Dune has blazed its way onto cinemas to enthusiastic praise from critics and fans alike. Crucially, unlike Denis Villeneuve’s last science fiction epic Blade Runner 2049, Dune has also performed well at the box office, becoming one of the year’s highest-grossing movies in its opening weekend.
This strong showing has led to a Dune sequel already being greenlit, and will certainly increase the likelihood of a Dune video game tie-in being developed. However, with the movie and the original classic books featuring such a complex story to draw from, there are a myriad of options for developers in terms of how to approach such a project.
Dune Adapted As An Action Adventure Game
The last Dune game was not a success story. A year after Frank Herbert’s Dune was released in 2001, the developer Cryo Interactive filed for bankruptcy. This demonstrates that a famous license is not always a guarantee of success. Even though Dune is currently a property hotter than the Arrakis sunrise, any developer brought in to work on an adaptation must bear this in mind.
That title adopted a third-person action adventure style, using cinematic cutscenes to depict a plot faithful to the first novel, and in line with the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries of the same name. While this approach did not lead to success, fans did not have an issue with the genre choice, but rather with the game’s graphics, clunky script, and dull gameplay. This means that, if done right, a third-person action approach could still work perfectly, and the huge popularity of titles like Dark Souls and God Of War certainly attests to this.
However, if attempting to create a cinematic game, developers would need to find a new story to tell in the Dune universe. Fans will no longer tolerate games that simply re-hash the events of a film; they expect games to rival movies in terms of acting, visuals, and storytelling, requiring new and different material rather than a retelling of the first novel.
Popular games like Alien: Isolation have demonstrated that new stories can be told within established movie universes to great effect, and the world of Dune certainly has a huge amount of lore and detail from which developers could pull. While the movie depicts a conflict between two dominant Houses on desert planet Arrakis in the year 10191, the novels also describe a series of monumental events in the history of humanity, all of which lead to Frank Herbert’s memorable vision of the future.
An example is the historical war against thinking machines, which has resulted in the regression to the pseudo-feudal society depicted in Denis Villeneuve’s epic. A video game could bring this war to life, and tell an exciting and original adventure story in the Dune setting. Indeed, a prequel novel detailing this conflict, entitled “The Butlerian Jihad,” has already been co-written by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert (Frank Herbert’s son, who wrote many Dune follow-ups after his father’s death.) The developer would therefore be able to use this source material to inform its script.
Other Options for a Video Game Adaptation of Dune
However, a cinematic action adventure is certainly not the only avenue available to the developers of a Dune video game. Many other genres could also work for a successful adaptation. Given that a lot of Dune’s plot depicts military conflict between a large cast of characters, a first-person shooter could be a good fit. Titles like Wolfenstein: The New Order demonstrate that FPS games need not always be frantic multiplayer shootouts, but can also tell intelligent and gripping singleplayer stories.
However, given the saturation of the FPS market and the presence of extremely high-profile competitors like Call Of Duty, a developer might instead wish to explore an alternative genre for its Dune adaptation. In 2009, a mod for Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword was released, entitled Dune Wars, and focused on the complex political machinations and warfare that dominate Dune’s world. 1992’s Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty also took a real-time strategy approach to adapting the books, and is regarded as one of the best Dune games ever made.
An RTS Dune game could work extremely well, enabling players to build up one of the great Houses from humble beginnings to galaxy-conquering titans, using a combination of trade, technology and military might. It would also present a great opportunity for online multiplayer RTS battles, with players taking on the roles of heroic House Atreides or scheming House Harkonnen, or one of the host of other Houses mentioned in the source material.
However, once again such a project would involve venturing into a genre with some well-established big players. The creators of a Dune video game might therefore prefer to find a more niche approach.
The renaissance of the beat ’em up genre, spearheaded by the success of Streets Of Rage 4, might lead developers to choose this style of game, as unlikely as it might seem. The Dune story is a surprisingly good fit for this format: With a hypothetical brawler game leading protagonist Paul Atreides on a one-man revenge crusade against the Harkonnens, featuring optional co-operative multiplayer modes to bring in the movie's other heroes, like Duncan Idaho or Gurney Halleck. The film’s hateful array of senior Harkonnens would make perfect end-of-level boss encounters, culminating in a climactic showdown against the floating, corpulent Baron himself.
It remains to be seen whether a video game adaptation of Dune will materialize in the years, but given the movie’s success, it is perhaps only a matter of time. History has shown that Dune can be adapted in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of success, but the developer of such a title will certainly be hoping it can find a winning formula.