When Frank Herbert began to pen the first Dune novel, video games were in an entirely nascent form. In 1965, when his iconic sci-fi work was published, a mere handful of games had been created, often for looming mainframe computers as research projects.
However, in starting to build out his world of interstellar feudal conflict, political drama, and the desperate mining of a powerful drug called ‘melange’ or ‘spice’, Herbert set in motion a series of events that would have a profound influence over the real-time strategy genre, and even the wider gaming landscape.
Herbert’s tale initially appeared as a run of serialised pieces in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. Soon after, Dune was released as a novel, which would in turn inspire numerous sequels written by Herbert and later his son. Such was the
