Dune 2000

Dune II from 1992 was for many of us the first encounter with what would become known as real-time strategy. I was sitting at my monitor, watching pixelated worms devouring my harvesters, and for the first time in my life I understood that strategy could be fun in real-time. Six years later, Westwood released Dune 2000 — a remake of the same game, polished, more modern, but at its core the same sunset over Arrakis.

The story stays faithful to Herbert's source material and the original game. On the desert of Arrakis, three houses — Atreides, Harkonnen, and Ordos — fight for control of the spice, the only substance without which the galaxy grinds to a halt. Whoever controls the spice controls the universe. Westwood understood this well and let you pick a side right at the start, with each faction having a slightly different way to make life difficult for your enemy.

The gameplay is classic RTS from the second half of the nineties — you build a base, harvest spice with harvesters, protect them from worms and enemy units, then attack. The controls were functional for 1998, though compared to StarCraft, which came out the same year, Dune 2000 feels more conservative. You can't select groups of units as conveniently, pathfinding sometimes suffers from creative freedom attacks, and your tanks occasionally decide on their own to take a roundabout route across half the map. This isn't a memory prettified by time — that's how it actually was back then.

What Dune 2000 did well was presentation. Westwood added cinematic sequences with live actors — not big-budget, but impressive for 1998 and the gaming industry. Frank Klepacki's music underscores the atmosphere of the desert planet exactly as it should. And the graphics, while obviously outdated now, looked sharp and clear back then. The game overall feels like an honest, solid remake — not a revolution, but a decently done job of bringing a classic into a more modern package.

Today, Dune 2000 will appeal mainly to those who know the original Dune II and want to relive that experience in a slightly more accessible form, or those interested in the history of the RTS genre who want to see where it all started. Expecting it to match the fluidity of modern strategy games would be a mistake. But firing it up, hearing that characteristic sound of the harvester heading out for spice, and spending twenty minutes back in 1998 — that still works.