StrategyFront Gaming

The Forefather of the RTS: Dune II

Dune is one of the greatest Sci-Fi series ever written. It contains noble houses, giant sandworms, and lots of plotting. It’s the sort of setting just begging for a game series to give it the proper treatment that it deserves. Let’s see if Dune II lives up to the franchise name.

In 1984, the David Lynch film, Dune, was released. The movie itself was well… not remembered fondly. If you hadn’t read the book, then the movie was almost incomprehensible.

Audiences going to theatres were even given a cheat sheet to try and decipher all the strange names and futuristic jargon. 

Then in 1992, a game of the same name was released as an adaptation of the movie. This game, also called Dune, developed by Cryo Interactive. Dune mixed classic adventure game elements with strategy mechanics. 

You’d fly around the planet going to different locations and talking to characters. Then move around your Fremen desert warriors to battle the evil Harkonnen.

The game was generally liked for mixing up the plot of the books with player involvement and initiative. As well as its unique blend of adventure and strategy. 

But while the Dune adventure game was being made, so was another Dune game…

The Beginning of Dune II

In December of 1992, Westwood Studios released Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. Unlike the first Dune, this game was a real-time strategy game.

While Dune II wasn’t the first real-time strategy game ever made, that was Herzog Zwei, but it was the most influential early contender. The foundation that Dune II set down would influence almost every RTS to come. 

Dune II eestablished many of the tropes that are now commonplace in the RTS space. 

Through its controls, it was the first real-time strategy game where you could use your mouse to control the game and move units. It pioneered the standard base building approach as well as collecting resoruces with worker units, and using buildings to unlock new technology and units.

Warcraft, Starcraft, and especially Command & Conquer would all take the ideas presented here and run with them.

Dune II is incredibly historically significant to the RTS space but its age shows in its gameplay and controls, which is why it’s left mostly unplayed and forgotten today.

“What became Dune II started out as a challenge I made for myself. The challenge was that strategy games would be out-of-control fun if the real-time aspect of Eye of the Beholder could be combined with resource management and a dynamic… But how? Long before I decided to experiment with actually building this new game in a Dune setting, I kept toying with the answer.”

Brett Sperry, from a 2009 interview with Gamespot

While Dune II wasn’t the first RTS. Brett Sperry, the designer of Dune II, was the one who coined the phrase “real-time strategy” as a more marketable take to distinguish it from the older turn-based wargames of the previous generation. 

Westwood would go one to design the Command & Conquer series but at the release of Dune II the game was already being billed as existing on “Westwood’s Command & Conquer Engine”.

Plot of Dune II

Dune II kicks off when Emperor Frederick IV of the Imperial House Corrino challenges Three of the Great Houses to mine Spice on the planet Arrakis. 

Whoever can deliver the most Spice to the emperor will be given control of the planet, an incredibly lucrative offer. 

The three factions at play are the: Atreides, Harkonnen, and the Ordos. The Atreides and Harkonnen both play a major role in the book series. 

While the Ordos are technically non-canon, only being mentioned in the unofficial Dune Encyclopedia. 

The game doesn’t do you any favors if you don’t know anything about the Dune Universe already. This is pretty much the whole set up you get and most of it will sound like gobbledygook until you actually start playing.

The player takes the role of the General of one of the Great Houses and must successfully destroy the other Houses while harvesting spice. 

As the missions go on and you take more territory, you’ll be given access to new technology. Technology as a whole is a premium in the Dune Universe. 

This is due to a pesky AI rebellion that nearly wiped out humanity, all computers are banned. Instead, humans use drug-enhanced advisors called Mentats who function as trusted advisors to the great houses.

As you begin to come out as the clear winner in the contest for Arrakis, the other two Houses will band together in an alliance to oppose you. 

The final battle will take place between yourself and the Emperor’s elite Sardaukar army. Dune II features separate cutscenes for each faction, adding a layer of depth to each faction. 

These cutscenes would later morph into the famous live-action cutscenes of the Command & Conquer series. 

Gameplay of Dune II

You begin by building your base. 

This concept, that you can place buildings anywhere and slowly expand your area of operation seems standard now, but for 1992 this was innovation. 

You could also build which buildings you liked in whatever order. Though to manage this freedom Westwood introduced the concept that some buildings would be dependent on others before they could be built. 

Again, this all seems quaint now, but for 1992 these were huge steps forward. It became almost ubiquitous in RTS titles after this.

Dune II only has one resource for you to collect, the Spice, which is central to the plot of the Dune novels. This substance can be mined by Spice Harvesters. This single and exhaustible resource which both sides were fighting over was a core part of Dune II’s design. 

Having to go out and expose yourself when collecting Spice meant that conflict was inevitable. Players couldn’t just sit inside their own base and wait for the enemy to come to them, they’d actually have to go out and defend their resources. 

This innovation would be mirrored in later titles like Command & Conquer’s, Tiberium Crystals. Command & Conquer was Westwood’s next project after Dune. The studio took what they learned from Dune II and improved on it for those games, spawning one of the most wildly popular RTS franchises.

