Dune 2000

Celebrating Westwood Studios’ forgotten RTS.

- John Strike

Imagine a universe where Patrick Stewart charges into battle holding a pug and firing sound at people, where Sting plays a ginger psycho lubed up with baby oil, and where Freddie Jones is forced at syringe point to suckle milk from a cat—all whilst under the watchful eye of a gigantic spice-puffing space vagina.

I am of course talking about David Lynch’s 1984 film, Dune, the adaptation for the big screen of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-finovel.

Dune is an intriguing and complex story about time and space, bravery and betrayal, and ultimately about one young man’s destiny to unite a universe. Set in the year 10191, the story sees two great houses battling for control of the desolate sand planet Arrakis. The planet’s mysterious spice is harvested to fund war, giant tank-eating worms roam its surface, and its indigenous Fremen warriors hold a great secret.

The Dune universe first came to PC in Cryo’s modest 1992 adventure game, however it’s undoubtedly Westwood Studios’ 1993 masterpiece, Dune II, for which the universe is best remembered on PC. Dune II: Battle for Arrakis, or Dune II: Building of a Dynasty as it was known in North America, played a pivotal role in the formation of real time strategy as a genre, and laid solid foundations for the beloved Command & Conquer that came a year later.

Then, in 1998, and in the shadow of both Command & Conquer and Red Alert, Westwood and Intelligent Games released the now largely forgotten Dune 2000.

At the time it scored poorly, and rightly so in the context of how much the genre had developed by that point. It lacked the production values that we’d seen in