The 1992 RTS icon Dune 2: Battle for Arrakis is one of the most iconic PC games of all time. As one of the most influential RTS games of all time, the game is survived largely by brilliant fan ports, but there’s still a desire to see it officially re-released.
As it turns out, it’s “one of the holy grails” of DRM-free PC gaming storefront GOG as well. As a platform for games preservation, GOG has worked hard to revive a number of titles absent from modern storefronts, but sometimes that work is harder than you’d expect.
Case in point: Dune 2. Originally developed by Westwood Studios, the game’s rights are seemingly part-owned by Electronic Arts, Universal Pictures, and The Herbert Foundation. Part of the rights are also owned by deceased producer Dino De Laurentiis as the game is based on David Lynch’s 1984 Dune movie which De Laurentiis part-owned.
“Currently, Electronic Arts has the game code, the assets, all of the rights to those things, and all the materials around the game,” GOG senior business development and partnerships manager Marcin Paczynski told GamesRadar. “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,” he continued. “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.”
Additionally, as Legendary Pictures holds the rights to modern Dune games, re-releasing an old Dune game right now could cause some upset. Even if everyone involved in the original game’s release could agree to re-release it, there’s the possibility that Legendary Pictures would try to block the game’s launch.
Nevertheless, Paczynski is still trying to get Dune 2 re-released somehow. “It’s on the top of my list, my personal one, because this is a game that I have a lot of nostalgia for,” he said. “The situation is a good example of how bad it can get with the licensing situation of a game.”
“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 continued. “It’s a good example of how complicated things can get.”
There’s a long history of beloved games being lost due to rights issues. Hell, the brilliant remaster team at Nightdive Studios exists purely because System Shock was trapped in rights hell. Goldeneye 64, one of the most influential games of the 3D era spent over two decades trapped behind legal nightmares.
Dune 2 is just another game in the stack to be held back by “those multi-billion-dollar companies”, but there’s always hope that it can come back in the future. Until then, there are still ways to play the game on modern hardware, such as through OpenDUNE, although that hasn’t been updated for nearly a decade.
