In Dune II the enemy does not wait for you. Each mission starts with a construction yard on a patch of rock in the desert of Arrakis and a little money. Somewhere beyond the black edge of the map a rival house has already dug in, and it is building, mining and training troops at the same moment you are. Computer Gaming World called it “a real-time exercise in every sense of the word”. Westwood Studios made it for Virgin Games at the end of 1992, and its pattern of harvesting a resource, building a base and producing an army became the one real-time strategy followed: Blizzard’s Warcraft borrowed it in 1994, and Westwood’s own Command & Conquer took it to a mass audience in 1995.
Fast facts
- Developer: Westwood Studios, Las Vegas. Publisher: Virgin Games.
- Titles: Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty in North America; Dune II: Battle for Arrakis in Europe.
- Released: MS-DOS, December 1992 ($59.99 in the United States); Amiga, 1993; Mega Drive, 1994; Acorn RISC OS, from Eclipse, by 1995.
- Credits (from Virgin’s advertisements): design by Aaron E. Powell and Joe Bostic; programming by Bostic and Scott K. Bowen; music and sound by Frank Klepacki and Dwight Okahara; produced by Brett Sperry.
- Players: one, against the computer.
Not the first, but the pattern
Dune II was not the first strategy game played in real time. SSI’s Cytron Masters (1982), Imagine’s Stonkers (1983) for the Spectrum and Technosoft’s Herzog Zwei (1989) for the Mega Drive all had armies that moved without waiting for turns, and American magazines were calling Populous real-time strategy by 1990 (the real-time strategy entry tells that story). What Dune II did was put the pieces together: a resource on the map, harvesters to collect it, buildings that unlock other buildings, factories that turn money into units, and an opponent doing all of it at once.
Westwood’s people have named the games they were playing. “We were also playing Herzog Zwei on the Mega Drive at the time,” Mike Legg, a Westwood veteran, told Retro Gamer in 2008. Joe Bostic, the lead programmer, added Populous, Military Madness and Civilization, and “thought a game grown out of the combined features of these titles would be great fun to play”. The first thing they built, he said, was real-time vehicle combat; base building and spice harvesting came after. The mouse was the advantage Herzog Zwei had lacked: it let the player give orders to individual units, and in Bostic’s words “was critical in making the RTS genre possible”. In 2013 he named Herzog Zwei among the influences himself, “for the fast pacing”.
Mining Arrakis
The licence came from Frank Herbert’s novel, by way of Virgin’s first Dune game, a Cryo adventure built around the David Lynch film. The sequel kept the planet and dropped the story. The Emperor offers Arrakis to whichever house produces the most spice, with “no rules of engagement”, and three houses answer: the Atreides, the Harkonnens and the Ordos, a house Westwood invented. Computer Gaming World noticed that the sandworms were “more moral, and likable, than many of the book’s leading characters”.
A mission begins on rock, the only ground that can be built on. The player lays concrete slabs and puts up windtraps for power, a refinery that comes with a harvester, silos to store what it earns, a barracks and a vehicle factory. The harvester drives out to the orange spice fields on the sand and trundles back full, and each load becomes credits. Later missions bring a radar outpost, a hi-tech factory for carryalls and ornithopters, repair pads, rocket turrets, a starport for buying units from off-world, and finally a palace with a house’s own superweapon. Sandworms swallow anything that stays on the open sand too long.
Each house fights a little differently. Brett Sperry told The One that the Harkonnens were his favourite, “because they have the Death Hand Missile and the Devastator Tank”; the Atreides had the Sonic Tank and could call on the Fremen, and the Ordos had saboteurs and the Deviator. The missions ran in order and got steeply harder, and in the late ones the Emperor’s Sardaukar joined the enemy.
Clicking, not typing
Sperry wanted a game “easy to learn and difficult to master”, he told The One in January 1993: “You don’t have to read a long and boring manual to learn how to play. In fact, all of our focus groups picked up the game within the first five minutes without reading a manual at all.” Everything was done with the mouse. Click a building and it showed a damage report and a menu of what it could make, with each item’s cost; click a unit and give it a move or attack order; click on the radar map to send it anywhere. A mentat, the house’s adviser, explained each mission and every building and unit. Units took orders one at a time; letting the player select several at once was one of the first things Blizzard changed when it made Warcraft.
Reception
Computer Gaming World previewed a beta in December 1992. Chuck Moss found a game that “marries the development/financial management dynamic of Sim City to the tactical battle challenge of The Perfect General”, and called it “a fast, tense, visual” game. The magazine’s review in April 1993 praised the “highly intuitive” interface and the sound, from “the shrieks of dying infantry” to “one of the most original and enjoyable music scores ever composed for a computer game”, and called the game “a real gem”.
