The best and worst Dune games on PC
We’re repromoting this 2020 look at Dune’s history on PC to celebrate the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One.
Dune is back. Denis Villeneuve’s film just came out, and Funcom has the license to produce three new games set in the Dune universe.
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Dare we hope that they will be good? Dune has endured some rocky interpretations and there’s a sense, from the aborted Jodorowsky film and the Lynch film that eventually emerged, that the source material may be unfilmable. Can it work as a game, though?
The answer is: sometimes. A fair few games have emerged in the shadow of the 1984 film. A few were good and massively influential. The others were… not. Let’s take a tour.
Dune (1992)
This excellent adventure game was gobbled whole by Dune 2’s release shortly afterwards. You play as Paul Atreides on a quest to control the Spice and enjoy a spiritual awakening amid the hellish sands of planet Arrakis. The desert world is beautifully rendered with stark background art and likenesses sketched from the Lynch film. It also has some great music and, for the time, spectacular animations that created the impression of 3D movement while riding worms, which you end up using as a sort of bus service once you’ve unlocked them.
It’s not perfect. As Richard Cobbett points out in his Dune crapshoot , Leto introduces himself by saying «I am the Duke Leto Atreides, your father», as though his son has popped into existence fully formed in front of him. Bizarre exposition aside, the exaggerated character art and hazy music create an alien atmosphere and a strong sense of exploration. You travel between secret burrows and Fremen hideouts on a world map, which initially creates a sense of the planet’s vast expanse. As it fills up you realise there’s an intricate culture hiding out there in the sands.
Instead of simply repeating imagery associated with Dune, Cryo use the Lynch film as a springboard to and came up with new designs that look great at low resolutions.
The devs ditch filigree and decadent palace finery in favour of strong angles and powerful silhouettes. It’s one of my favourite portrayals of that universe.
Dune 2 (1992)
The game that helped to define a genre. Real time strategy games would be quite different today if Westwood had chosen to adapt the novel differently, and an RTS is an unusual framework for a story about power and political intrigue. It’s also difficult to capture Dune’s weathered vision of the future from a top-down perspective and just a few pixels per unit to work with.
It’s a triumph nonetheless. Clever little thumbnails in build queues give your imagination just enough to work with. Suddenly those little red boxes are powerful Harkonnen battle tanks. A rippling of sandy pixels hints at the presence of a terrifying sandworm. I used to jump with fear when a roaring sandworm popped up to chomp a spice harvester.
It had some interesting ideas. It’s understandable that future RTS games wouldn’t require you to sluggishly lay foundations before building structures, but it’s perfect for the punishing desert climes of Arrakis.
The desert is always trying to reclaim your buildings, and your bases feel like temporary outposts at best. Worms circle your harvesters and can plague battles, encouraging you to move tanks between patches of safe rock.
The campaign was decent too. The Ordos went off-script, but the idea of a faction that could turn the allegiance of enemy units was neat. Inter-mission chats with your house mentor added flavour and set the stage for Command & Conquer to build these into full FMV briefings.
Dune 2000 (1998)
Westwood could not replicate the charm of the first game with this remake. It’s not a bad game at all, but it failed to stand out in a post-C&C and Total Annihilation world. The genre had moved on and this reskin, while far more advanced than the original, lost Dune 2’s atmosphere somewhere in translation.
It did at least have proper FMV cutscenes between missions. While hammy, a lot of effort clearly went into trying to capture the vibe of each of the great warring houses.
Plus if you play as the Atreides you get yelled at by John Rhys-Davis .
Frank Herbert’s Dune (2001)
Oh dear. The developers Cryo Interactive went bust shortly after releasing this take on the Sci Fi Dune TV miniseries. It’s a third-person shooter with stealth elements and environments that look as though they were conceived at the dawn of 3D graphics rather than 2001 (GTA 3 and Max Payne came out in the same year).
The game is irredeemably terrible. For a universe that has been so vividly realised by Lynch and Jodorowsky’s aborted film, a Dune game simply cannot survive looking this way; the shot above is an actual marketing image that they chose to sell their game. Paul Atreides’ mother, the powerful Bene Gesserit concubine, looks like she’s an egg with a face punched into it.
The controls are also terrible and the story makes almost no sense. This is the point where a game adaptation can start to hurt the source material. Seeing two barely animated dolls honk on at one another about Spice and worms makes a venerated piece of science fiction look and sound like trash.
This is a problem the books have always had. Though the Lynch film built some enduring imagery, it was itself a broken mess. If you’re coming to the series cold it can look ridiculous. ‘What’s the big deal?’ you might think. The book is a 400-page examination of political and spiritual power set in a universe that feels like it has existed for millennia. That universe deserves better. Good luck, Funcom.
Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website’s launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
Old DOS Games packaged for latest OS
Dune is a thrilling tactical video game. In the role-playing game, the player plays the role of Paul Atreides. The game is an actual time strategy game in which the player can communicate and associate himself with the in-game aspects.
The plot of the game is set on a planet named Dune (also known as Arrakis) which is well known for the spices. The spices are the most precious things of the universe and a person can take command over the entire universe if he controls the spice. Also, spice allows people to travel from one place to another in the universe. The people of the planet are known as Fremen and are distributed amongst several tribes.
At the beginning of the game, the player needs to associate himself with people of the tribe so that he can establish cordial relationships with them in order to get help from them whenever needed. Also, the player can get the troops of the tribes to fight with him against the enemy. But every time, it is not easy to convince the tribes to shake hands with the player. Once, the player has convinced the troops to associate themselves with him, he needs to order them to position themselves around Dune. The motive of the player is to defeat the Harkonnen as he is also in search of the spice.
The game, Dune consists of several different levels and each level has its own complexity level. It is seen that the complexity level increases with subsequent levels. Furthermore, the player has his own strength and weaknesses. The game involves both, thrill and tactics. Also, the graphics are crisp and the sound part is done well.
Screenshots
Reviews
Review
by
unknown author
Works perfectly on Win10. Unlike basic DosBox saving a game is actually possible!
Thanks.
Review
by
acecairo
Great Strategy with light adventure elements. The first half of the game involves you having conversations with characters and doing certain actions in order to advance the story while mining spice and searching for villages, while the second half of the game involves you building up an army to defeat the harkonens.
I was disappointed by the ending, I expected a cool cinamatic or artwork or something for my hardwork and was dissapointed to see the same character animations of paul that are throughout the game, lame. Still over all a great game with wonderfull music.
Similar games:
Dune 2
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Super Dune 2
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Dune CD
What is abandonware ?
PC game series: list of Dune games
After the success of the Oscar-winning director Denis Villeneuve’s film Dune, based on the novel by F. Herbert and starring Oscar-winning actors, the cult fantasy universe is back in the spotlight. Therefore, we decided to tell you about the best games on it.
These games cannot be called a series in the full sense of the word. Not only were they made by completely different studios, but all of them (with the exception of the RTS series from Westwood Studios) belong to completely different game genres.
Nevertheless, the action of all the games included in the list takes place in the Dune universe, albeit with varying degrees of rethinking and some deviations from the original.
The original Dune book series was written by Frank Herbert from 1965 to 1985, and did not attract much attention from game designers. Only the film of the legendary David Lynch, released in 1984, forced the studios to pay attention to an interesting space setting full of strange technologies, betrayals and massacres.
Dune (1992)
The first attempt to transfer the setting of a remote desert planet with valuable spice reserves to the world of video games was the work of the French studio Cryo Interactive Entertainment. Interestingly, this project was the first game of this company.
The protagonist was young Paul Atreides, heir to Duke Leto Atreides. The plot of Dune largely followed the events of the first novel in the series, with minor differences. Many of the characters were inspired by the David Lynch film, and the 1993 re-release even featured audio and video clips from it.
The developers made a bold decision for those times to combine elements of a real-time strategy and a quest in one game. The transition from one genre to another was smooth and was carried out as we moved along the plot — if at the beginning of the game we mainly flew around the planet on an ornithopter and tried to negotiate with key characters, then towards the end, the main occupations were spice mining, hiring troops, arranging bases and battles, first with the enemy House Harkonenn, and then with the elite troops of the Emperor himself.
To successfully complete the game, gamers had to show strategic planning skills and monitor the balance between troops and the economy. Excessive enthusiasm for the development of the army in the early stages of the game can not only cause a lack of spice to pay tribute to the Emperor (which is fraught with an early invasion), but also provoke a large-scale attack by the Harkonens, who, according to the plot, have long been convinced of their complete victory over the House of Atreides.
The game has contributed not only to the development of the strategy genre, but also to the gaming industry as a whole. «Dune» became the first game in the history, in the packaging of which the inserts-covers for standard boxes, familiar to all gamers who made the era of games on CD and DVD, were used. Prior to this, all printing was carried out directly on the boxes with games, which significantly increased their cost.
At the time of its release, «Dune» was quite successful, selling 300,000 copies in 5 years. Many critics spoke rather flatteringly about the game. Unfortunately, it is almost unknown to modern gamers — after all, in the same year it had a very strong competitor.
