I always thought the original Dune game doesn't get enough love. Dune II was obviously more influential being a template for a successful new type of game, but Dune actually told the story with beautiful pixelart cut scenes and required you to follow the steps in the book, (or maybe more based on the Lynch film.) Actually my teenage self discovered Dune through playing the Amiga version and only read and watched it after so it will always have a special place for me.
> But, rather amazingly, Cryo’s Dune defies any knee-jerk prejudices that might be engendered by knowledge of Philippe Ulrich’s earlier or later output. While it’s every bit as unique a design concept as you might expect given its place of origin, in this case the concept works. For all that they spent the better part of three years at one another’s throats more often than not, Dune nevertheless wound up being a true meeting in the middle between the passionate digital artistes of Cryo and the more practical craftsmen in Virgin’s Anglosphere offices. For once, an exemplar of the French Touch has a depth worthy of its striking surface. Dune plays like a dispatch from an alternate reality in which Cryo cared as much about making good games in a design sense as they did about making beautiful and meaningful ones in an aesthetic and thematic sense — thus proving, should anyone have doubted it, that these things need not be mutually exclusive.
Dune: Spice Opera is my favourite album of all time, and the rare CD is one of my most prized possessions. I'm friends with Stephane Picq on Facebook but he hasn't been on in years.
the dune ost by stephane picq is a master course in how to take full advantage of the fm chip, and that's where it sounds the best and i believe how it was intended. it's beautiful analogue electronica. the spice opera is a nice addition, but it's trying a bit too hard...
Absolutely agree! I was so disappointed when the industry as a whole moved away from the mishmash of gameplay styles that tried to fuse the narrative with gameplay, to generic play with narrative only as decoration. Fortunately we've had indie games reintroduce experimentalism in play types in more recent years. I suppose it's in the nature of game development and programming itself that things become essentialised and iterated, but for me the - somewhat clumsy - creation of something new is always more interesting than a perfected abstraction. Especially when storytelling and gameplay are so interlinked.
Remi Herbulot invented the HERAD music system, which used features of the sound chip that no other sound system did. Remi operated on a godlike level of FM sound production, the only other person who even approached him was Robert Prince (Doom musician).
Stephane Picq wrote most of the Dune soundtrack as real electronic music then "backported" it to Remi's music system. Ulrich contributed one or two tracks.
Absolutely agree. The original Dune artworks and soundtracks are really appart, it's more an experience than a "traditional" video game (while at the time, there weren't traditional games, good memories...) The first Dune is also more faithful to the book regarding the ecology theme and the Fremen arc (in my mind at least)
It's been a "few" years since I played Dune I & II, but I can still remember the Dune soundtrack and much of its imagery with amazing clarity. They were amazing achievements for the time.
The pc CD-Rom version also had beautiful cutscenes, a movie clip and music. I liked it much more than Dune II thigh the replay value of the latter was much better. But I feel much more love for Dune I.
I had the pleasure of QAing Dune II on the PC while I worked at Virgin Games in 92. The game really sucked me in and was fun to play, despite the bugs.
This is why I'm amazed really bad games get made! "Playing games and recognizing if you're having fun" isn't some rare skill set that only certain people have.
It's universal.
We may have different tastes, but I can't see how some games went through development, QA, management, etc. and no one said "This isn't much fun to play." Or even recognized that people weren't excited and smiling at the game!
How screwed up of an organization does one have to have for there to be that little feedback shared and listened to?
The majority of the work in games is making assets and delivering code. Neither of these have fun as a KPI.
Further, defining fun as a KPI presents challenges of sociology, psychology, and philosophy: People are happy to exclaim "this is fun!" And then quit playing within a few minutes. Absent a very, very careful understanding of the belief structures that drive the combination of purchase and interest that makes someone a "fan", the metric degrades to raw "engagement", which leads to meetings where it is determined that the engagement metric should be boosted through the introduction of gambling-style addictive loops.
In other words: lots of people like playing good games. Almost nobody knows precisely why they like a game, and therefore they do not know how to make a game equivalent to what they like. What the industry does instead is to clone whatever worked last time and try to give it a twist or add a little more scope. Whatever formula worked for another game, everyone is going to try adding to theirs, whether or not it's sensible. Specific game teams manage to see farther and make exceptional work by dint of being able to frame the discussion appropriately, so that it brings in everyone's perspective. Without that, every meeting is just a discussion of deliverables. But in many, many cases, the team has to make the game twice to be able to sink their teeth into the problem. Hence the common thing of game sequels being much better than the first entry.
