Dune 2000 / Warcraft II (Saturn)

Before real-time strategy conquered the world, it first had to conquer living rooms. The pairing of Dune 2000 and Warcraft II on the SEGA Saturn is testimony to that conquering expedition — two pillars of the genre that tried to put down roots outside their natural PC home.

Dune 2000 is a remake of Westwood's legendary Dune II, the game that practically invented the modern RTS template: harvesting a resource (the spice melange), base building, unit production and a battle of three warring houses for dominion over the desert planet Arrakis. Blizzard's Warcraft II then pushed the genre further — a fantasy clash of humans and orcs, battles on land and at sea, spells, and above all a superbly tuned pace that made it one of the most beloved RTS games of all time.

Both games share the same challenge that accompanied every console port of strategy games at the time: how do you replace the precision of the mouse? Controlling dozens of units with a gamepad is a bit like taming the elements and demands patience. But it's precisely these conversions that show just how much the market of the time craved the RTS genre — so much so that publishers weren't afraid to take on the technically thankless task of bringing them to the TV.

The cultural footprint of both brands is enormous. Dune gave the genre its shape, Warcraft gave it a soul, and later a whole universe grew from it, culminating in the phenomenon of World of Warcraft. Having them on the Saturn means holding two pieces of essential gaming DNA in your hands, albeit in a form that betrays where the limits of the hardware of the time lay.

For fans of strategy and console history alike, this is a fascinating pair. It's not the most comfortable way to play these classics, but it's the most interesting one in terms of how the genre learned to walk outside of the PC.

Why play: Two cornerstones of the RTS genre together on a console — ideal for anyone who wants to understand where modern strategy games came from.