Dune (Original 1992 Game) Review

So I spent the weekend playing Dune. Yeah, that Dune — the very first one, released in 1992! And damn, what a ride.

First Impressions

I should say upfront — my introduction to Frank Herbert’s universe, which is now (deservedly) going through a full-blown renaissance, started with the legendary Dune II. Not the first real-time strategy in history, but definitely the most important one — it laid the foundation for the entire genre and inspired millions of games to come. And that game absolutely blew me away. It triggered one of the earliest creative frenzies of my life: I was, what, 8 or 10 years old — spending weeks buried in sketchbooks, notebooks, clay, and styrofoam, inventing my own strategy game and sci-fi universe — a mashup of Dune (as much as I could understand it from a single game) and Star Wars, which I was already a huge fan of by then.

Surprisingly, my interest in Dune sort of stopped right there. I never watched David Lynch’s cult film, never read the books (just didn’t happen to have them around, and this was long before Saratov had anything resembling the internet). So all that greatness just passed me by. As much as I loved Dune II, I never became any good at it — RTS games demanded constant crisis micromanagement, a skill I would later develop in business thanks to the wonderfully volatile environment of being an entrepreneur in Russia... but never quite mastered in games. Even back then I was already thinking about how cool it would be to make a real-time strategy that lets slowpoke players like me actually enjoy the damn thing and not just feel like failures over and over again. That idea’s been maturing in my head ever since — and I’ve been gradually weaving it into the mechanics of Verbo Draconi — but that’s a story for another time.

After my brief love affair with Dune II, of course I wanted to try the first game. And... I was totally disappointed. Back then it just seemed like a boring point-and-click adventure — a genre that was insanely popular in the early 90s, but required English skills way above what I had at the time. I played for 20 minutes, realized I didn’t understand a damn thing, and gave up. Wiped it from the floppy. Floppy disk! Oh, come on! Damn...

Now, 30 years later, I finally gave the classic a shot — and holy shit, I was floored. It’s not really an “adventure game” in the traditional sense — it’s exactly the kind of thing I’m working on now. When people ask me what kind of game I’m making, what it’s similar to, I start mumbling vague comparisons: well... it’s kind of like SpellForce, kind of like Total War, kind of like Disco Elysium, kind of like Arcanum, kind of like XCOM... but also not really like any of those. It’s an original concept, basically. Sometimes I even start thinking no one’s ever done anything like it before.

Then I played Dune for half an hour — and realized that 30 years ago, someone had already done exactly the thing I’ve been dreaming about this whole time. The game is a seamless blend of story-driven adventure — with narrative, dialogues, relationships between characters — and grand strategy on a planetary scale. You're constantly managing your dukedom: assigning specialization to settlements, prioritizing resources, choosing between production, ecology and military needs, fighting a cunning enemy, answering to a distant Emperor — and having conversations with your parents, friends, meditating in the desert. And all of this — within a single interface.

Story, Characters, Ideas

As far as I can tell, the story follows and expands upon the plot of the original film — which in turn follows the original book. And when you’ve got Frank Herbert’s world as your literary foundation, and David Lynch’s film as your aesthetic and artistic compass — well, you’d have to really go out of your way to fuck it up.

But they didn’t. The story is brilliant — especially considering that this linear narrative is woven into what today we’d probably call a sandbox grand strategy. The characters are also brilliant. Perfectly presented, completely in line with their movie and book counterparts, and a real joy to interact with.

Design, Graphics, Sound

Back in good ol’ 1992, graphic quality didn’t depend on your engine (the word "engine" barely even existed in the modern sense). It all came down to the pure artistic skill of the people drawing the damn thing. And games usually fell into one of three categories:

Type one: Draw it beautifully, animate it smoothly, aim for the Disney gold standard. Type two: Can’t draw for shit — throw something together, make the game fun, and hope no one notices. Or hell, go full 3D (which, back then, was usually a death sentence for any visual design — guaranteeing instant obscurity and selling only to the few brave souls willing to suffer through the horrors of early polygonal graphics). Type three: Don’t draw anything. Just make a text-based game. Hard to imagine now — but there were plenty of those.

