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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

At the end of the opening monologue of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 1 (2021) – the first instalment in the newest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune (2021, 1992), the Fremen warrior Chani asks ‘...who will our next oppressors be?’ as the invading force her people have been fighting against for decades abandon her planet. Amidst the smoke and fire of heavy munitions, this adaptation begins unlike any other version of Dune, opening the story by foregrounding the costly fight of the Fremen people against a cycle of exploitation and violence while imperial forces attempt to colonize the desert planet Arrakis for its resources. Chani’s line is a critical adaptation choice that begins this retelling of Frank Herbert’s story with a focus on the cautionary anti-colonial themes of the series which have often been underplayed in favour of Paul Atreides’ hero’s journey.

This paper looks at the text and legacy of the first Dune videogames to adapt the franchise: Cryo Interactive’s 1992 adventure game Dune and Westwood Studios’ 1992 real-time strategy game Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. This paper first examines the chain of adaptation from the original Dune text, through David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation, before diving into a textual analysis of each game. Ultimately, we outline how this chain of adaptation first concentrates on the Paul Atreides monomyth such that the novel’s underlying themes of territorial exploitation and anti-colonial message are downplayed or lost in favour of Paul’s ascent to power. In the case of Dune II, the game goes further and celebrates the scale of the war that it renders through its gameplay.

A brief synopsis of Dune

In Dune, Paul Atreides travels to the desert planet Arrakis as his father’s noble house has been given an imperial decree to manage the planet and increase the production of spice, which fuels all space travel in the galaxy. Eventually Paul’s family is betrayed by the imperial forces, and he escapes with his life into the sands of Arrakis before ultimately recruiting the local population – known as Fremen – to his cause. Paul spends the bulk of the novel with the Fremen, and a substantial portion of the text is dedicated to depicting ways of living and relationships to land and water that contrast with Paul’s imperial upbringing. Though Paul eventually recruits the Fremen and gets revenge against the conspiring forces that betrayed his family, he does so by sacrificing much of his humanity as he knowingly exploits the people who sheltered him to achieve his ends. Though the ending of Dune is celebratory, Paul’s victory comes at great cost as he has recruited people he loved and admired into lifetimes of future war (Herbert, 1965).

In a 1982 interview for NBC, Frank Herbert attempted to distil his thesis of the Dune series for the general public:

Don’t trust leaders to always be right. I worked to create a leader in this book who would really be an attractive charismatic person for all the good reasons, not for any bad reasons. Then power comes to him. He makes decisions. Some of his decisions made for millions of people, millions upon millions of people don’t work out too well. [...] I think that our society was founded on a distrust of government, and we have lost that distrust in government (DuneInfo, 2015; Herbert, 1965).

Herbert’s statement was made 2 years before the first screen adaptation of Dune released on December 14th, 1984. Within this film Paul’s partner Chani is merely a love interest for Paul Atreides, whose ascent to power is the unquestionably celebrated and climactic moment of the film. Following in the footsteps of the recent blockbuster Star Wars, the 1984 Dune depicts the protagonist Paul entirely as a young naive hero, eventually coming into his own power to save the galaxy from evil. Learning the ways of the Fremen is an obstacle course for Paul as he trains them to be an army without scruples. Thus begins a trajectory of Dune adaptations that struggle to convey the moral lesson of Frank Herbert’s original telling of the story, where the interplay between Paul and the Fremen lead to an outcome where Paul’s choices bring unfathomable pain to millions of people across the universe, and ultimately cause Paul to question his own choices.

Literature review and methods

Game studies has produced volumes on games’ intersections with Hollywood. Brookey’s (2010: 3) examination of spin-off games traces the facilitation of media convergence between Hollywood and game industries from Atari’s E.T. game to more contemporary such as Disney Interactive and Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts game series. Similarly, Papazian and Sommers’ (2013) edited collection, for example, contains multiple analyses on Hollywood adaptations of games, representation in these games, and transmedia narratives. Within this volume, Felan Parker (2013)’s analysis not only on how the Star Wars franchise expanded its narratives through games, but also his argument on the importance of highlighting the socio-cultural processes behind the construction of ‘canon’ becomes essential to our analysis, because in the case of the Dune games, what gets considered as ‘canon’ is negotiated by studios and developers to better market these games. Multiple analyses of Hollywood and games, however, tend to focus on examples in the 2000s and beyond and less on the 1990s. It is important to pay attention to games’ intersections with Hollywood in the 1990s especially when some of Hollywood’s failures produce games that shape genres, such is the case with David Lynch’s Dune and the Dune games that were produced after it.

