Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty has never had a modern re-release, and GOG's Marcin Paczynski has explained why. According to him, the 1992 Westwood Studios strategy game is caught in a licensing knot involving five separate rights holders, one of them tied up in a current Dune game.
Paczynski, senior business development and partnerships manager at GOG, laid out the problem in an interview with GamesRadar+ published on 1 November. Kotaku picked up the interview a day later, describing the game as owned by at least four companies; GamesRadar+ counts five parties. GOG hasn't published the comments itself, so we couldn't check them against an original GOG statement; everything he says below is as quoted by those two outlets.
Who owns what
The first layer is simple enough. Westwood made Dune 2, and Westwood was later acquired by EA. "So currently, Electronic Arts has the game code, the assets, all of the rights to those things, and all the materials around the game," Paczynski told GamesRadar+.
The trouble is the name on the box. "But of course, they do not own the IP," he said. According to GamesRadar+, Paczynski explained that the game wasn't based on Frank Herbert's novels but on the 1984 film, which was made by Universal Pictures with Dino De Laurentiis as its main producer. De Laurentiis held part of that film licence and, in Paczynski's words, "he died 15 years ago", so "whoever is the successor" to his rights "has a portion of them".
Add it up and GamesRadar+ quotes him listing Universal Pictures, Electronic Arts, the successor to the original film rights holder, the Herbert Foundation (which he says holds the rights to the IP as a whole), and Legendary Pictures, which owns the rights to the new Dune films.
Where Dune Awakening comes in
That last name is where things get properly modern. GamesRadar+ reports that Legendary has licensed Dune games to Funcom, the studio behind Dune: Awakening, and Paczynski says "there is an exclusivity there." How that exclusivity would affect a re-release of Westwood's old Dune games, a list GamesRadar+ says also includes Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Dune, is "currently not clear," he said.
Kotaku sums up the upshot: it seems very unlikely that Dune 2 will get an official re-release any time soon, or join GOG's preservation programme.
Why GOG keeps trying anyway
It isn't for the money, by Paczynski's own estimate. "You have all of those multi-billion-dollar companies playing a role for a game that, if we released it, might sell, I don't know, like 50,000 units – maybe 100,000 – for $5.99 or $9.99," he told GamesRadar+.
He also called it "one of the holy grails" and said it sits "on the top of my list, my personal one, because this is a game that I have a lot of nostalgia for." He added: "The situation is a good example of how bad it can get with the licensing situation of a game."
The reason the game matters is not in dispute. GamesRadar+ calls Dune 2 the foundation of the real-time strategy genre, with Blizzard's Warcraft and Westwood's own Command & Conquer taking direct inspiration from it. Kotaku is a touch more careful, noting it wasn't the first RTS but essentially provided the blueprint for the genre.
Ollie's take: There's something very Dune about this: a small, valuable thing that five great houses all have a claim on, and nobody seems to have found a way to untangle it. The sums Paczynski quotes make the real problem plain. Getting five rights holders to sign off is a lot of legal work for a game priced like a sandwich, and preservation keeps losing that kind of maths. The one hopeful note is that GOG is still asking. A game that helped found a genre deserves a proper, supported home on a modern storefront, and it would be a shame if the only thing standing in the way is paperwork.
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