dune is not technically the very first RTS – there was Herzog Zwei in 1989 – it still presents itself as a standard of the genre because of its qualities. We can clearly see this: the varied gameplay of Dune 2 is found in games such as Starcraft or the Warcraft saga.

They're not the only ones who had the idea

Westwood Studios weren't the only ones to release a Dune game, this latest one is officially the second. The very first project is supported by Cryo Interactive, a French studio. This company was created following a disagreement between developers and Virgin (USA). At that time, the programmers had made a proposal to Martin Alper, the president of the American firm, who was not convinced. Disappointed with this refusal, the person who made the proposal, Philippe Ulrich, decided to create Cryo Interactive in order to continue the development of his project. At the same time, Westwood Studios signed a contract with Virgin to produce a Dune game, which would ultimately become the RTS Dune 2: Battle of Arrakis. For its part, Cryo Interactive managed to release Dune, the same year but in a different genre, which placed more emphasis on adventure. These two games are not the only adaptations of Frank Herbert's novels. The films of David Lynch (1994) and Denis Villeneuve (2021 and 2024) are the best-known works. A prequel series, Dune: Prophecyalso produced by Quebecer Denis Villeneuve, begins November 18 on HBO Max.