Dune II: Battle For Arrakis – Sand & Conquer

Year: 1992 |Publisher: Virgin Games|Developer: Westwood Studios |Original format: PC | Version played: Amiga

I’ve never been much of an RTS fan. It’s just not my kind of genre, and I never really used a PC for gaming. I did play Command & Conquer when it first came out, because it was a phenomenon and impossible to ignore. But around the same time, there’s one RTS I played even more, and that’s Dune II on the Amiga.

I was a huge Amiga fan in the mid-nineties, after buying a second hand A1200 from the Free Ads. It came with hundreds of games, many of them copies, as well as a large stack of original boxed games. Dune II was among them and, having already played Command & Conquer, I was eager to sample its seminal predecessor. I haven’t played it for probably 25 years now, but with the release of the new Dune movie, I thought it was time to go back and reappraise Dune II.

As well as not being much of an RTS fan, I’m also not much of a Dune fan. Until this week, I’d only seen clips of the David Lynch film. I remember channel surfing in the nineties, catching a scene of Kyle McLachlan and Patrick Stewart trying to stab each other through their holographic armour. Then the action would shift to endless talking and techno-babble and I’d switch the channel to watch The A-Team or something. I’ve also never read the Dune books, and all these years later, my only real experience of this highly influential sci-fi world is a licensed game on a long forgotten computer. 

But then, a couple of weeks ago, I went to see the new movie adaptation of Dune and I was absolutely blown away, not just by the cinematic vision of Denis Villeneuve, but also by how engaging and imaginative its world was. The characters, the politics, the geography… All instantly captured my imagination and, me being me, I feel a need to feed that imagination by going back to the movies, the tv shows, the books and, yes, the games…

In this new context, I initially returned to Dune II not to reappraise it RTS mechanics, but to see if the story and world of Frank Herbert’s books would now make more sense than they did as an uninformed teenager. Yet I actually can’t say it made that much of a difference to my enjoyment.

I can certainly appreciate how much of Dune II faithfully adapts the world of the novels. It skillfully takes the politics of the competing houses, the Atreides and the Harkonnen, and does a pretty efficient job of explaining their conflict in just a handful of introductory images. I find it impressive, in retrospect, how Westwood Studios was able to take this premise and use it to come up with an entirely new kind of video game concept. The idea of mining for resources on a planet, building up your industrial civilisation, and then using that industry to build war machines, to protect your mining operation, spread out across the land and attack other houses. So actually, while I returned to this game expecting it to deepen my appreciation of the Dune fiction, what it has actually done is further strengthen my admiration for Westwood Studios and their inventive vision for the real-time strategy genre.

Now, I’m sure there will be some who argue Dune II wasn’t actually the first RTS. Technosoft’s Herzog Zwei arrived on Mega Drive a full three years earlier and offered a compelling mix of unit command and construction. Earlier still, Japanese PC games like Silver Ghost or Bokusuka Wars blended strategy with action to command multiple units in combat. There are probably several others out there in the proverbial black hole of the past that can all lay legitimate claim to influencing the RTS genre. But only Dune II can be credited with building the foundations that would form the game design of Command & Conquer and therefore the building blocks of the RTS as we know it today.

When I played Dune II again this week, I was really struck by how many of the conventions of the genre were present and functional. The core game loop; building, collecting resources, building more, moving troops around and attacking. It’s all there and functions as a coherent, compelling whole.

I remember at the time I first played this game. I was already very familiar with other mouse controlled simulation games on the Amiga, such as Sim City or Theme Park. So the idea of designing a city or building an industrial zone on a world map was one that came very naturally to me. It’s really incredible how many of the other elements of the game, such as combat and resource gathering, simply slot into place with one another, like jigsaw pieces clicking together to form a whole. It’s as though this game design was always something that video games were meant to do, and that Westwood were just the first to discover it.

Of course, you have to give some credit to Frank Herbert’s original work. The idea of going out into the desert to harvest spice from the sand to then use as a resource to expand one’s power… That’s all in the original text and makes for ideal videogame mechanics. The wealth is right there for the taking, but the more you try to harvest, the greater the chances you’ll attract the unwanted attention of a rival house, or that the vibrations of your machines will cause a sand worm to violently erupt from the earth below. That the perfect risk/reward mechanic, if ever I heard one, and while it all originates from Herbert’s imagination, you have to credit to Westwood Studios for recognising its gameplay potential and making it a reality.

