Regardless of source, they were all there. Some of these elements, such as fog of war, were borrowed from these other genres while still others were invented during the game creation process. Nearly every element of real time strategy gaming that we have come to expect appeared in one form or another in Dune 2. So we decided to make Dune II a game that combined the best parts of these (realtime gameplay, exploration & tech production, and military combat) into something fun and new.” The popular games we played at the time were Populous, Civilization, and tabletop wargames. “Although we knew the game was going to be based on the Dune license, we didn’t want it to be another RPG game. It stands today as the game that standardized a genre, that brought together all the elements in a single formula that would be followed in nearly every real time strategy game to follow. It does so happen, that the game Joseph Bostic and the team over at Westwood Studios would produce would turn out to be such a piece of design and engineering. There are very few things in this world that you can point to and say, “Yes, that’s where it all started”, it’s truly rare to find a single piece of engineering or design in which one can see how an entire field or genre finally came together, there are precious few epiphanies that set a format to be followed ever thereafter. Westwood had worked on licensed property before, mostly Dungeons & Dragons, with good success, so we said sure.” Virgin Interactive asked us if we wanted to do a Dune based game too and we were free to make whatever kind of game we wanted.
We didn’t know what it was (Cryo was very secretive), but suspected it was an RPG of some kind. Another company in France, Cryo, was already working on a Dune game.
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At the time, they had the license to the Dune movie for purposes of making video games. They were a good parent company and let us continue to make the games we wanted to make.
“Not too long after I started working at Westwood Studios, we were acquired by Virgin Interactive.