Westwood Studios' 1992 classic Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty – alternately known as Battle for Arrakis depending on the version – is one of the most important games ever made. It laid the foundation for the entire real-time strategy genre, and everything from Blizzard's Warcraft to Westwood's own Command & Conquer took direct inspiration from it.
So why has it never gotten a modern re-release? As it turns out, making a game based on a movie based on a novel that's now been adapted into a different movie with a different tie-in game creates something of an IP nightmare. Marcin Paczynski, senior business development and partnerships manager at GOG, has been trying to unpack this mess for some time.
"This is one of the holy grails," Paczynski tells GamesRadar+. "It's on the top of my list, my personal one, because this is a game that I have a lot of nostalgia for. The situation is a good example of how bad it can get with the licensing situation of a game."
Dune 2 was developed by Westwood Studios, which was eventually 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 explains. "But of course, they do not own the IP. The problem with the IP is that it is not directly owned by the Herbert Foundation, because the games were not based on the books; they were actually based on the movie from 1984. That movie was created by Universal Pictures, and the main producer for that movie was [Dino De Laurentiis]. The problem is that he also has part of that movie license with him. But he died 15 years ago."
So "whoever is the successor" to De Laurentiis' rights "has a portion of them," Paczynski says. "You have Universal Pictures, Electronic Arts, and the successor for the original rightsholder of the movie IP. On top of that, you have the Herbert Foundation that holds the rights to the IP as a whole, and on top of that, you have Legendary Pictures that owns the IP to the new movies."
Legendary's piece of the IP becomes an issue because it has given "the license to create games within the IP to Funcom" in order to create Dune: Awakening, and "there is an exclusivity there." It's "currently not clear" how that would impact a re-release for any of Westwood's old Dune games, which also include Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Dune.
"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," Paczynski concludes. "It's a good example of how complicated things can get."
Check out our full interview to find out why Paczynski believes "there is no game preservation with DRM."
