Westwood Studios: The Studio That Invented Real-Time Strategy

In 1985 two friends in Las Vegas, Brett Sperry and Louis Castle, started a company called Westwood Associates doing conversion work and quiet, competent RPGs. Within a decade they had done something almost no studio ever manages: they invented a genre, then perfected it, then watched the whole industry copy them.

That genre was real-time strategy, and this is the studio's whole arc: the Dungeons & Dragons dungeon crawls, the fantasy adventures and role-playing quests, the moment Dune II rewired what a strategy game could be, and the Command & Conquer juggernaut that followed. Plus one of the strangest, most ambitious adventure games ever made. Here is the map.

From dungeons to war rooms

Westwood's story runs in two halves. The first is fantasy: grid-based D&D crawls like Eye of the Beholder, the storybook point-and-click of The Legend of Kyrandia, and the first-person role-playing of Lands of Lore. The second is war: Dune II lights the fuse, and Command & Conquer turns it into a phenomenon, complete with full-motion-video briefings, a rival soundtrack of industrial rock, and a bald prophet named Kane who refuses to die. Same studio, two empires.