Dune II by Westwood Studios is one of the RTS that canonized the genre. For this reason it is considered among the most influential titles of all time, also thanks to its setting. After all, there must be a reason if Frank Herbert’s books are still transposed into films and video games today. However, other classics derived from the Dune 2 formula, such as the Command & Conquer series, by Westwood itself, and the Warcraft series. It is therefore not surprising that someone decided to remaster it. What is surprising is the platform chosen: the Amiga.
A project full of love
This someone is none other than Robert Koon, one of the game’s original programmers. His love for the old 16-bit Commodore platform pushed him to create a new version of Dune 2 for AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) and OCS (Original Chip Set) chipsets.
Reading his Patreonwe learn that Koon felt that “the Amiga game didn’t live up to expectations. It shipped on five floppy disks and suffered from constant disc changes. The DOS version’s fantastic intro sequence was significantly shortened. The soundtrack was limited And there was no specific version for AGA. Gameplay on the Amiga was also scaled back slightly due to the limited resources available for the game.”
Its objective is, therefore, to resolve these errors with a new edition: “My goal is to recreate Dune 2 for the Amiga from scratch by releasing it in the form it should have had at the time, i.e. correcting all the main problems and then some, such as the lack of native PAL support.”
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