Dune II: Battle For Arrakis (1992)
The Dune universe was licensed in the early nineties by Virgin Interactive, which published the first Dune. During the development of the Cryo Interactive project, the publisher’s representatives repeatedly had concerns that the young French company would not be able to achieve an acceptable result, so the bosses quietly started a parallel project, giving it to Westwood Studios, already well-known by Eye of the Beholder.
And if Cryo Interactive tried to make their game as close as possible to a literary source, then Westwood, after analyzing the novel, singled out the key idea for their game from it — the whole plot comes down to a struggle for control over the spice. This means that the best genre for the game will be pure strategy, and the role of the characters can be quite limited to briefings before missions.
Thus was born the game, which is often called the first RTS in the modern sense of the genre. For the sake of gameplay considerations, Westwood noticeably redrawn the plot, adding another Great House (namely the Ordos) to it and turning the guerrilla war of the local population against the invaders into the brutal battlefields of futuristic armies. Of course, the Fremen remained in the game (what is Dune without these charismatic Bedouins of deep space) — but from the backbone of the Atreides army, they have become one of the types of units available for hire.
Having chosen one of the three Houses (the Atreides kind and prone to rapid attacks, the evil fans of heavy guns of the Harkonenns or the treacherous fans of squeezing out other people’s equipment and undermining the buildings of the Ordos), gamers built bases, established spice production, riveted many tanks and infantry units, ran away from Shai-Huluds (huge worms hiding under the sand) and, of course, fought with the troops of the opposing houses for control of certain sectors of Arrakis.
As the story progressed, new units and buildings gradually opened up, and at the very end, you had to fight against the other two houses at once and the Emperor who joined them.
Most of the units for all three Houses were plus or minus the same with purely visual differences, but closer to the last third of the game, units and abilities unique to each House were unlocked. So, the Harkonnens were able to bring down powerful missiles on their enemies and build devastator ubertanks, the Atreides hired Fremen, bombed enemy bases with ornithopters and built sonic tanks, and the Ordos hired demolition men and built deviator tanks that temporarily seized control of enemy vehicles.
Dune II’s list of features is impressive even for modern strategy games, but then it generally seemed like an ideal war game.
Tanks and harvesters (harvesters for collecting spice) could easily crush enemy infantry, only rocket launchers could hit air targets, a harvester could be taken from the fields of spice using a cargo aircraft (it could also evacuate equipment from battle for repairs), built on «naked ground» buildings gradually lost strength, which affected their effectiveness.
Many of the ideas embodied in Dune II have been developed both in the further works of Westwood (in fact, it was thanks to Dune that the legendary Command & Conquer series appeared), and in projects of other studios. And the interface with the main screen, mini-map and status and orders panel for the selected object has become standard for all strategy games.
250,000 copies of the game have been sold in 4 years. She received many prestigious awards, high marks from most critics (average rating was 9out of 10) and is still considered one of the most important games in the history of the RTS genre.
Dune 2000 (1998)
By the second half of the 2000s, Westwood Studios was doing relatively well, but their owner and publisher Virgin Interactive gradually began to have financial problems.
Therefore, the publisher insisted on releasing a continuation of the Dune series of games. Unfortunately, almost all of Westwood Studios’ resources were thrown into work on the Command & Conquer series. Therefore, instead of creating a fundamentally new game, the studio attracted new outsourcers from Intelligent Games and limited itself to a complete redesign of Dune II.
As a result, gamers got the same game, only with more modern graphics. The only noticeable gameplay change was that different types of weapons now inflicted different damage on different units (siege tanks hit buildings and infantry well, but were useless against vehicles, while conventional tanks coped well with vehicles, but were not very effective against infantry ). Also in the game finally appeared multiplayer.
Perhaps in 1995 this would have been enough for success.
However, in the era of StarCraft and Age of Empires, this was no longer enough. Dune 2000, while not a complete failure, did not sell as well as the publisher had hoped. Most critics smashed the project in their reviews, giving it a score of about 6 out of 10. Shortly after the game’s release, Westwood Studios was bought from Virgin Interactive by the Canadian giant Electronic Arts.
Dune 2000 Launch Instructions
Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001)
For the first time in the history of games based on Herbert’s novels, events have moved beyond Arrakis — now we have the opportunity to fight on the surface of Caladan (the home planet of the Atreides), Giedi Prime (the home of Harkonennov) and several other planets with completely different landscapes.
Most of the units retained their names and basic mechanics, but radically changed their appearance — the devastators turned into a kind of AT-ST, and the deviators became anti-gravity. Most of the armament was changed from firearms to plasma-laser ones.
In addition, each House received several radically new units. Finally, the game went into full 3D with a free camera.
