SANDS OF TIME

A masterful sci-fi adaptation that shaped the future of the RTS? That would be DUNE II

- Will Freeman

When Frank Herbert began to pen the first Dune novel, video games were in an entirely nascent form. In 1965, when his iconic sci-fiwork was published, a mere handful of games had been created, often for looming mainframe computers as research projects.

However, in starting to build out his world of interstellar feudal conflict, political drama, and the desperate mining of a powerful drug called ‘melange’ or ‘spice’, Herbert set in motion a series of events that would have a profound influence over the real-time strategy genre, and even the wider gaming landscape.

Herbert’s tale initially appeared as a run of serialised pieces in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. Soon after, Dune was released as a novel, which would in turn inspire numerous sequels written by Herbert and later his son. Such was the first book’s popularity and influence on science fiction that it inevitably attracted the attention of Hollywood. Though, as it turned out, the vast and intricate setting Herbert had spun from words was far from easy to adapt into a celluloid release. Over the years Dune movies have been panned and canned, with David Lynch even disowning his infamous 1984 film version. In fact, it was 2021 by the time a Dune movie arrived that most felt was worthy, with director Denis Villeneuve at the helm.

A TALE OF TWO DUNES

Games, meanwhile—with all their interactivity, intricacy, and freedom from linear storytelling—proved to be a little more suitable when it came to communicating the spirit and tone of Herbert’s creation.