I've worked on games, huge productions, which ended up receiving really low ( and well-deserved) review scores.
Everyone knew it was about to happen, but this was a multi-year product where everyone had been pointing out the issues more than early enough but management simply wouldn't hear it. Concerns about unrealistic scope, poor design, etc. were met with demands that we believe in the game and put our backs into it.
Even then, I did find myself enjoying the game and every now and then lost track of what I was supposed to be testing (as a software engineer testing my changes, not QA) and simply lose track of time playing the game.
where everyone had been pointing out the issues more than early enough
The other variation I've experience is everything starts out great with a clear design and reasonable time line. Then a couple of years later, when you are almost done, some people start worrying that what you're making might be a bit too 'niche' and start adding some 'minor' changes to make the it appeal to a larger demographic.
I originally wrote but removed another paragraph (because I didn't want to make the comment too long) about another wrinkle... The worst production I was part of, which lead to a full year of crunch for my team, started with everyone saying we were way over scoped and then the studio leadership decided, halfway through production, to change the entire campaign to be built around five huge set pieces each of which required months of work to develop bespoke stuff only used in one mission.
What baffles me is that the data-driven mindset is supposed to counter this, but the people in charge in these cases were probably already thinking they are daa driven by essentially following assumptions.
The problem is that the studio leadership made the deliberate decision to aim for something our data showed we could not deliver, relying on overtime to compensate for the overambitious scope. Which is not a feasible solution and, unsurprisingly, did not work out.
Once you have a game that is playable enough for you to really realise that "This isn't much fun to play" you're often too far along to start making major changes.
Same with 'bad' movies. The people releasing the bad movies aren't oblivious to the fact that the movies turned out bad and not what they hoped it would be, but they're out of time, out of money and contractually obligated to get the thing out the door.
Knowing that a game isn't fun (or good) does not mean that you know how to fix it. Or that you have the budget left to fix it.
You can tell a book isn't fun but you may not know how to make it better.
Or the game may just go in a different direction that you originally planned. I've read about authors complaining that their characters didn't develop how they initially wanted and you may think "How is that possible?" but the same can happen with games (or software or any product you design).
And a lot of good games suck until very close to the end where suddenly everything clicks and they become amazing. It's not really a very predictable process & at the end of the day you have to spend a lot of resources (time & money, some of it you're on the line for to publishers or investors) before you find out.
It can very easily be better financially (or at least less bad) for a studio to finish up a game they realized (possibly too late) isn't as good as they hoped than to just abandon it - you have contractual obligations, you get paid on milestones, and everyone still has to get a salary even if you decide to abandon the game.
I'd be super curious to get a representative sample on this from inside the industry.
Do studios not prototype games?
Maybe it's rose tinted glasses from a simpler time, with shorter development cycles, but almost all these famous game retrospectives seem to begin with "once we had the initial systems in playable form, before assets or polishing, it turned out the game was a lot of fun."
You prototype a lot but a promising prototype doesn't always turn to a good (and original) game.
Not every game is fun in prototype form (think for example of SimCity or Civilization - you have to have a certain level of complexity before it's interesting) and other times something that seems fun for a few minutes in a prototype doesn't necessarily translate to a fun X hours game. Or you can find a fun core (matching gems in a match 3 game and causing a lot of cascades is fun!) but is not something that will on its own make a game commercially viable in 2022.
And sometimes you run out of time before finding a very promising prototype and have to get started anyway or you'll have people idlying (while getting paid & costing you money you may not have before you sign a publishing deal) so you just take a leap of faith on whatever seemed best among what you did find...
The cases in your quote are really the rare exceptions where everything went great but it doesn't go that way every single time.
Agree, you essentially prototype before you have a budget. when the prtotype is approved or blessed, you get a budget, but that is the point of no return where you lose the mandate to significantly and suddenly change this concept. If you stray from it gradually though, you cannot course correct significantly if that affects budget.
