Dune - The Grandfather of Real-Time Strategy

The noble Atreides. The insidious Ordos. The evil Harkonnen. Within his reach, a desert planet and the spice to control the universe. Welcome to Arrakis. Dune was written by Frank Herbert, who was inspired by the

dune

s of Oregon. It began life in the monthly magazine Analog, later reworked into a single novel and published in 1965. It quickly racked up praise and awards for its rich world and very human conflicts, and established itself as a science fiction classic, frequently cited as one of the biggest. specimens of the genus. You may have heard a bit of Dune's cinematic history. The license was first purchased by Apjac International in 1971, but the producer died before filming could begin and production was halted.

The rights changed hands and Alejandro Jodorowsky began directing. After spending $2 million on pre-production alone and the script lasting a projected fourteen hours, the project collapsed. To say it was overly ambitious would be an understatement. Dino De Laurentiis acquired the rights in 1976. David Lynch came aboard as director, and the infamous Dune adaptation was finally released in 1984. The subsequent film was a notorious flop, but Virgin Games arrived in the valley of opportunity. Enter Martin Alper. You may not know the name, but you may recognize the voice. RED ALERT ANNOUNCER: Enemy approaching. Alper was the president of Virgin Games.

He enjoyed Dune and managed to license the rights to create games based on the film. Specifically the movie, curiously. He didn't have much of a concept, other than the idea of ​​making adventure games, and he wanted Virgin to compete with Sierra Online. The project was entrusted to Cryo Interactive, a small French development team. Virgin, however, was unimpressed with the infrequent and “incomplete” milestone presentations, so the decision was made to cancel the game. At the

time

, Westwood Studios was developing Legend of Kyrandia. When some Virgin staff visited to do a demo, they offered Westwood the Dune license.

Brett Sperry, president and co-founder of Westwood. Sperry, a fan of both Lynch's novels and film, took the reins. They asked him to look at Herzog Zwei for ideas, a game the Virgin office had been playing a lot. The title, by the way, is German. Duke II. Hmm. “Herzog Zwei was a lot of fun,” Sperry recalls, “but I have to say that the other inspiration for Dune II was the Mac software interface. The whole design interface dynamic of clicking the mouse and selecting items on the desktop made me think; Inspiration also came from other places; Populous, Civilization, Military Madness, Westwood's own Eye of the Beholder, and a discussion Sperry once had with Chuck Kroegel, then vice president of Strategic Simulations, who felt that war games were past their prime, mainly due to their roots in turn-based games. tabletop board games, taking players to newer and more exciting genres.

Sperry felt that the genre had barely been explored, so designing an exciting, fast-paced wargame was a personal challenge. And so, with Joe Bostic, Aaron Powell and the rest of Westwood behind the project, he began development. Westwood's Dune was released on MS-DOS in 1992, but did not keep that name. Although Virgin had canceled Cryo's Dune, it worked out; Nobody told Cryo. They continued working on the project, getting much further into development before Virgin found out, and managed to finish the game earlier that same year. Despite not being a sequel, it was the Westwood title that received the name change, becoming Dune II.

Although there were

strategy

games with

real

-

time

elements before, Dune II was the first RTS by virtue of being the game that gave its name to the genre. The term was chosen by Sperry to distinguish the new style of play from the contemporary labels of “wargaming” and “

strategy

.” Games like Herzog Zwei preceded it, but it was Dune II that codified the standards, becoming the foundation upon which future

real

-time strategy titles would be built. You start with a construction yard, which allows you to build wind traps for energy, and a refinery with an automated harvester. The spice you mine is converted into credits and used to fund your army.

It's all there, albeit in a somewhat archaic package. Unlike later RTSs, it is not possible to select and command more than one unit at a time, a feature introduced by later games such as WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, which allowed simultaneous control of up to a total of four. The control system is also quite basic. After selecting a unit, the player must choose a command from the sidebar or press the associated key and then click to issue it. The context-sensitive cursor was added in the Genesis port only a year later, but it took another game to standardize these features.

An innovative game for the time, but difficult to control by today's standards, a limitation that some contemporary reviews also mention. That's why much of the footage you've been seeing comes from Dune Dynasty, a loyal fan remake based on the OpenDune project. Dune II was one of Frank Klepacki's first songwriting projects for Westwood. He took inspiration for the sound of Dune from Toto's music for the film and the soundtrack of the game Cryo by Stéphane Picq and Philippe Ulrich, but from there he made it his own. The music changed instruments every few bars and was built to adapt to dynamic tempo changes, allowing it to flow from one score to another in accordance with the action on screen.

