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The Dune games

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The Dune licence split in two in 1992 in a way that rarely happens. The French studio Cryo was building an adventure game, the publisher Virgin lost confidence in it and commissioned a second, separate adaptation from Westwood in America. Both eventually shipped, and they have almost nothing in common. Dune, the Cryo game, is mostly narrative: you fly an ornithopter between settlements, talk to characters, and assign Fremen tribes either to harvest spice or to train as fighters.

The other one changed an entire genre. Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty assembled things nobody had put in one game before: selecting individual units with a mouse, building a base from a sidebar menu, an economy driven by harvesting a resource under threat, and a campaign map where you choose the next mission. The three houses field different units and different final weapons, so the same terrain plays differently depending on whom you command.

Remakes, sequels and a stealth game

Dune 2000 rebuilt the same campaign with filmed briefings between missions, and Emperor: Battle for Dune moved it into three dimensions while letting you recruit allied factions alongside your own house. The odd one out is Frank Herbert's Dune, tied to the television mini-series and built as an action game with sneaking rather than as a strategy title at all.

What runs here is Dune II, and it appears twice, since the catalogue lists two separate copies of that game — the standard one and a version carrying Italian and Spanish text. Both start in the browser window through the built-in emulator, with no download and no plugin. The Cryo adventure, the console conversion, the remake, the 3D sequel and the mini-series tie-in are catalogued as profiles with description and screenshots.

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