Studies on the real-time strategy genre list the Dune games, particularly Westwood’s Dune II, as one of real-time strategy’s early pioneers (Dor, 2019: 76). Rolf Nohr’s (2010: 189) examination of strategy games in the 1990s, which included an analysis of Westwood’s Dune II, argues how real-time strategy games’ early pioneers reproduced the discourses of Cold War geopolitics. Moreover, analyses of real-time strategy games, particularly Sid Meyer’s Civilization series, point out the colonialist imperatives of these games especially in how these games reproduce colonial narratives (Poblocki, 2002), how these games represent indigenous peoples as resources to be extracted (Mir and Owens, 2013), and how these games reproduce postcolonial space (Mukherjee, 2016). In her essay, Postcolonial Playgrounds, Sybille Lammes (2010: 2) invites scholars to examine how games mutate postcolonial histories and our understandings of space, and how games, through these mutations, alter colonial legacies. For Lammes, games as postcolonial playgrounds continually ‘test, scrutinize, and transform’ colonial histories (Lammes, 2010: 4). Souvik Mukherjee, in his book Videogames and Postcolonialism, complicates Lammes’ argument by pointing out how histories, particularly personal histories with colonialism and colonial games could be ‘intertwined with and constructed out of colonialist logic’ (2017: 31).

With these perspectives in mind, we combine the practices of postcolonial media history (Werkmeister, 2016: 235) alongside textual analysis (Fernandez-Vara, 2024:10). For this project, we gathered and assembled developer interviews alongside written histories of these games sourced from game magazines, and historical accounts, contrasting these accounts to examine ‘counterpoints, breaks and contradictions’ to question the colonial discourse of these accounts (Werkmeister, 2016: 253). These accounts also help contextualize narrative and design decisions found in our analyses of each game. Meanwhile, we also deploy game analysis methods to emphasize how game structures deploy colonial space (Lammes, 2003; Mukherjee, 2016) and colonial narratives (Humphreys, 2021). Through these combined methods of media history and textual analysis, we highlight how games and the institutions surrounding them – namely, game companies and film companies – construct an ‘assemblage of play’ (Taylor, 2009: 336) that facilitate the construction of these games as postcolonial spaces. Through our analysis, we interrogate not only how Hollywood films such as Lynch’s Dune influence colonial narratives and mechanics in games, but also how games justify colonial expansion and extraction through the process of adaptation.

Failing forward: Dune (1984), adaptation rights and its screen afterlives

The story of the Dune games begins with the Dino de Lauretiis Corporation acquiring the rights to Frank Herbert’s Dune, and its attempt to adapt the novel as a single movie to compete with 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars film franchise. Numerous directors were picked but subsequently dropped the project, until David Lynch ultimately became the film’s director. Unfortunately, Lynch’s adaptation underperformed at the box office and received multiple negative reviews. Consequently, a year after its release sequel plans were cancelled. The Dino de Lauretiis Corporation also went bankrupt, thus putting adaptation rights to Dune in limbo (Dune, 1984; Maher, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c).

Daniel Ichbiah’s (2012: 184) account of the production of Cryo Interactive’s Dune, starts with Martin Alper, founder of Mastertronic. Mastertronic was then bought and incorporated into Virgin Interactive, who sought to acquire the rights to Dune in 1988. Initially, Alper tried acquiring the rights from the Herbert estate, but he was unsuccessful in doing so. While he could not acquire the rights to Frank Herbert’s novel, he finally succeeded in acquiring rights to adapt David Lynch’s adaptation in 1990. This pattern of acquiring rights through its movie adaptations would be repeated in later Dune games such as Funcom’s Dune: Awakening – Funcom acquired adaptation rights through the Dennis Villeneuve adaptation – because of difficulties faced by developers acquiring rights from the Herbert estate (Stanton, 2025). Around the same time, a group of French developers, headed by Philippe Ulrich, Remi Herbulot and Jean Martial Lefranc, created Cryo Interactive. Philippe Ulrich, in particular, was known to have created the scenario for Captain Blood a popular science fiction adventure game that sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. After Lefranc was appointed to become the director of Virgin Loisirs, he set up a meeting with Martin Alper for future projects. In a meeting with Alper, Remi Herbulot proposed several science fiction themed game projects. During this meeting, Alper proposed adapting Dune into a game which he had the rights to. Thus, in August 1990, an agreement was finalized between the groups to create a videogame adaptation of Dune.