Although, of course, for Frank, and indeed for Westwood, his best work was yet to come. From the beginning, Sperry was not content to be tied to a licensed property. SPERRY: The interesting thing about all of that is that SPERRY: you know what, and at the end of the day, SPERRY: this is a prototype. SPERRY: I'm going to create something else SPERRY: without anyone's license, SPERRY: and it will be called Command & Conquer. Even the name Command & Conquer was tied to Dune II before the game that would bear that name solidified as a concept. "The first in Westwood's new Command and Conquer series," "powered by Westwood's Command & Conquer engine." A direct box mention of Dune II, written in the fall of 1992, appeared in magazines as early as 1993, and one even gives the new game a name.

The January issue of The One Amiga published an interview with Sperry ahead of the Amiga port of Dune, during which he previewed “Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone.” Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood. "When we first showed the game internally, it had wizards and castles," he recalled, speaking of this early form of C&C. "It solved one of the fundamental problems we had when making an RTS, which was that we wanted to have a central resource that everyone was fighting over. Dune has Spice, which made a lot of sense and was also used when we came up with the idea of ​​Tiberium" The DnD-inspired fantasy setting was abandoned in favor of a more relatable near-future conflict, and inspired by the 1957 B-movie The Monolith Monsters, a powerful green crystal would replace the Spice's role, becoming the resource around. from which the entire story would unfold.

Command & Conquer was released in 1995, and... well, you know the rest. But it wasn't the end of the road for Dune. VOICE: On this planet... VOICE. : you will die VOICE: We've seen it. In 1998, Dune 2000, a sort of remake of Dune II, was released while Westwood was working on Tiberian Sun, development was outsourced to British developer Intelligent Games, who had previously handled the expansions. by Red Alert (EDIT: multiplayer maps only) The gameplay is comparable to Red Alert, being a decent update to the original Dune. It also included basic live action scenes from the C&C series, MONEO: Riches!?

MONEO: Is that why you have come to this MONEO: damn sand pit that saw the return of the Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos? The Ordos, of course, were not in the original books, while the other two factions played very prominent roles. The House's name comes from the Dune Encyclopedia, which was praised by Frank Herbert but is now considered non-canonical by his estate. It appeared in a list of the Great Houses of the Landsraad, although the coat of arms of House Ordos as used in the Westwood games, a snake coiled around a book, was actually designed for House Wallach.

Although this is the only mention of Ordos in the source material, the House appeared as a playable faction in every Dune RTS, allowing Westwood to develop his own story for this House of merchants and smugglers. MENTAT: Worm sign. In addition to reprising his role as Harkonnen's announcer, Frank Klepacki returned to compose the game's music, using it as an opportunity to remaster his Dune II soundtrack, which is now no longer limited by old sound cards. Dune 2000 really is just C&C on Arrakis, and it's a shame that the game is all but forgotten today, now perhaps better known as that other game that comes with OpenRA.

It was adequately reviewed at the time, although many critics disparaged it for its "dated visuals and overly familiar gameplay," two factors that may have been strong at the time, but are less of an issue now. Sure, it's still dated, but for a 22-year-old game, isn't that expectation the price of admission? Still, it's better for a good game to be misremembered as a bad game than not to be remembered at all. Much of the same can be said for Emperor: Battle for Dune, a game that follows C&C's core tenants but ends up feeling somewhat different. Again outsourced to Intelligent Games, it was the first and indeed only 3D RTS to be released under the Westwood name.

It is commonly believed to be powered by the Westwood 3D engine, the same engine used for Renegade, and which was adopted by EA under the SAGE name for every Generals C&C until 2010. In reality, this is not the case. Research by Assembly Armada's tomsons26 has confirmed that Emperor does, in fact, use a completely different engine called Xanadu developed in-house by Intelligent Games. D2K also used its own in-house engine instead of Westwood's, despite common claims that it is powered by the Red Alert engine. Emperor is a brave attempt to transition to a 3D perspective. It allowed for a fairly reasonable camera height, with the low camera being a common complaint in SAGE games, but going to the maximum height only exacerbates the game's problems with design readability.

With the low-poly models and the ease with which units are grouped together, the game can be a bit murky in the way it conveys what it is you're looking at. It may have inherited its esoteric art style from D2K, but for a game from 2001, you can't fault it for its polygon count. Reading the silhouette of an object is always much easier with 2D images. You may not know what each of these units does until you fire them, but you will always be able to tell them apart. These guys are definitely not identical, but when we get closer to a more playable height, they look like the same thing.