I've also on multiple occasions had to send pitches to upcoming games while we were still a year from shipping the current game (as it takes a while to actually get money, if you want a smooth transition of team members you have to do it gradually and plan it well ahead of time). And when finishing up an existing game is when you have the least person-resources to invest in prototyping new ideas.
And if you're a small company/startup without a lot of money you can't chance getting stuck without funding, so play with the cards you were dealt and try what you can...
The problem is that games as they are usually developed require a lot of investment before the systems in them are supposed to gel together and become a playable product. If it becomes clear that it's kind of crappy at that point, there's a huge incentive to just finish it up as best as they can and throw it out on the market to recoup a bit of the costs.
The book, and later CBC tv show, jPod, gives a fictionalized account of how bad games get created. Douglas Coupland loves to exaggerate reality a bit but he generally does good research on the core of whatever cultural segment he is writing about.
Thanks! I remember getting a copy in first year uni just before traveling home for break. Upon getting home I stayed up most of that first night playing just enthralled - something I’ve not done since. I don’t remember any bugs.
I feel a bit like Dune 2 may have been one of the last games that everybody played. (Doom 2 was probably the last.) I never played much Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Warcraft or Starcraft, but I loved Dune 2 and played the hell out of it.
I guess this was about the period that the computer gaming hobby started to separate into different genres where people started sticking to just one or two favourite genres.
I feel a bit like Dune 2 may have been one of the last games that everybody played.
Where? I was a pretty active gamer at that time and not only never played it, but I don't even recall people really talking about it. I recall C&C being a much bigger deal for example.
Yeah, I didn't play any of those. I played quite a bit of Doom and Doom 2, but after that, I was mostly done with FPS games. Same as playing Dune 2 but being done with RTS games. I mostly played RPGs and turn-based strategy after that, which is why to me, this period feels like a turning point between everybody playing all the great games across genres, and people gravitating towards their favourite genre.
But it's entirely possible that it's more a matter of age. It makes sense that when you're young, you try everything and when you get older, you stick with your favourites. Although some classics still break through genre barriers. Like Portal or Minecraft.
Yeah I'm pretty sure it is - I'm 39 (so a bit younger than you) and for me "everyone played" Half Life and Starcraft! When I graduated high school at 2001 I played a lot less for quite a few years.
Around 1993 playing Dune 2 was all I wanted to do with my life as a young teenager. I really loved this game and played over and over..... wow.... I really miss those days! :-) Sometimes I watch a recorded gameplay on YouTube just for fun... and I still think the intro and the soundtrack is amazing to this day! I loved reading about how this game came together!
I only had the chance to play it at a friends' house, and I remember me trying to just building turrets... all the way to the enemy base. And I won with that very silly strategy. You were not able to freely place buildings so that's why I just built a thin wall of turrets all the way, expanding the fingerprint of "my" base.
This was a protoss strategy in StarCraft that was fun as well. Except you just built them right next to their base you didn't need to build out from yours.
I played it in the late 90s years after its release, was really good game. Maybe I'll fire up dosbox and have a look at it again. Would be interested to hear the soundtrack after all those years.
It's a souped-up Dune II that runs on Linux/Windows/Mac.
Uses original graphics and sound but has quality of life improvements like higher resolition, group select, map editor, network play, different AI engines/difficulties etc.
IMO the Dune2 AdLib soundtrack is one of the best demonstrations of the FM capabilities of the OPL chip.
The controls are very dated by modern standards. Which is a shame, because I have a ton of nostalgia for the base building and resource gathering. Ah, to lay down concrete slabs again.
Agree. After playing Command & Conquer in the mid 90s, I revisited my favourite Dune II from just a couple of years previously... and oh dear! It scarcely held up even back then. It's not that it had turned into a bad game in the meantime, it was just that C&C had some significant UX improvements in terms of commanding multiple units, and now doing anything significant in Dune II felt like a big pile of hassle. Was like being stuck with EDIT.COM again, after a good stint on Emacs :(
There was a later remake, Dune 2000, which I've never played. But it postdates both Command & Conquer and Red Alert, so maybe it's a bit better?
Or not... I had such good memories of it, but then tried it again a few years ago and, uh, it's just terrible. The concept is still cool, but it's just pain to play. The memories were way better.