Other games like Starcraft and Age of Empires, would also introduce multiple resources the player would need to keep track of. Further deepening the need for careful planning and resources management which Dune II introduced. 

Combat in Dune II

Each House also has its own units, an innovation that would perhaps be most purely realized in Starcrafts three separate factions all with their own unique units, buildings, etc.

The Atreides can build a Sonic Tank, the Harkonnen can build Devastator Tanks, and the Ordos can build the Deviator Tank (which shoots a mind-control substance which turns other units to your side).

Dune II plays much slower than most modern RTS games, which can be a blessing due to its clunky controls. Units have large health pools and take a while to be killed, so if you make a mistake you can usually get your troops out of it.

The game was also innovative in its use of fog of war which covered the entire map but for the areas, the player has troops in.

Unlike in later games, once the fog of war was lifted it stayed lifted. 

Throughout the game, you’ll find that infantry is next to useless at attacking enemy bases due to their painfully slow speed and low damage rate. They can also be run over by Spice harvesters which is hilarious but also deeply frustrating since spice harvesters aren’t combat units.

Instead, you’ll want to use your infantry to protect your more beefy tanks which are the real meat of your army. You’ll also have trikes and quad vehicles that are useful for maneuverability but mostly too weak to take head-on fights.

Combat definitely suffers from unit imbalance. Spamming tanks is usually a surefire way to win since their durability and range make them superior to almost every other unit.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the AI in Dune II is extremely basic. The AI will only attack the side of your base closest to theirs meaning you know exactly where you need to defend and will never have to worry about being flanked. They will also only send a few units at you at a time allowing you to pick them off easily.

These are just the things I noticed. According to others the AI will also: attack its own buildings if your units are behind them. Never build new defenses after its initial base is build, only repair the ones that are destroyed. Also if an AI spice harvester runs over your infantry it will just bug out and not produce any more spice.

Towards the later stages of the game players will unlock their Houses superweapon to overwhelm their enemies. The Harkonnen unleash a barrage of cruise missiles know as Death Hand. The Ordos unleash sneaky saboteurs who destroy buildings. The Atreides get access to the native Fremen warriors to join their ranks.

Of all of these, I found the Ordos superweapon to be the most underwhelming. The Harkonnen missiles were too inaccurate to be useful all that often. While the Fremen were on par with the Sardukar(much like the books) and were the most useful. Still, none of these were as useful as spamming tanks at the enemy.

Combat is slow but can be hectic, some of this is caused by only selecting one unit at a time. I can only imagine how groundbreaking this sort of approach was in 1992. 

Controls of Dune II

Controls were innovative in that they focused fully on using your mouse to control D, instead of the keyboard-centric controls of earlier games. 

What you can’t do however is select multiple units at once. Each trooper or tank has to be selected on their own. Multiple unit selection would be an innovation initiated by successors to the genre like Starcraft. 

Dune II’s age shows in how you direct units around. You have to manually select whether you want to attack, move, retreat, or guard. 

This is a far cry from later context-based systems where simply clicking on an enemy unit will initiate an attack. Though the later Mega Drive/Genesis version of Dune II included this feature. 

Graphics & Sound

Even today, the Graphics still work with the pixel aesthetic. The overall design is clean with buildings and troops being easy to distinguish.

This clear visual language is something Westwood would carry with them into the Command & Conquer series, and helped new players immensely when first learning the game.

The overall sound design is excellent. Taking inspiration from both the original Dune game and the David Lynch movie. 

Impact

Dune II laid the foundations for all RTS games that came after it.

It’s a world map where players can choose which regions to conquer prefaced the later strategic meta-campaigns which would provide context for the real-time strategy battles.

Having resource collection units became ubiquitous in most RTS games. As well as base construction and unit production. Each of these gave RTS games their distinctive flow, with players building up their infrastructure before launching attacks, turtling, or rushing.

This also allows you to choose your own army composition giving a huge degree of variety to each game. It allows players to comee up with their own strategies and test them against other builds.

Conclusions

Soon after Dune II’s release, Westwood sought to develop a game not tied to any existing IP, as so began to work on the Command & Conquer series. 

While much of Dune II’s mechanics had been done individually elsewhere their combination here along with the real-time combat and base building was a formula for success. 

Dune II would eventually spawn two sequels of its own, Dune 2000, which was a partial remake of the original that brought many of the mechanics up to speed with the times, and Emperor: Battle for Dune, which brought the Dune franchise into 3D and kept many of the mechanics of its predecessors. 

Dune II is now abandonware, if you’d like to download it you can do so here.

More Dune:

If you’re interested in more Dune Games check out our article on the failed Dune MMORTS: Dune Generations.

If you enjoyed our article on Dune II and wanted to purchase another game, please consider doing so through our Affiliate Link on G2A.com. When using this link we receive a commission that helps us keep writing strategy game content! Thank you for your support!