Simulating desert power: Dune games, real-time strategy, and the postcolonial legacies of Lynch’s Dune

Cryo Interactive’s Dune (1992) was based on Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name. After the production company that created David Lynch’s Dune went bankrupt, the game developers acquired the rights adaptation rights from Universal Pictures. Borrowing heavily from the novel and its early film adaptation, the player takes on the role of Paul Atreides – managing armies while adventuring and creating relationships with the Fremen. Both the strategy and adventure aspects created two layers of the game: real-time strategy managing spice operations and dungeon-crawling to meet important characters in the story. In the same year, Westwood Studios released Dune II . In comparison to Cryo Interactive’s version, Westwood Studio’s version of the game focused on real-time strategy. Players play as military commanders in their selected house from Dune ’s universe: building military bases, mining spice, and capturing enemy territories. These activities culminate in a final showdown between the player’s house battling against three enemy sides, including the emperor’s Sardaukar forces. This gameplay formula of establishing bases, mining, and battling against enemy units eventually built the foundation of Westwood’s successful Command and Conquer franchise. In this paper, we trace the history of the Dune games and their legacy in the real-time strategy genre. We aim to bridge analyses of media convergence alongside analyses of colonialism in real-time strategy games. In the case of the Dune games, representations of colonialist imperatives emerged from how two studios attempted to reproduce and gamify elements in Frank Herbert’s novels and its early film adaptation. Resource extraction, military management (including management of Fremen or native-coded characters as uncontrollable support allies), and the gamic reproduction of the fog of war become central in how the Dune games simulate the neocolonial logics of empire building.