To say that Cryo Interactive’s production of Dune was troubled is an understatement, considering the multiple problems its developers experienced getting the game approved by Virgin, its parent company. According to Ichbiah’s account, Ulrich’s team laboured to storyboard the game for several months. For their initial storyboards, the team read Herbert’s novel to understand its themes. After deciding on what they read as the key themes of the novel, the team decided that the best way to capture the spirit of Dune was to combine military strategy with a point-and-click adventure game embodied in the first-person perspective of Paul Atreides. However, David Bishop, the game’s London-based producer, hated this concept, claiming that the plan lacked unity, and that the proposed mixture of genres would not succeed. Trouble came when Virgin threatened to cancel the production. Many backers pulled out. Alper, with the Cryo project seemingly doomed to failure, began talks with Westwood Studios to get them to adapt Dune in Cryo’s stead. With a potential cancellation looming, members of the Cryo team rushed to meet with Alper with work samples to save the project. Though initially unimpressed, eventually, the team won him over. Alper then gave the team 5 weeks to create a working prototype. With this, the team worked to simplify the game’s story, choosing to start the game with Paul on Arrakis, and made cuts to appease their American and British backers. A few weeks later, the team sent the prototype. Alper was impressed with the game and its soundtrack and decided to save the game from cancellation. Through this account, it is evident how creating a prototype to save the game from cancellation is Cryo’s biggest achievement, demonstrating how a game could still be created even when the business side of creation almost falls away. Moreover, during development, at Virgin’s encouragement, the Cryo team utilized the visual aesthetics of the movie, as Virgin had the adaptation rights. Thus, changes were made to simplify the story and its gameplay, making the game closer to the film to appease North American audiences. The team acquired permission from the film’s actors to reproduce their likeness in the game, save Sting and Patrick Stewart, who refused to give permission, and consequently, their characters were redrawn.

In 1992, Cryo Interactive’s Dune was finally released, selling thousands of copies in its first week. Marketing and box art of the North American MS-DOS and Amiga versions of the game contained images from the Dune film – signalling that the game is an adaptation of the film despite the adaptation being 8 years late. Nonetheless, Dune’s success allowed Cryo Interactive to create multiple ports, including a Sega Genesis release in 1993, and enabled the company to publish their future games independently. This is where Ichbiah’s account ends, and through this account, he manages to capture the legacy of Cryo Interactive especially in the French game developer landscape. Cryo Interactive, though, unfortunately went bankrupt in 2002 following unsuccessful game releases in the early 2000s. Despite Cryo Interactive’s success with its adaptation of Dune, the game would go down in history as a curiosity instead of one that would inspire design standards yet-to-come. That credit goes to Westwood’s Dune II.

The story of Westwood’s Dune II starts with Martin Alper approaching Westwood Studios, which at the time was a successful game developer adapting games for different intellectual properties. Westwood’s then most successful game was Eye of the Beholder, an adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons with real-time roleplaying game elements. Alper approached Westwood because of their track record in successfully adapting other intellectual properties. Multiple accounts of Westwood’s Dune II’s production (Johnson, 2016; Keighley and Ajami, 2000; Machin, 2013; Moss, 2017; Willson, 1998) cited varying titles that inspired Westwood’s adaptation. Stephen Clarke-Wilson’s account (Wilson, 1998) claims that at the time of licensing negotiations, Virgin wanted its own version of the Sega Genesis game Herzog Zwei. Multiple interviews with Brett Sperry and Louis Castle (Keighley and Ajami, 2000; Johnson, 2016) indicated that they took inspiration from games such as Military Madness and Rescue Raiders, which they felt were very ‘Dune-like’ (Johnson, 2016). Notably, both co-founders of Westwood were Apple enthusiasts, so they wanted to borrow ideas from Apple’s interface and its use of the mouse button in designing their new game (Edge, 2013). In an interview with CGMagazine, Joe Bostic – then lead designer of Dune II – pointed out that Populous (1989) also helped inspire the game perspective as an early god-game that utilized the mouse for gameplay (Machin, 2013). In another interview, Bostic claimed that developing the game meant that they had to ‘[break] from the existing narrative […], bypassing the confines of the story’ to create their game. Upon examining all these accounts, while varying individuals involved in its licensing and development cited multiple influences on Dune II’s design, it is very clear from all these accounts that its franchise owners and developers wanted to create a strategy game utilizing the Dune intellectual property. Louis Castle, in a podcast interview, described their process of adapting Dune as a real-time strategy game.