Dune was clearly made by extremely talented artists and designers — the visuals are full-on type one. A gorgeous Disney-style animated aesthetic, completely in line with the highest visual standards of the time. And honestly? Even now, in the golden age of retro-style graphics and pixel art revival, it still looks beautiful. The facial animations — and even the lip sync (!), I shit you not — were probably the best you could find in 1992.

And then there’s the sound. That’s a whole different conversation. The original release came with an excellent MIDI soundtrack, featuring pieces from the film and tracks inspired by it — and it was genuinely good. But then Virgin decided to go all in and released a luxury CD version — with full voice acting for every line in the game, plus full-quality audio music!

Even today, AAA games with massive budgets often leave side dialogue or NPC chatter as plain text with no voiceover. But back in 1992, when the best games could barely wheeze out a garbled “Shoruken!” or “Cowabunga!” (that sounded more like “Corallo Mutangar!”), here was a game where every character, every unit, every command, every status report — was voiced.

The average home PC back then had what — maybe 80 megabytes of storage? If you were rich, you had 250. Top-tier rigs with 500 MB cost as much as a spaceship. But a CD held 650–700 megabytes. That’s like downloading a 10-terabyte game today. So yeah — hearing all those voices in 2025 was incredible. I can only imagine how people in 1992 were straight-up pissing themselves from excitement, not believing it was even possible.

Bottom line: in terms of visuals and sound, this game is an absolute masterpiece of its era.

Gameplay

What really blew me away — of course — was the gameplay. Honestly, I think this game was decades ahead of its time, because in terms of pure design, it's just one innovation stacked on top of another.

On the one hand, it’s an adventure game. A very typical genre for that era, where you click around the map to travel between locations, talk to NPCs, solve puzzles, collect and use items. Only here, instead of items, you take characters with you — and if you bring the right person to the right place at the right time, the story moves forward in the direction it needs to go.

On the other hand, unlike most adventure games that are confined to a handful of tight locations, this game gives you an entire planet as your playground. You move across it from one site to another, discover new places, run into trouble, meet new characters, stumble into enemy patrols.

And on the third hand — it’s a grand strategy. You’ve got a whole planet divided into provinces. You can harvest spice — the game’s main resource — negotiate with the local population (who may want to join your cause, side with your enemy, or just stay neutral). The enemy doesn’t sleep — they send out raiding parties. Resources dry up, so you need to upgrade your equipment and scout for new deposits. Your armies need training and gear. And once every few days, the goddamn Emperor calls you via interplanetary comms, demanding a shipment of spice — more and more of it each time.

What’s really well done is that this whole managerial chaos doesn’t crash down on you all at once. At first, your father — the Duke — is still in charge, and you only deal with small, local stuff. Then gradually, control passes into your hands, and now you’re the one building up your domain and challenging the right of House Harkonnen — already deeply rooted on Dune — to rule the planet. The bastards have practically enslaved the local Fremen population.

And it’s not just empire-building and full-on war — you also have to deal with small-scale shit like: production sabotage, a disease outbreak in a settlement, a sandworm attack on a harvester. That’s where characters come in handy — you can send them out to fix these micro-crises, or assign them to train your units, whether workers or fighters. At some point, traders show up who sell you desperately needed upgrades — in exchange for that precious spice the Emperor keeps nagging you about. Oh — and did I mention ecology? The local Fremen have invented a way to start terraforming Dune. The problem is, greenery disrupts the formation and harvesting of spice — so you have to constantly balance between gaining the locals’ loyalty (and wrecking the Harkonnen economy through eco-terrorism) and keeping your own economy afloat.

Time, in this game, never stops. Every move, every conversation, every order you give eats away at the clock — and there's no rewinding it. Orders also take time to execute — nothing happens instantly. At any given second the game may feel turn-based, but in truth, everything happens simultaneously. It's more than just a Real-Time Grand Strategy — it’s a system that forces you to plan several steps ahead and anticipate how your enemy might respond.