Critics have met the game quite favorably, giving it an average score of 8 out of 10. Emperor: Battle for Dune is remembered for its excellent graphics and great soundtrack. In terms of gameplay, the new project by Westwood and Intelligent Games did not offer anything fundamentally new, and the multiplayer did not receive much attention from the developers.
In the first year after its release, «Emperor» sold quite well, but Warcraft III, released in 2002, kicked out almost all competitors from the RTS market for a long time, so Emperor is almost forgotten these days.
Frank Herbert’s Dune (2001)
In 2001, the Frank Herbert’s Dune mini-series was released, and the French from Cryo Interactive, who created the first game in this setting, decided to earn some money and make a game based on the series.
At the time of the development of the project, Cryo experienced financial difficulties, which significantly affected the quality of the game. The resulting Action-adventure «pleased» gamers with constant brakes, disgusting level design, weak graphics and a very small amount of content. Of course, no one was in a hurry to buy such a bad game. And critics rarely gave her ratings above 5/10. At the same time, the studio spent the last money to purchase a license and develop the game.
As we wrote at the very beginning, Dune was the first game from Cryo Interactive. It’s somewhat ironic that another Dune game was the studio’s last project, after which it was closed.
Dune: Spice Wars (2022)
At the end of 2021, Funcom announced a new game set in the Dune universe — a real-time strategy game with 4X elements Dune: Spice Wars.
This RTS will be dedicated to the confrontation of factions for control over the desert planet Arrakis, the place of extraction of spice — the most valuable resource in the universe. Not only famous house factions will join the war, but also cult characters known from books: the parties to the conflict will be led by personalities such as Leto Atraders and Vladimir Harkonnen, and generals such as Peter de Vries and Glossu Raban will come under their command.
These personalities will not be introduced into the game for the sake of a beautiful portrait on the player’s avatar: faction heads will be able to conduct diplomatic negotiations, and commanders will have unique abilities. When it comes to combat, Dune: Spice Wars will be a classic RTS experience, with resource extraction, territory capture and meticulous unit balancing.
The game is being developed by Shiro Games, known for good strategy Northgard, so we can expect that the return of «Dune» to monitor displays will be successful. The release of the project in early access is scheduled for 2022.
Steam page
What’s next?
For many years, it seemed that after the failure of the last two attempts to create games based on Dune, no other studio would take up this material. The era of the worldwide popularity of Herbert’s novel seemed completely over. But in February 2019, Funcom announced that it had signed a contract with the current copyright holder, Legendary Entertainment, to release at least three games in the Dune setting. One of them will definitely be an MMO with a huge open world.
We remember the Norwegian studio for such high-quality projects as The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey quests, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and The Secret World MMORPGs, as well as the hardcore survival game Conan Exiles.
Games in the Conan universe have shown that the studio works wonderfully with literary sources and not only carefully transfers characters and locations from the pages of books to PC screens, but also organically supplements the game universe with its own content.
Most likely, the release of at least one of the three planned games will be timed to coincide with the release of the film. Therefore, fans of the Dune series can look to the future with optimism — after a pause of 20 years, Dune returns to the world of computer games.
Conclusion
F. Herbert’s series of novels has become a milestone in the history of science fiction. Unfortunately, almost all attempts to transfer her events from the pages of books to other media did not end very well. Lynch’s expensive film was a box office failure, and both studios that made the Dune games closed shortly after the release of one. Perhaps the fact is that this setting, full of intrigue and deep philosophy, is too complicated for the movie and game format.
Nevertheless, such masterpieces as Dune, Dune II and Dune 2000 will forever be remembered by the gamers who made them and made a huge contribution not only to the history of the RTS genre, but to the entire video game industry. And thanks to Funcom, we may soon have another chance to visit the sandy planet and fight with enemies for control of the valuable spice, which is known to be mast flow.
There are no computers and robots in «Dune» — how plausible is that?
Can you taste the spices in the air? It’s people all over the world watching Dune. If you have already watched Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi film based on the classic novel by Frank Herbert, you may have noticed one strange detail — there are no screens in the film. No one writes messages in the messenger, does not launch the next episode of «Space Squid Game» on a smartphone, and does not plunge into the virtual world to destroy demons or build their own beaver settlement.
Instead of screens, in «Dune» we see Paul Atreides learning about Arrakis using a strange projector.
Instead of e-readers of the future, people use books, no one has tablets or virtual reality glasses. Even spaceships don’t have displays, be they holographic or 2D. What is this future? How do people have fun, chat, exchange memes and watch Japanese pornography from ancient times? The answer is simple — no way. Because that’s how the Dune universe works.