Then from a gameplay point-of-view, we liked real time. We said: what if we take these really complex strategies – if we took these complicated roleplaying games, D&D and managed to get it to work real-time for Eye of the Beholder so, what if we took all these strategy games we made for SSI all these years and went back to making them real time and just took that real complexity – in real time. It would be very difficult to play – we have to dumb down certain things to make them easier to use – but that would be interesting to have the resource generation at the same time. And Dune as a fiction was great because everything has to go back to the spice and spice is the energy of the universe, so it made it very adaptable for this harvest, grow, build for war, attack, and have-at-that whole gambit (Johnson, 2016).

From this account, it was clear that the developers were focused on creating a particular form of gameplay, building from the successes of their earlier title. But real-time also meant that they had to simplify certain elements and focus on developing harvesting or resource generation as a core mechanic in this war game. Dune was the mere ‘fiction’ that accommodated these design decisions and gameplay mechanics. Taking all these accounts together, Dune was reimagined through the lens of American military games.

Complications with Cryo Interactive meant that Westwood’s version had to carry the title Dune II, because Cryo was far ahead of Westwood in terms of development, and got the earlier release date in the same year (Willson, 1998; Edge, 2013). Nonetheless, Dune II’s release became a commercial success. Reviews from gaming magazines praised its ‘intuitive design’ and for its amoral and apolitical approach to war, making the game ‘a real gem’ for wargamers (Greenberg, 1993: 85). Following this success, Westwood created their own intellectual property built from Dune II’s system to create the popular Command and Conquer series (Edge, 2013). While Command and Conquer ultimately became Westwood’s most popular series particularly because of its multiplayer mode (Loguidice and Barton, 2009: 70), Dune II would be credited for helping create the 4x – eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate – gameplay loop (Moss, 2017), which later games would build from, including Blizzard’s Starcraft (Dor, 2014: 60; Dor, 2024: 21) and World of Warcraft (Dor, 2014: 60).

The complex production and licensing processes surrounding Cryo Interactive’s Dune and Westwood Studios’ Dune II ultimately demonstrate Hollywood’s legacy on these two titles. In the case of Cryo Interactive’s Dune, appeasing predominantly North American and British backers who held licenses to adapt the Lynch film at Virgin Interactive, engendered simplifying their version of the game, and utilizing its visual licenses. Leaning into executives’ tastes also meant patterning their game to Lynch’s film adaptation which privileged a monomyth retelling of the original novel. In the case of Westwood Studios’ Dune II, creating a satisfying real-time gameplay loop resulted in the loss of the original novel’s themes, including its anti-colonial critique. In the latter parts of this essay, we examine both games to see how they create a reversal of the original novel’s themes to introduce gameplay mechanics that scholars point out as colonial (Lammes, 2003; Mukherjee, 2017).

Cryo interactive’s Dune

Cryo Interactive’s Dune is best described as a hybrid game that is part adventure game and part real-time strategy. Both parts are meant to gamify Paul Atreides’ rise to power from a plucky Duke’s son to emperor. The game starts with a cutscene of Princess Irulan that was ported from the Lynch’s film. This is only the first among many borrowed visuals from the film, which permeates the game – signalling developers’ decisions to make nods to the film, despite making some minor changes to the narrative to simplify gameplay structures. In the opening cutscene, Irulan introduces ‘spice’ which she describes as key to space travel in the world of the game and is only found on the desert planet Arrakis, which is also known as Dune. Moreover, she describes how the native people of the planet – the Fremen – are waiting for a messiah. While this cutscene is directly ported from the movie, it also signals what the game prioritizes: resource extraction and the reproduction of the monomyth. Both aspects will be discussed further in this section in this examination of the game. Nonetheless, using film clips in this game shows how Cryo Interactive’s utilization of visuals from the film becomes a way to semiotically signal its ties to the David Lynch movie adaptation – something that not all the succeeding Dune game adaptations do.

