It seems that TV, movies, and video games will never run out of classic sci-fi and fantasy series to adapt. Everything from The Lord of the Rings to The Witcher has been adapted time and time again. The great thing about video game adaptation of stories like these is that they offer a new perspective on the world by giving the player control over how they experience and influence it. A lot of novels with rich settings are exciting to explore in a video game context, and one sci-fi series that's tapped into this before is Dune; a sprawling, influential series of novels by Frank Herbert.

Adaptations of Dune for the screen are probably the most famous. One was made during Herbert's lifetime, releasing in 1984, and in 2000 a miniseries took another crack at telling the story. It's hard to adapt novels that are close to a thousand pages long into any format, but that doesn't mean people won't try. Dune has had a few video game adaptations, mostly appearing in the 1990s and 2000s, close to when Dune movies were at the height of their popularity. With a new movie adaptation of Dune on the way, one wonders if there's any hope for a new Dune video game.

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The first licensed Dune video game (simply called Dune) was an interesting mix of adventure and strategy, released for MS-DOS and other early home computers in 1992. Players took the role of Dune protagonist Paul Atreides and became responsible for both overseeing Spice mining and building up a military force strong enough to fight the scheming Baron Harkonnen. The Dune game saw positive reception and good sales, with some critics saying that the game was actually a better adaptation of the Dune books than the 1984 movie.

Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty, also released in 1992, was not actually a sequel to the first Dune game. Instead, Dune 2 was a real-time strategy game in which players chose to represent one of the ruling houses of the desert planet Arrakis and competed with the other houses to take control of spice production on Arrakis. Real-time strategy games existed when Dune 2 released, but it was a formative game for the genre. Dune 2 established some important hallmarks of RTS games, including the fog of war that shrouds the map and the constant connection between base building and resource management.

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A few years passed between these successful Dune adaptations and the next games in the series. Dune returned to video games in 1998 when Dune 2 was reimagined for PC and PlayStation by Intelligent Games as Dune 2000, which told a different story and incorporated full-motion video. Unfortunately, Dune 2000's new story and graphical improvements were met with mixed reviews. Intelligent Games and EA followed up Dune 2000 by cooperating on another real-time strategy game called Emperor: Battle for Dune that imitated many of Dune 2000's ideas and was ultimately better received.

Emperor: Battle for Dune wasn't the only Dune game to release in 2001. Cryo Interactive released Frank Herbert's Dune that year, which was a 3D adventure game based on the TV miniseries adaptation of Dune by the (then-named) Sci-Fi Channel. Critics panned Frank Herbert's Dune and the game failed commercially, which contributed to Cryo Interactive closing its doors a few years later and cancelling its plans for an online RTS game called Dune Generations. Dune hasn't returned to the video game scene in an official capacity since then, but maybe there's hope for a second coming.

If the new Dune movie gets enough attention, then maybe a game studio will see what it can do with the IP too. Dune is truly a cornerstone of the sci-fi genre, so it'd be great to see someone use next-gen consoles to bring fans back to the harsh world of Arrakis.

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