Dune II

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"He who controls Dune controls the Spice. He who controls the Spice, controls the universe."

Released in 1992, Dune II is the Trope Codifier for the Real Time Strategy genre, as well as the Trope Maker for numerous gameplay conventions.

The games featured three playable factions: House Atreides, House Harkonnen and House Ordos. In Dune II, as well as its remake Dune 2000, the player would be given a map of Arrakis that represented the territories of the three factions. The player, no matter which side he picked, would then play through a variety of missions (In Dune II, either harvesting spice or destroying the enemy base and all their units) and could see their progress on the map. Once they'd conquered pretty much the entire map, the two enemy factions would join each other, as well as the Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV of House Corrino and his Imperial Sardaukar, to fight off the much too powerful player faction. Once the player had won the entire game, he would be treated to a cinematic of whatever faction he's playing bringing their own form of justice to the Emperor for having tried to use them in his elaborate Xanatos Gambit.

The game was ported over to the Sega Genesis in 1993 under the title Dune: The Battle For Arrakis.

Dune 2000, a remake released in 1998, took good use of the advancement of computers, and replaced the drawn cutscenes of the original with Westwood Studios' near-trademark Full Motion Video cutscenes, slightly more tactical objectives (Rather than "Kill the Harkonnen" you get to "Protect the Fremen from the Harkonnen" then "kill the Harkonnen") and Frank Klepacki (you may have heard of him), one the original composers for Dune 2, returns to score the new music and remix some of the old ones.

It was followed by a true sequel, Emperor: Battle for Dune, in 2001.

The Dune games featured Geo Effects quite early in the history of Real Time Strategy. Buildings could only be built on rock, and there were limited rock available, meaning that players had limited base-building opportunities. Further, infantry could be positioned on mountains to protect them from being run over by tanks, and vehicles would move much slower over dunes than just desert plains. And, lest we forget, this is Dune we're talking about here - rock is also a safe haven from the Shai-Hulud.

Very loosely inspired by the Dune books, of course. The first Dune game was an Adventure Game with RTS elements that followed the plot of the 1984 Film., making this largely as sequel In Name Only, retaining the basic setting elements but presenting a new story about war and political control distinct from the novels. The game engine for Dune II would later be refined and used for a game set in an original universe - Command & Conquer. The inverse would happen for the sequels, using the game engines for Red Alert, Tiberium Sun/Red Alert 2 and Command & Conquer: Renegade (An FPS, of all things).

Dune II and Dune 2000 provide examples of: