Dune

The early 1990s produced several games adapting Frank Herbert's novel Dune into interactive form, and it's from this period that a pair of very different titles gave rise to the series. Dune, from French studio Cryo Interactive in 1992, was an unusual blend of adventure, resource management and strategy set on the desert world of Arrakis, where the player, as young Paul Atreides, works to unite the Fremen tribes while gradually taking control of spice mining. The game also ran on a day-night cycle and made the player manage water use through stillsuits, pushing it closer to a desert survival simulation than a classic adventure game.

That same year brought Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty from Westwood Studios, a game that pushed narrative aside in favor of base-building, spice harvesting and real-time unit control - and in doing so effectively founded the real-time strategy genre in the form later expanded by Command & Conquer and Warcraft. Dune II is often cited as one of the most influential games of the decade, even though it didn't look like a landmark release at the time.

Despite sharing the same source material, the two games offered very different experiences - one leaning on story and diplomacy, the other on tactics and pace - and both were ported across the platforms of the era, from the Amiga to the Mega Drive to PC under DOS. What defines the series, then, isn't a single shared design, but how the same source material was pulled in two entirely different genre directions.