The user interface certainly doesn't help. While the sidebar is definitely very attractive and well designed, the health bar has been replaced by a translucent health ring, which by default is half hidden behind the Guard mode icon. These are things you can overcome over time as you become more familiar with the game. Unit voices, however, are a problem that only gets worse the more you play. Individual units sound great, but the game has unique voice barks for groups, and let's just say it doesn't have that many. HARKONNEN UNITS: At once! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away!

Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! HARKONNEN UNITS: At once! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! At once! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! Right away! The soundtrack, however, is something else. This time, each House has its own unique music from a different composer. House Atreides is composed by Frank, taking a mostly orchestral approach similar to D2K, with some nods to his previous work. Composed by David Arkenstone, House Harkonnen has a taut industrial quality, with electric guitars for the melody.

However, it is House Ordos that steals the show. These songs were composed by Jarrid Mendelson, who had previously worked with Frank on Tiberian Sun. Unfortunately, these two titles would be the only games he would compose for, having apparently left the industry after Emperor. It may have shortcomings, but they don't define an otherwise quality game. The emperor, above all, was ambitious. It set out to distinguish itself from Command & Conquer, in the process becoming an entity unto itself. This is his legacy. Emperor: Battle for Dune was the last game in the series to be released. Intelligent Games would close just a year later, and EA would liquidate Westwood Studios shortly after.Our old friends Cryo Interactive released another adventure game based on the TV series, shortly before the company filed for bankruptcy.

And that was Dune. It's been over a decade since the last Command & Conquer release, but with the Remastered Collection on the horizon, that's about to change. But what about Duna? The emperor was released in 2001 and almost two full decades have passed since then. Among all the talk about Remasters, thoughts have turned to Arrakis. It's a shame it's not possible. Westwood may have had a degree of creative freedom, but Dune was ultimately a licensed product and the license has since expired. Martin Alper had not licensed the rights to create games based on the Dune books, but rather the Dune movie. "Dune is a trademark of Dino De Laurentiis Corporation and licensed to MCA/Universal Merchandising." Every Dune RTS has some variation of this as part of its license.

This creates a complicated scenario; Who really owns the rights to the Dune games? Frank Herbert Estate is, of course, the arbiter of Dune ownership overall. Herbert licensed the audiovisual rights to Apjac in the early 1970s, but these rights changed hands several times and eventually came into the hands of the De Laurentiis Corporation, which produced the film distributed by Universal Studios. Virgin Games then licensed the rights to these two to create games about the film. EA purchases Westwood and all associated assets, but some time after Emperor: Battle for Dune, the rights they had expired and reverted to the previous owner.

Now, it's unlikely that De Laurentiis Corp or Universal still have rights to the games. They certainly no longer have the rights to make movies on the property, as neither are involved in the 2020 Dune movie. However, De Laurentiis Corp still retains the rights to the films it produced even after the license expires. to carry them out. They still own Dune 1984. The question is: how much of the movie's merchandising do these parties still control? EA may no longer own Dune, but it at least owns the work done by Westwood and Intelligent Games. One would have thought so. Speaking about her efforts to distribute Dune II on GoG.com, Marta Adamska detailed the entire problem.

And that is. It's interesting then to note that in 2019 the Herbert Estate happily approved the reprint of a Dune board game from 1979. "It should still be old," in fact. As it stands, the Dune RTS are out of stock and cannot be sold digitally. If you want to play these games, you have two options; Look for physical disks or ask a good one-legged man and you will have no guarantee that old disks will work in a modern computer. They didn't do it in mine. A new Dune movie from Legendary Entertainment will be released in December 2020. In addition, the company Tencent Funcom has obtained exclusive rights to develop games based on the new film.

No RTS has been announced yet, but even if Funcom tried that route, Westwood's heritage is no more. Still, never say never. There are only 40 years left until the

dune

enters the public domain. You better mark your calendars, EA. The Dune series should not languish in obscurity. It has more than earned its place in video game history, even if its license is stuck in limbo. It is worth remembering; Command & Conquer's long-lost older brother; Family in all but name. Dune II may not seem like much now, but its effect on the games industry was prodigious. Even going beyond the concreteness it established for Command & Conquer and so many other real-time strategy games, it's worth noting that it directly inspired WarCraft, launching not only that franchise, but also the esports giant StarCraft. and the entire MOBA genre.

There were many workarounds along the journey, of course, many wonderful, creative people and fantastic, innovative games, but if you trace his lineage, you can still see the vestiges of his ancestry. Everything points to an old DOS game about extracting spices. My name is Stefan. Thanks so much for looking.