Unfortunately, Denis Villeneuve did not have time to dig deeper into the lore and history of the Dune universe in this film. But in short, once upon a time in this universe there were computers, robots and, perhaps, an analogue of video games and Netflix. However, approximately 10,000 years before the events of the film, a galactic war took place between humans and artificial intelligence. Humans have won, and the result has been a catastrophic regression in terms of digital technology. Computers were banned and for millennia, no progress was seen.
But how then is navigation in space carried out? How do communication systems work? How calculations are done, business activities and many other activities that rely on calculations.
Elementary — all mathematical problems fell on the shoulders of people, but not ordinary, but the so-called «mentats». Basically, they are human computers. Like accountants in a king’s court. And given that the political structure in «Dune» is more reminiscent of ancient or medieval, with the Emperor, houses, nobility and unusual galactic feudalism, then in the book Herbert presented a fairly holistic and logical device, albeit beyond the scope of a rational approach. Fortunately, the method of rational thinking does not have to be present to make a compelling story.
Due to this characteristic arrangement of the galaxy, «Dune» is markedly different from any other science fiction. We are used to perceive sci-fi as something classically futuristic. Like how it is presented in «Foundation» — a new series based on Asimov, in «The Matrix» or even «Star Wars». Such imaginary worlds are understandable and accessible to us, because they are not very different from what surrounds us.
We may not be able to hop aboard a space shuttle and fly to a distant planet, but we can put a VR device on our heads and go on a space adventure with the Elite Dangerous.
«Dune» was released in 1965 — at a time when computers were just taking their first significant steps, and personal machines remained a dream. But even then there were bold concepts and fantasies about what computers could be like in the distant future. Why did Herbert decide to immerse his story in such an unusual setting for perception?
Because «Dune» is not a story about computers, artificial intelligence or holographic projectors. I’m sure there are enough people in the Shazoo audience who would be interested in digging into the concept of far future technologies — what will computers be like in 200 years? And after 1000? And in 10,000 years? However, for all the stimulation of the imagination, no really good sci-fi, be it a book, a movie, a TV series or a game, revolves around how many cores the processors of the future have, whether NVIDIA is still alive, and whether they were able to run Crysis on a smart toilet.
For us, it is much more interesting to read, watch and listen to stories about people, about the challenges they face, how they experience them, how they grow above themselves and what connections they form along the way. Everything else is just decoration.
«Lord of the Rings» could be remade into a massive space epic with evil at the center of the Galaxy and a heroic group of representatives of different space races heading towards a black hole to destroy an ancient artifact.
Star Wars could have been a fantasy story, with golems instead of robots, monstrously powerful magical weapons, and a tragedy of fathers and children. Moreover, magic is already present here in the form of lightsabers, Forces and spirits.
It’s just that someone prefers down-to-earth magical stories, others choose everyday reality, and give the third one space or a dystopia on Earth. Moreover, good writers know that to create an interesting world, it is enough to create a coherent core, and everything beyond it can be on the verge of absurdity.
And readers, viewers or players will take the rod and, with the help of individual details or elements, think of everything else. Thanks to our amazing brain!
True, all this does not answer the question — how realistic is such an approach to life without computers? Is it possible for human computers or other biological organisms to perform the same functions?
Yes, living computers are indeed possible.
The brain of any living being is a computer, albeit not of a traditional kind. The brain receives information from various kinds of sensors: visual, olfactory, tactile, and so on. It then decodes the signals and interprets them. Based on this information, the brain reacts. For example, the brain calculates the trajectory of a cat’s jump so that it grabs a mouse. Or determines the sound source based on the delay and volume of the signals recorded by the ears. In the Dune universe, a person simply takes on specific tasks, such as navigation.
Real scientists have been working for years on the concept of biological computers that can use DNA to store data and molecules to perform various operations.
Hypothetically, such biological computers can be immune to external electromagnetic influences, and the data processing speed can be comparable to supercomputers. The main beauty is that such organic machines are able to repair and increase power on their own.
But whether it is possible to create human computers with the help of genetic intervention, as in «Dune» — it is too early to judge, because we still cannot look into the brain so deeply as to describe its work with full confidence.
The fear of artificial intelligence is quite justified and biological technologies can be rationalized. This alone is unlikely to stop fans of space pyramids from using mentats to mine space bitcoin.
Fortunately, all these ideas and fantasies are just a backdrop for what we loved, love and will love for millennia: a juicy human drama.
If you’re wondering which science fiction doesn’t have computers, check out Warhammer 40K. Clearly inspired by Herbert, the authors created their own unconventional science fiction, which is actually the endless wars of the Roman Empire, transferred tens of thousands ahead, where instead of northern barbarians, orcs.
