Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty from 1992 is the game with which Westwood Studios essentially defined the real-time strategy genre as we understand it today — base-building, resource mining, research, and direct real-time unit control were first combined by this very title, inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune universe. The player picks one of three noble houses — Atreides, Harkonnen, or Ordos — and on the desert planet Arrakis fights for control of deposits of the rare spice, the key resource of the entire universe, which the imperial court also longs to obtain in the background of the story.

The core of the game consists of gathering spice with harvester vehicles protected from giant sandworms, building a base with limited space, and gradually unlocking more advanced units and technologies through research buildings. Each house has its own set of units and special abilities — the Atreides rely on infantry and reconnaissance, the Harkonnen on brute military force, the Ordos on speed and sabotage — which gives the game a certain tactical variety despite the still-simple mouse controls of the time, which lacked more advanced features like group orders. The graphics and sound were of very high quality for their time, and the atmosphere of the parched, dangerous planet was supported by austere but functional music as well as the sounds of hissing sand and the deep rumble of an approaching worm.

Dune II became a direct inspiration for both Warcraft and Command & Conquer and is generally recognized as the game that established the RTS genre as such — earlier titles contained similar elements, but this was the first to combine all the key elements into a single coherent form, which the entire genre then adopted. Even more than three decades later, Dune II is valuable as a historical milestone, though its pace and controls are naturally slower and less comfortable than in later strategy games, and players used to more modern RTS titles will need to lower their expectations of smoothness.

Why play it: For anyone interested in the roots of the RTS genre who's willing to lower their expectations of smoothness and controls — Dune II is a historical milestone from which both Warcraft and Command & Conquer descend.