As boring as it might sound, I think the beating heart of Westwood’s game design is simply how long it takes to do anything; the mathematics that govern the game. Everything has a timer on it, whether it be the time it takes to fill a harvester with spice, to build a factory, generate a unit or send a tank crawling across the desert, you’ll spend just as much time waiting as you do acting.

Rather than just spend that time waiting around, you find yourself finding ways to make other actions while the clock ticks down. Perhaps while those barracks are being built, you can check on your harvesters and bring them home. Maybe while your tanks are slowly crawling toward an enemy base, you can train up and release some soldiers to guard the city walls. It’s virtual plate spinning, somehow both tedious and addictive in equal measure.

Of all the innovations in Dune II, I think my favourite is actually the humble radar. Your visibility of this world is initially confined to your immediate surroundings but once you’ve managed to build a radar station, and powered it with a wind trap, a mini-map in the bottom right of the screen will pleasingly flicker into view. As your troops and vehicles push at the boundaries of the world, the radar map will paint in a miniature pixel-by-pixel recreation that successfully communicates the exact location of sand, rock, spice, enemy buildings and troops all with simple coloured dots.

I love the way it draws itself in as you explore, like Deluxe Paint’s graffiti tool, but more than that I’m impressed that the map is also interactive. If you click on a tank in the big gameplay window and command it to move you can of course click anywhere else in that same window to determine its destination. But you can also click anywhere on the radar map too, saving you tedious seconds of mouse scrolling so you can command your army over the longest distances. To have two completely separate representations of the same play space, in order to give the player an enhanced level of control, I truly think is a triumph of gameplay and UI design.

Sadly, Westwood didn’t master every element of the RTS first time around, and one of Dune II’s most severe shortcomings, in retrospect, is the inability to control multiple units at once. I don’t think this was a limitation of early Nineties hardware, but more a limitation of the imagination. I expect you’d need to play for a long time before you’d realise exactly what an entirely new type of game needs to make it better, and the realities of time, resources and sod’s law dictate that you won’t always be able to implement those improvements before that game’s development is complete. 

In a modern RTS, moving all your units at once is very simple. Just use the mouse to click and drag a selection tool over all of the units you need, choose the appropriate command and off they all go. You could be forgiven for thinking this mechanic has existed since the dawn of the genre but it’s just not there in Dune II. Instead, if you want to move 10 units, you have to click on and command each of those 10 units one at a time, laboriously moving each one, wasting time and generating pure frustration in the process. Playing an RTS without group selection really highlights how important that mechanic was to the evolution of the genre so, it takes Dune II to realise just how clever Command & Conquer was.

The other frustration I have with Dune II may be a more personal one, and it’s the sheer difficulty of the game. In the missions where you’re tasked with wiping out an enemy house, victory can often seem like an uphill struggle or a war of attrition. You can lose so many of your troops just moving them across the map and even once you get to the enemy base, it feels like your rival house is able to repair their buildings quicker than you can damage them. This isn’t so much of an issue in the earliest levels, when you’re able to move enough tanks to a rival base in such numbers that you quickly overwhelm them, but when the difficulty increases, I felt like it was almost impossible to win.

Furthermore, while you also have the same ability to repair your buildings while they’re being attacked, it’s easy to lose track of how your base is doing when you’re on the offensive elsewhere on the map, and if your core factory building happens to be destroyed then it’s essentially game over. It’s literally impossible to win the game at this stage as you’re left unable to construct anything new. No factories, no harvesters, no troops. No hope!

Interestingly, Dune II received a sort of half sequel, half remake in 1998 with the release of Dune 2000. I’ve never had the chance to play it but it does seem to address my two main criticisms of Dune II. It allows for multiple units to be commanded at once and features greater balancing in the combat, suggesting that it might play in a more strategic, assured way. Despite this, Dune 2000 didn’t review as well as the Command & Conquer games of the time and is clearly not as well remembered as Dune II. Maybe I’ll get around to playing it some day. But I have a couple of TV series, a book and, hopefully, a brand new movie to get through before I think I’ll get around to that one.

FOUR LITTLE THINGS ABOUT DUNE II: BATTLE FOR ARRAKIS THAT I RATHER LIKED

1. The construction screens and story scenes present a nice opportunity to show Dune’s world up close and in detail.

2. At the end of each mission you’re awarded a score because, well, it was the Nineties. But you’re also given a rank that’s added next to your name on the leaderboard. I particularly liked being called a “Desert Mongoose.”

3. There’s something mesmerising about watching the harvesters filter through the sand to retrieve the spice.

4. Whenever you move a vehicle across the desert they leave these teeny track marks in the sand before eventually fading away.

Finally, how about some music from Dune II: Battle For Arrakis…

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