In Britain PC Zone reviewed it in its first issue, in April 1993, and reached for the same comparison: “a Sim City clone which is also a real-time shoot ’em-up”, and “a thinking man’s shoot ’em-up”. When the Amiga version arrived, Amiga Format’s Andy Nuttall found it “dark, moody, atmospheric, addictive, brilliant”. Bullfrog’s Syndicate was out the same year, and he put the two side by side: “If Syndicate could be described as Populous 2 with guns, then Dune 2 is Sim City with heavy artillery.” His complaints were small: vehicles that would not find their own way round a building, and a pile of disk swaps for anyone with a single floppy drive.
Mega Drive and Acorn
Westwood rebuilt the game for the Mega Drive, where Virgin published it in 1994 as Dune II: Battle for Arrakis in Europe and Dune: The Battle for Arrakis in North America, with new controls for the joypad. Sega Visions called it “a thinking warrior’s game” where “economics are important”. On the Acorn Archimedes, Eclipse published a RISC OS conversion; by September 1995 Acorn User was reporting “the successes of Dune II” and Eclipse’s plans for a CD-ROM version.
Warcraft and Command & Conquer
The closest early follower came from Blizzard. Patrick Wyatt, who started Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1993, has written that the team “were inspired to create Warcraft after playing (and replaying and replaying) a game called Dune 2”, and that before Blizzard had artists on the project he used screen captures of Dune II’s art as placeholders. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer found the resemblance plain in 1995. Westwood staff have said so too: Adam Isgreen told Retro Gamer in 2008 that the similarities were “pretty… blatant”, while Bostic took them as “the sincerest form of flattery”. The Warcraft entry has the detail.
Dune II also gave its name to Westwood’s next game before that game existed. Sperry told The One in January 1993 that Dune 2 ran on “Westwood’s Command and Conquer engine which took four man years to create”, and that another game on it was “tentatively called Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone”. It became Command & Conquer, set on Earth and fought over Tiberium, in 1995. Edge thought it “an only slightly improved version” of Dune 2: “Substitute spice for Tiberium and you have Command & Conquer.” Looking back in 1997, Sperry told Edge that Command & Conquer came from “a perceived gap in the market — that started with Dune 2, actually”.
Later history
Westwood went back to Arrakis twice. Dune 2000 (1998) for Windows was a remake of Dune II with filmed briefings, and Emperor: Battle for Dune followed in 2001. After Electronic Arts closed Westwood in 2003, players kept the original going themselves: fan projects such as OpenDUNE and Dune Legacy rebuilt the game to run on modern systems.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 101, December 1992, pp. 102–104: Chuck Moss, Dune II sneak preview.
- The One issue 52, January 1993, p. 39: Dune 2 work in progress, with Brett Sperry on the design aim, the focus groups, the three houses, and “Westwood’s Command and Conquer engine”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 105, April 1993, pp. 84–85: Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty review (Westwood Studios, Virgin, $59.99; the houses, missions, interface, mentat and sound).
- PC Zone issue 1, April 1993, from p. 60: Dune II review.
- CU Amiga, July 1993, and August 1993: Virgin Games advertisement, “Battle for Arrakis”, with the game’s credits. The One issue 59, August 1993: the same advertisement.
- Amiga Format issue 50, September 1993, p. 56: Andy Nuttall, Dune II review (the buildings and units, the Sardaukar, “Sim City with heavy artillery”).
- Sega Visions, June/July 1994, p. 90: Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis for the Genesis.
- Acorn User issue 159, September 1995, p. 55: Eclipse and “the successes of Dune II”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 109, August 1993, p. 32: Westwood Studios founded in 1985 by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle.
- Computer Gaming World issue 126, January 1995, from p. 228: Chris Lombardi, Warcraft review, on its likeness to Dune 2.
- Edge issue 25, October 1995, p. 66: Command & Conquer review.
- Edge issue 51, November 1997, p. 57: Brett Sperry at the ECTS round table.
- Retro Gamer issue 48, 2008, pp. 71 and 74: Command & Conquer retrospective, with Mike Legg on Herzog Zwei, Joe Bostic on Dune II’s other influences and its development, and Adam Isgreen, Legg and Bostic on Warcraft.
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013, p. 55: Joe Bostic on Dune II (Populous, Civilization, and Herzog Zwei “for the fast pacing”).
- Retro Gamer issue 111, February 2013, pp. 86–89: Graeme Mason, “The Making of Warcraft”, with Patrick Wyatt on the changes Blizzard made to Dune 2’s design, including multiple-unit selection.
- Patrick Wyatt, “The making of Warcraft part 1”, Code of Honor, 25 July 2012 (web, secondary): Dune 2 as the inspiration; its art used as placeholders. https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-1
- Sega Retro, “Dune II: Battle for Arrakis” (web, secondary): Mega Drive release dates and regional titles. https://segaretro.org/Dune_II:_Battle_for_Arrakis
- Wikipedia, “Dune II” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates; Dune 2000, Emperor: Battle for Dune, OpenDUNE and Dune Legacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_II