After the prologue, the game begins on Arrakis in the Atreides’ fortress. The first character one meets is Duke Leto Atreides who quickly briefs Paul Atreides, the player character, on their purpose on Arrakis – to harvest spice for the emperor. Moreover, Duke Leto instructs players to find Gurney Halleck. This initial task introduces the player to one core element of the game, which is exploration and diplomacy. One explores spaces going room to room in the Atreides palace via arrow keys. Outside the Dune palace, one is given a map which expands with every sietch and Fremen village that players ‘discover’. Initial exploration is via ornithopter. Players are given the option to explore the desert on foot, however, doing so leads to a game over scene where Paul, the player character, is shown to visually wither away in the desert. While these exploration options are limited, over time however, players would be given different means to discover the desert, after some key plot points which will be discussed later. Nevertheless, these limitations create the impression that Paul, the player character, starts out with almost nothing.

Upon travelling to one of the sietches, the player encounters Gurney, and some Fremen. Conversation options allow the player character to immediately recruit the Fremen on-site by selecting the ‘work for me’ conversation option. When this is selected, Fremen often jump into helping players. Players could immediately set them to harvest spice. Exploring more allows players to find more sietches with Fremen who could be recruited for spice harvesting. Other units that players encounter could also be trained for military work, with Gurney training them.

Many Fremen that players encounter seem to know very little about spice or combat. Additionally, they are more than willing to immediately do whatever the player character asks, and often repeatedly whisper offhandedly upon encountering Paul, ‘could he be the One?’ Players gain more power the more sietches they recruit to their cause. When players spend enough time exploring the desert, they gain the ability to communicate telepathically to party members and Fremen units, making the strategy elements easier as the game progresses. Halfway through the game, players gain the ability to ride sandworms allowing for more mobility in the game. Around this time, Stilgar and Fremen characters also invite players to drink the Water of Life, which greatly enhances the player character’s telepathic abilities by allowing players to communicate with their Fremen allies across the planet. These mechanics and plot points set up Paul, the player character – and therefore the player – as the messiah of the game. In doing so, the game portrays that these indigenous-coded peoples need someone to guide them in managing the affairs of their own planet. This presentation of the Fremen echoes many key narratives of settler-colonialism – such as America’s ‘manifest destiny’ and frontier myth. Tara Fickle, in her book, The Race Card, points out how the frontier myth has been ingrained in many ludic procedural narratives and theorizations of play (Fickle, 2019: 194). Similarly, Sara Humphreys demonstrates how games, particularly those tied to more filmic genres such as Red Dead Redemption or LA Noire, reproduce the frontier myth as ways of normalizing the dominance of cisgender straight white men as those that dominate game worlds (Humphreys, 2021: 8). It is important to note how Dune, as an early adventure and strategy game similarly reproduces these myths to normalize whiteness and settler-colonialism, thus showing this narrative’s transnational appeal, especially given that Cryo Interactive is a French company making a game primarily for North American and European players.

Gameplay on the early parts of the game primarily involves exploration and spice harvesting. As players explore the desert, they find opportunities to find equipment – such as harvesters and ornithopter – to better harvest spice. Around this time, the game makes it obvious that spice is also the key currency in the game, as players can trade with spice to acquire more equipment with other non-player characters. Players are required to send shipments of spice to the emperor based on deadlines set by the emperor. Should players fail to send spice shipment by the emperor’s deadlines, the game triggers a game over cutscene wherein the emperor sends his Sardaukar forces to take over Arrakis and annihilate the Atreides. Thus, exploring and harvesting spice keeps the game moving forward. Mukherjee (2017) demonstrates how games utilize colonial modes of possession, especially on how these games facilitate movement through game spaces via exploration and extraction. Similarly, Euteneuer (2018) describes how games normalize settler-colonial structures via game economies. Dune’s use of spice as currency thus normalizes colonial extraction.

