Dune II is regarded as one of the most influential RTS titles of all time. Based on the famous sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert, it took the epic battle for Arrakis and turned it into a real-time contest of cunning, strategy and resource management, paving the way for subsequent games like Command & Conquer and Warcraft.
Originally released on the Amiga, PC and Mega Drive, the game established Westwood Studios as one of the leading lights of the RTS genre – but the company arguably never quite captured the same magic with its sequels, Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Dune.
If you're hankering for some old-school RTS action, then you'll be pleased to learn that Robert Koon – who was one of the programmers on the original Dune II – is currently hard at work remastering the iconic original for the Amiga AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) and OCS (Original Chip Set).
According to his Patreon page, Koon feels "the game on the Amiga wasn't as good as it could have been. The game shipped on five disks and suffered from extensive disk swapping. Most of the great introduction sequence from the DOS version was chopped down quite a bit. The soundtrack had a limited presence, and there was no AGA-specific version. Even the Amiga gameplay was slightly diminished due to limited resources available to the game."
Koon is now keen to right those wrongs with a remastered edition of the game. "My goal is to remake Dune 2 for the Amiga from scratch the way it was meant to be released and to right all of those wrongs — and more; there was no native PAL support, for example."
If you like what you're hearing, then head over to Koon's Patreon and pledge your support.