Dune II: Battle for Arrakis (1992)

Westwood Studios

While far from the first of its kind, Westwood’s 1992 game Dune II, based on Frank Herbert’s iconic 1965 novel, codified the basic rhythms of the base-building Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre going forward: workers extract resources, and that generates more workers, structures, and eventually military units to defeat your opponent.

Although successful in its own right Dune II’s real legacy lies in the games it influenced. It’s directly cited as an inspiration for games like Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, which itself led to the titans of 1998’s Starcraft and 2010’s Starcraft 2. Westwood’s own stable of RTS games, represented primarily by the Command and Conquer series, continued and expanded the design legacy of Dune, while influencing a whole new pack of games like 1997’s Total Annihilation.

Despite it being a dense and problematic text in its own right, at its heart, Dune, the novel, is an anti-colonial story that condemns the exploitation of both the resources and people of the planet Arrakis.

In adaptation, Dune II strips that element from the setting, placing the player in the role of the colonizers, who must scrabble for the right to strip the planet of its resources. In the end, you simply mine the drug known as spice, turn it into money, and use that money to destroy the other factions. The final image in the game is watching your faction’s color washing over the planet, erasing the yellow sands.

Tracing this path so easily -- to see the grooves and contours of an entire genre stemming from this one moment to modern-day RTS -- really lays bare the entire enterprise. At its core, the legacy of Dune II runs deep. We break the bones of the earth, and we use the shards to kill our enemies.

Edited by Caroline Delbert