Notably, the game also incorporates gendered modes of exploration and colonial possession via its party system. The party system allows characters to travel with players to help out with particular interactions. Travelling with Stilgar, the Fremen leader, for example facilitates easy recruitment of Fremen troops, and travelling with Gurney helps with training Fremen troops. On the other hand, Jessica, Paul’s mother, is only useful when exploring the Atreides palace to help discover secret rooms. By limiting Jessica’s usefulness to discovering palace secrets, indicates how the game relegates its women mostly within domestic spaces. The game also has two other female Fremen characters – Harah, introduced as Jamis’ wife, and Chani. Harah assists Paul in the early parts of the game by helping him gain favour with other Fremen, but she is no longer useful when Paul recruits Stilgar halfway through the game. Chani functions as the game’s love interest, thereby incorporating an assimilationist narrative (Edwards, 1999: 149) in her relationship with players. She introduces players to her father Liet-Kynes, who describes the game’s ecological system, which will be discussed later. Chani’s other function is to heighten tensions between the Atreides and the Harkonnens when Feyd-Rautha kidnaps her, and thus Paul would need to start raiding Harkonnen fortresses to save Chani.

The game gradually ushers in military campaigns when players gain a considerable number of Fremen allies. It starts when Harkonnens begin raiding Atreides allied sietches. This motivates the player to train Fremen units for military combat with Gurney as a party member speeding up their training. Military campaigns escalate when Duke Leto is killed in a Harkonnen skirmish and Chani gets kidnapped. Through these military campaigns, the Harkonnens are not only portrayed as the rival faction competing to harvest spice, but also as evil overlords. With each successful raid, players could rescue captured Fremen, who declare that they have been reduced to ‘slaves’ working for the Harkonnens. Players can recruit these rescued Fremen and immediately put them to work as military units or spice harvesters. Rescued Fremen appear to be more than happy to work for Paul. Because the Fremen are more than willing to work for Paul, it frames this form of exploitation as one that is benevolent, because in contrast, the Harkonnens are evil slave owners. Setting up the Harkonnens as evil overlords and the Atreides as the ‘good guys’, not only oversimplifies the core narrative, but makes the argument that colonialism is only bad when its colonizers are evil (Figure 1).

More than halfway through the game, the game introduces its ecology system wherein players could utilize wind traps to create vegetation in Arrakis. Planting vegetation raises the morale of various Fremen units, making them more effective in battle or spice harvesting. Nonetheless, one could win the game even if one barely uses this system. Attempting to fill the entire planet with vegetation unlocks a secret ending wherein the Harkonnens leave the planet because there is no more spice to harvest. However, unlocking this secret ending triggers an endless gameplay loop where the emperor continues to ask for more spice even if there is no more spice to harvest, and no endgame cutscene occurs. As a result, the ecology system in the game feels like an afterthought because the game still prioritizes spice harvesting and combat.

The game ends when players conquer all Harkonnen fortresses and make the final push for the Harkonnen palace, triggering the end game cutscenes. The Harkonnens surrender and it is revealed that the emperor is in league with the Harkonnens. After this reveal, the emperor is stripped of his power. The game ends with all the players’ newfound allies hailing them as emperor.

The game’s use of both adventure game and real-time strategy genres combined to help simulate a straight retelling of Paul’s rise to power as a monomyth. This monomyth is used to normalize the frontier myth of a white cisgender coded saviour characters leading and educating indigenous-coded characters, and extracting their lands for just causes. While Cryo’s Dune focuses on telling this narrative, Westwood’s version further proceduralizes this narrative of expansion, as we explore in the next section.

Westwood’s studios’ Dune II: The building of a dynasty

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty eschews the close proximity to characters and instead zooms out to the strategic dimensions of conflict. Dune II is a Real-Time Strategy Game (RTS) and so emphasizes tactical and strategic choices over narrative and character development. Suvik Mukherjee notes that the RTS genre is the most emblematic of empire as the core mechanisms are concerned with ‘a geopolitics through which [empire] lays claim to a consolidated space and on further expansion’ (Mukherjee, 2017: 30). From the pre-game opening sequence, the stage is set for a colonial approach to play that echoes the expansionist race for land in the early colonial period. The games prologue sets the scene:

The emperor has proposed a challenge to each of the houses. The house that produces the most spice will control Dune. There are no set territories and no rules of engagement. Vast armies have arrived. Now three Houses fight for control of Dune. The noble Atreides. The insidious Ordos and the evil Harkonnen. Only one house will prevail. Your battle for Dune begins… Now.

