Real time strategy! All of us have played on of these games at some stage in our adventures across the gaming landscape. For some, the constant management of resources versus troops is too much bother, but for many, the genre has been an amazing hit, spawning forth many sub genres such as Multiplayer online battle arena’s (MOBA’s) and Tower Defence games.

But where did it all begin?

Wikipedia likes to state that the first ever real-time strategy game was “War of Nerves!” in 1979, but to be honest that wasn’t the birth of the genre in my opinion.

No dear reader, the first time Real time strategy came onto my Radar was Dune II: Battle for Arrakis in 1992. But what of Dune 1 you cry! Surely that was its predecessor?

But no dear reader, you will find that the first Dune was a point and click adventure, very different from its sequel, which aimed to put you in the shoes of a house leader in the Dune universe, pitting you against your rival houses for control over the desert planet Arrakis and its rare, space travel enabling, life extending, Spice Melange.

It came on a whopping FIVE stiffy disks! Madness, I say!

Whilst, as I mentioned not the first game of its type, it was the first to gain popularity, paving the way for the genre in years to come!
Firstly, the game established the “Gather resources step” as part of the real time action, with your harvesters greedily guzzling the desert spice to fund your war efforts. Providing a supply chain weak point for enemies to exploit. Many a time would Dune II throw a spanner in your works, when the infamous sandworms rose up from the desert sands, swallowing your harvesters whole, if you hadn’t been paying attention to worm signs.

It was also one of the first games that required “building dependencies” so that the technology tree was not immediately all available, pacing a game to a slow escalation of technological development. Some of the buildings were “mobile” as well, an innovation in the industry which is carries on to date.
The advent of the faction “superweapon” also came from Dune II, with Harkonen’s dirty nukes or the House Artreides local alliance with the Freman of Dune. Less memorable was the Ordos Saboteur, whose sneaky ways could cripple your foes base.


Sweet Sweet Superweapons

Next we had the invention of the mysterious “fog of war”. If you have not seen your opponent’s base and setup, you can’t tell what they’re doing. This modelled real life military intel gathering, not quite to the level future fog of war iterations would take, but was the basis for its development, adding a level of strategic depth unseen before this time in a game.

Lastly and most importantly, the game introduced a context sensitive mouse interface, allowing you to control each of your units through a simple strategic click of a command! What genius! No longer did you need to send orders through command lines or laborious selections, but you could simply click on the unit and select its order.


Ordos Deviators could turn enemy units against their allies!

This was by no means perfect yet of course, you had to select each unit individually and then select the order, making the game a staccato of furious clicks when it came down to any large-scale army movements.

The concept of multiple selections and even later groups would only come further down the line, as game designers realised players wished an even more fluid command framework to work off.

One thing I’m glad that never took off from Dune II, was the concrete slab foundations. Each building required between four and six of these slabs and you would have to laboriously build each one individually at a time until much higher in the technology tree where you could build an amazing four at a time. This slowed construction way down and thank the great Shai’hulud they took it out of most future games!


So much concrete to build...

This fantastic game would go on to inspire the likes of the entire command and conquer series, as well as have a hand in Starcraft and Total Annihilation’s origins. To this day, echoes of its innovations can be seen as staples in the real time strategy genre.

Want to see what you missed out on? Well you can play the game now in your browser.

Ah the march of technology is always so delightful!

Let us know in the comments below what you thought of Dune II as a game. Or if you think there was an even more iconic grandfather to the Real Time Strategy family.