Yeah... the whole "put esoteric graphical buttons required for frequent and repetitive game actions on a static background around the viewport" is thankfully consigned to the dustbin of history.
I realize why it was done: maximizing interactive graphics on the limited hardware of the day by shrinking the rendering region.
But good god, making core user interface elements that unusable is a fever dream only someone completely unfamiliar with time-motion studies or prior mainframe keyboard art could dream up.
They could have at least made it hands-on-keyboard and had a shrunken viewport.
Dune 2000 was pretty good back in the day. I enjoyed its gameplay and its art looked great for the time. It felt about the same tier of fun as C&C and Red Alert, though perhaps a bit less replayable due to maps feeling rather samey. Certainly worth checking out though if its still runnable
Loved Dune 2000. It's definitely more palatable than the original, but it's worth playing both D2000 and Dune Legacy. It's really too bad we aren't getting anything out of the franchise anymore. I liked the new 4x, but it lacked the personality of the older games.
not denying that Dune II was the first "successful" RTS but that Atari 800 game runs in real time (it is not turn based), you select units and tell them what to do (go to X, fire at Y) etc using the joystick to move a cursor and shortcut keys to select units and groups.
There are many predecessors that were strategy games that run in real-time, but they aren't RTS games in the modern sense.
One historian defines it as a game which:
> ...runs in real time, ... also one where players start with a largely blank slate, gather resources, and use them to build a variety of structures. These structures can in turn build military units who can carry out simple orders of the “attack there” or “defend this” stripe autonomously. The whole game plays on an accelerated time scale which yields bursts if not sustained plateaus of activity as frantic as any action game[1].
Oh wow, the Herog Zwei reference brought back a lot of memories for me. I loved playing that with my friends. We had the same gentleman's agreement mentioned in the article. We also sometimes started the game and went away for 15min or so to accumulate lots of money before starting in.
Nice tips! The wait time will make the game go faster and less time idling. The no transform will make playing vs. cpu harder. Time to dust it off & replay!
Hijacking for another Dune-themed game: anyone successfully played Emperor: Battle for Dune on Windows > 10? Easily one of my favorite RTS's all time, but not as nostalgic as Dune 1/2/2k or other RTS's and definitely won't get the remaster/remake treatment :(
I played Emperor: Battle for Dune when it came out in ~2003 and loved it as a child, especially house Ordos and the cobra cannon, but boy, are those some rose tinted glasses.
The switch to an early 3D engine made the game look and feel janky as hell, and you could tell from the lack of polish Westowood was in pain from the EA take over. Placing buildings, moving units across the map, path-finding, everything felt ... unfinished. The low-poly 3D models made everything look like textured cardboard boxes. Hell, even the UI and HUD elements were real time 3D rendered, but really low-poly and fugly. It seemed unnecessary, as if the game devs and designers had no experience yet how to make a 3D RTS game right, but the marketing guys told them everything must be full 3D because every cool game is 3D now. I much would have preferred they stuck with per-rendered 2.5D isometric graphics from the Red Alert 2 engine.
But the story, cut-scenes and missions had me captivated enough to spend too many hours in the game, that had my parents worried. Good times.
That's great. Trying the Lutris installation guide for this is on my to-do list. Did you get it working with just the instructions
alone, or did you have to take additional steps?
There's a really well written serie of three articles about Dune and Dune 2 history on the Digital Antiquarian, if you want to find out a lot more about theses you can find them here:
https://www.filfre.net/tag/dune/
First part is about Dune the book and its author Franck Herbert, the second one about Dune 1, and the last one about Dune 2. Each article is well documented and describe in great details the technical, economic and artistic background of the people who made these three projects.
I was just hoping for a moment to have found a new reverse engineering project for the Christmas holidays, but then I see that there is already an open source implementation (Open Dune), which kind of takes the fun away (even if it was developed without RE).
What's also noteworthy is Emperor: Battle for Dune. Released by the same Westwood Studios in 2001, it was their first foray into 3D RTS. It was a great game IMO. Excellent soundtrack. The only problem was they replaced House Camino with a new House Ordos - a change that was unpopular among some Dune fans.
Despite the hyperbolic title, this is a good article in that actually researches the precursors and shows how they helped synthesize Dune II - nothing comes out of thin air and I came away convinced that Dune II was an important moment in RT strategy games.