Why I think the game was way ahead of it's time

For me, there were two key innovations in the game’s design — beyond the fact that the entire game is already a goddamn innovation the likes of which the world had never seen. And both of them relate directly to player difficulty.

First — the adventure part. It’s not hard, and it’s logical. Most such games back in those days were designed to trap the player for weeks — if not months. Not because of story volume, but because the puzzles were absolutely bonkers. If you knew what to do, you could often beat a game in 90 minutes. But without a walkthrough, you'd waste weeks trying to apply a white rock to every pixel on every location, only to discover that you were supposed to throw it into the center of a cloud vaguely shaped like a dog so that an NPC would go, “how beautiful.” Here — none of that crap. If you follow the story, remember who the characters are, and actually listen to what they say, 99% of the time you’ll know exactly who to bring where to get the job done. In the remaining 1%, you probably just weren’t paying attention — but the game will still drop you a hint.

Now the strategy part — that one’s a lot trickier, because it’s deliberately uninformative. There are no familiar spreadsheets of resources, no neat unit counters, no on-screen overlays showing you everything on the map: unit stats, names, gear, hit points, construction timers — none of it. To find out what a unit can do, what they’re equipped with, or even what they’re currently working on, you have to talk to them. You get reports, verbal updates, text summaries — and you decide what orders to give based on that. But it’s not stupidity. It’s intentional design. A real ruler doesn’t sit in front of endless interactive dashboards and UI panels — they operate based on a general understanding of the situation, a strategic vision of where things are heading, and constant conversation with advisors, subordinates, and allies. And instead of dumping all the mechanics on you at once, the game hands them over gradually — not overwhelming you, but letting you feel the growth of your power, and the responsibility that comes with it.

My experience

My full playthrough took just over 5 hours — and that’s with me listening to every conversation, not skipping even the standard unit status reports. The adventure side was easy. The parts that made me work were mostly about navigating the planet and finding settlements — not via exact coordinates, but by vague directional clues. I also got the hang of the combat system fairly quickly.

For the first half of the game, I had to really think. I had to keep territories, armies, and resources in my head at all times, constantly haggle with traders and plan my next moves. But eventually, I reached a point where I had half the planet under my control, the plot had more or less played itself out, and the AI just... had nothing left to throw at me. By the way — the war part? Easy as hell. Maybe it’s because I know a thing or two about how medieval wars were fought, and I’ve got a good feel for both strategy and tactics. Or maybe the combat and economy systems really are pretty simple. Either way, the last third of the game felt like steamrolling. I was stomping the Harkonnens into the sand, and it got a little boring — I just wanted it to wrap up already.

By the way, I suspect that Dune II’s entire battle system was originally meant to be part of this first game — they probably just didn’t have the resources to pull it off back then. If they had… that would’ve been epic. But hey — that’s just my own speculation. I’ve never seen or read anything that actually confirms it.

Technical Execution

Of course, getting a 1992 game to run on modern hardware wasn’t exactly plug and play. There don’t seem to be any proper official ports for today’s systems, and I wanted the real experience — the original CD version — so, huge thanks to the folks behind DOSBox for their emulator.

As for the quality of the game itself — not a single complaint. It never froze, never glitched, never lagged, and never once pissed me off. I’ve got to say — games from that era were either hopelessly clunky and buggy (even if sometimes wildly creative), or polished to a mirror shine in terms of technical execution. This one? Polished. It shines like a hand-assembled Bugatti.

Final Thoughts

Honestly, once I finished the game, I felt... enlightened. Yeah — like that. Out of nowhere. Naturally, I keep a close eye on the gaming industry — especially on any project that touches on ideas I consider my own original designs. And usually, I feel this mix of joy (hell yeah, it works) and frustration (damn, while I was dragging my feet, someone else did it first and claimed the trailblazer’s crown). But here — I felt nothing but awe. Deep, sincere respect for the people who, 30 years ago, with no references, no templates, no roadmap — just made a game that outpaced the entire industry by decades.

Massive props to them. Truly. And yeah... I guess there’s a quiet little question echoing in the back of my head: “I wonder... could I ever pull something like that off too?”