Dune 2000 (1998)
Dune 2000 is a 1998 real time strategy (rts) video game made by Westwood Studios and Electronic Arts.
Westwood returns to the sand where the whole genre began. Dune 2000 remakes the studio's own Dune II inside Frank Herbert's universe, handing you command of one of three noble houses fighting over Arrakis: the brutal Harkonnen, the honorable Atreides, or the secretive Ordos. Spice is the prize, and harvesting it under threat of sandworms funds your war machine. You build a base, raise infantry and armor, and push across the dunes in real time, with live-action briefings from house mentors between missions. Familiar, harsh, and steeped in the politics of a desert planet.
Quick answers
What is Dune 2000 about?
Westwood returns to the sand where the whole genre began. Dune 2000 remakes the studio's own Dune II inside Frank Herbert's universe, handing you command of one of three noble houses fighting over Arrakis: the brutal Harkonnen, the honorable Atreides, or the secretive Ordos. Spice is the prize, and harvesting it under threat of sandworms funds your war machine. You build a base, raise infantry and armor, and push across the dunes in real time, with live-action briefings from house mentors between missions. Familiar, harsh, and steeped in the politics of a desert planet.
When was Dune 2000 released?
Dune 2000 was released on 1 September 1998.
Who made Dune 2000?
Dune 2000 was made by Westwood Studios and Electronic Arts.
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Dune 2000 in our writing
- Companion guide: Westwood Studios: The Studio That Invented Real-Time Strategy
A few thoughts on Dune 2000
Dune is the Frank Herbert novel this whole world grows from, essential if the houses and spice politics pull you in, and Dune gives it David Lynch's strange, operatic screen version. Both trade strategy for the source, but the desert, the intrigue, and the worms are all here.
Great houses at war over a throne or a resource everyone wants
Dune 2000 puts you in command of Atreides, Harkonnen or Ordos, three houses tearing Arrakis apart over the spice that funds everything. Herbert's novel and Lynch's 1984 film lay out that same desert power struggle, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon trade sand for a throne with equally ruthless calculus, and The Witcher 3 drops its warring kingdoms into a similar fight for territory.
Scores and concept albums for an unforgiving alien frontier
Dune 2000 plays out on a planet that kills anyone who gets comfortable, all scorched dunes and sandworms waiting under the surface. Vangelis's Blade Runner score carries the same dry menace, Muse's Black Holes and Revelations and Deltron 3030's future-tense raps match its scale, and Ayreon's Universal Migrator and Tangerine Dream's Irrlicht both sound like transmissions from somewhere just as hostile.
Games where factions go to war for control of the map
Dune 2000 hands you one of three warring houses fighting block by block across Arrakis for control of the spice. That same territorial grind drives Skyrim's civil war between Stormcloaks and the Empire, San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto V's turf battles between rival crews, and Half-Life 2's resistance clawing Earth back from an occupying alien regime.