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (Westwood Studios, 1992) fundamentally shifts the focus of the original novel and the Cryo Dune game to one of pure geopolitical conflict, which significantly alters the premise of Frank Herbert’s original source material. The underlying global politicking that leads to the betrayal and sabotage of the Atreides and Paul’s ultimate position as an alluring, but ultimately exploitative leader is replaced by a direct order for competition on behalf of the game’s three houses: Atreides, Harkonnen, and Ordos. Like the books, the Atreides are depicted as an upright and moral faction while the Harkonnen are presented as moustache-twirling villains. The Ordos – a faction not present in the source material – are a scheming cartel with serpent heraldry. These three houses serve as the game’s three playable factions which can be chosen at the onset of the game. The player takes on the role of a nameless general in their chosen house, who has been tasked with the organizational responsibility of fulfilling the emperor’s mandate.

The narrative arc of the game is experienced primarily through the pre-mission brief screens, where a representative from each house tells the general the goals for the current mission. Occasionally, these brief screens include small sequences from the emperor’s palace as he sends his own personal army to assist the losing houses in order to maintain balance in the competition. This is also the main way the plot of the source material is integrated into the game.

The introductory mission for each house is the same: collect 1000 credits. This is emblematic of Dune II’s primary concerns with territorial expansion and resource acquisition. The game’s loop is straightforward: build harvesters to collect spice in order to transform the spice into credits, then turn those credits into military units that can guard your harvesters so they can collect more spice. Eventually the mission goals change to focus on eliminating your rivals and finally eliminating all the opposing houses simultaneously along with the emperor’s forces in a climactic final mission to claim the title ‘Ruler of Arrakis’. Despite these unique mission goals, the overall flow of the game remains the same: use your accrued military force to eliminate opposition on the planet until you have achieved total monopoly over the primary resource that funds the in-universe economy along with total control over the planet and its denizens.

Transforming the barren land of Arrakis is a key part of the gameplay. Each map begins with few buildings and land that appears uninhabitable. Some of the terrain is rough and rocky, while the bulk of each mission takes place on the sand, upon some of which the dark brown spice is scattered. The player must use the resources extracted from the land to build ‘concrete slabs’ across the natural landscape in order to house a range of structures that support the colonial project. Construction yards, silos, refineries and wind traps are the foundation for transforming spice into military force in the form of barracks, armour factories, automated defences and troops. As each mission goes on the dark brown spice is physically removed from the map by harvesters and the natural rock is covered in concrete and the various structures and units it supports.

Each successful mission leads to the main mission-select screen, which looks like a fictionalized tripartite rendition of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1916 secret treaty that split the Ottoman Empire between the English and French with the approval of Russia and Italy (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The main mission screen which shows the invading forces’ spheres of influence on Arrakis.

At the onset of the game, the lands of the native Fremen people are already carved out between the colonial forces specifically for the sake of economic competition. The Fremen themselves are mentioned infrequently throughout the game. The game does not ask any moral questions about this arrangement, as the Fremen are wholly reduced to ‘a defensive strategy’ of the Atreides faction through a pre-mission brief. The Fremen themselves are depicted only through their in-game unit which is exclusive to the Atreides. As units, the Fremen are only partially controllable because the AI determines which enemy units the Fremen will attack, and they will not attack any enemy structures. Rhetorically this design choice conveys competing messages between agency and subjugation. Are the Fremen not fully controllable because the game wishes to convey their maintained autonomy in spite of their alliance with the Atreides, or is this because they are unruly locals?

The answer to this question is further complicated by the tactical structure that produces the Fremen unit: the Palace. The Palace is a late game structure that is available to each faction and allows for the construction of the most powerful unique units in the game, referred to as ‘superweapons’. The Harkonnen have an extremely destructive long-range missile, while the Ordos produce a lone spy that can change the allegiance of a building on the map. The Fremen are the Atreides superweapon. While this imbues them with a great degree of power within the context of the game, it is not inconsequential that they are produced by a palace. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon evokes the palace as one of the enduring symbols of colonial rule (Fanon, 1963: 204). Fanon channels the palatial image of oppression, declaring that ‘Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism, and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever further!’ (Fanon, 1963: 311).

