Dune 2 keeps topping wish lists at GOG, and keep getting stuck. Senior business development manager Marcin Paczynski told GamesRadar the 1992 Westwood real-time strategy classic is “one of the holy grails” on his personal re-release list — then explained why it is also “a good example of how bad it can get with the licensing situation of a game,” as reported by Video Games Chronicle.
Electronic Arts owns the game code and assets after buying Westwood in 1998. That is the easy part. The fiction rights are not based on Frank Herbert’s novels alone; the Westwood games tracked the 1984 David Lynch film. That pulls in Universal Pictures and producer Dino De Laurentiis, who died years ago and left a successor somewhere in the chain.
“You have Universal Pictures, Electronic Arts, and the successor for the original rightsholder of the movie IP,” Paczynski said. “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 game deal with Funcom, the studio behind Dune: Awakening, adds another exclusivity question Paczynski said he cannot fully untangle in public.
The commercial case is modest next to those letterheads. Paczynski sketched a re-release that might sell 50,000 to 100,000 copies at $5.99 or $9.99 — meaningful for a preservation storefront, trivial for a room full of multi-billion-dollar rights holders who all have to say yes.
Meanwhile the modern Dune game pipeline keeps moving. Funcom’s MMO is rolling into a frozen Blood and Ice expansion on Dec. 1, proof that somebody can clear Legendary’s table when the project is new. Getting the game that basically defined mainstream RTS back onto storefronts is a different kind of negotiation.
Until those signatures line up, Arrakis 1992 stays in the vault, holy grail and all.