The shadow of the palace in Dune II is one where design reveals ideology. Paired with the Harkonnen missile and the spy-like Ordos saboteur, the Palace positions the Fremen as a component part of the ruling state’s military apparatus: a tool of violence that can be used to control the very planet that belongs to the Fremen. The native population of Arrakis is largely an afterthought beyond their instrumental role in this game. The only other possible allusion to the Fremen in the game comes as a short line of text when playing as the Ordos, when they note that ‘The Atreides have become far too vocal in this sector, and whine constantly about their rights’, though this implies that the Fremen are already fully part of house Atreides.

Once the player has completed the final mission, the end of the game triggers a unique cut scene for each faction. All three scenes involve members of the player’s chosen house confronting the emperor and deposing him for his betrayal – one last small callback to the source material. The Atreides victory is short and simple – as they formally declare the emperor has been accused of treason and will be put on trial. In contrast, House Ordos and Harkonnen remove the emperor by force. It is implied that house Ordos feeds the emperor to a lizard, while the members of house Harkonnen take out guns and shoot him until he blows up. There is no greater message to be had about the conflict on Arrakis in Dune II. Though the emperor is deposed, one emperor replaces another as in any win state the planet Arrakis is under total control of the player character. We can only assume the Fremen are exterminated by the Ordos or Harkonnen, or at best subsumed into the Atreides military apparatus. The game’s story itself does not tell us, because despite the importance of the Fremen to the cautionary messages about colonialism and leadership that Frank Herbert’s Dune attempted to impress upon readers, the game simply equates the Fremen to a Harkonnen missile. This reduces them to a soulless resource in a war for more resources: an ideological framing all too familiar to colonized peoples within wars of expansion. Any shadow to the Atreides victory that emerges in the subtext of the original novel is gone, and the moral of Dune II’s story is that exploitation of the land and its people lead to an uncompromising victory.

Conclusion: Hollywood’s legacy of postcolonial games

Our combined analyses of Cryo Interactive’s Dune and Westwood’s Dune II indicate the studios’ different approaches to adapting Dune. While Cryo Interactive’s version favoured retelling the monomyth for its adaptation, Westwood favoured stripping down narrative and political themes to create an intuitive and replayable war game. Yet despite their differences, both games distilled narrative and gameplay mechanics that normalize conquest and myths that justify settler-colonialism.

Contextualizing these textual readings alongside historical accounts of both games also divulges how complex licensing agreements, company funding and expectations, and developers’ decisions contributed to the construction of these colonial narratives and gameplay mechanics. These accounts highlight these systems as assemblages that reconstruct games as postcolonial spaces. Thus, the practice of adaptation, distilled within these assemblages, repurposed Dune, trimming the novel’s original text of its anti-colonial messaging, and utilizing its license to instead normalize colonial systems. We draw attention to these practices specifically, especially because the licensing of Dune games, including upcoming games such as Funcom’s upcoming Dune: Awakening, have always been licensed to Dune’s film and television adaptations, and the media companies that owned the rights to these adaptations, not Herbert’s novel. Westwood Studios later remake of Dune II, Dune 2000 even incorporated cutscenes that draw on the aesthetic of the Lynch film. Like a game of telephone, the Dune novel’s themes and interrogation of power structures get lost with each succeeding adaptation. While we primarily attribute this to the chain of adaptation, the source text of Dune itself suggests that this is result of the nature of power: as the franchise grows in popularity and more is produced, the substance of those productions is less important to the product than there simply being more Dune.

At the end of David Lynch’s 1984 Dune, after rallying the Fremen and consolidating galactic power, Paul Atreides defiantly declares that he ‘can kill with a word’. Though this utterance is meant to take on a victorious tone as Paul has finally overcome the injustices committed to his family, it echoes the violence of the colonial power that Paul has accrued. Paul’s words echo the administrative force that colonial states employed to transform autonomous human beings into colonial subjects. ‘I can kill with a word’ is as much a mantra of governance and authority over the people he now rules as it is a statement of Paul’s victory. Many adaptations and offshoots of Dune’s source material have struggled to problematize the end state of Paul’s victory on Arrakis. This is certainly true for Dune II and its nearly absent Fremen. The process of adaptation over years from the original text to film, to the subsequent games first concentrated the monomyth of Paul’s ascent over the decolonial and cautionary themes of Frank Herbert’s original novel. The chain of adaptation moves further from the original novel’s themes in Westwood Studios’ Dune II, as the theme of the series in Westwood’s vision becomes a celebration of power and monopoly through victory within total war.