![]() ![]() ![]() The former turned out to be a surprisingly evocative and playable fusion of adventure and strategy game, but it was the latter that would quietly - oh, so quietly in the beginning! - shift the tectonic plates of gaming.įor Dune II, which was developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Games, really was the first recognizable implementation of the genre of real-time strategy as we have come to know it since. Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty sported its Roman numeral because its transnational publisher had gotten its transatlantic cables crossed and accidentally wound up with two separate games based on Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science-fiction novel - one made in Paris, the other in Las Vegas. ![]() Gaming’s Velvet Underground, on the other hand, was the avatar of real-time strategy, which came to the world in the deceptive guise of a sequel in the fall of 1992. ![]() Pepper was DOOM, which came roaring up out of the shareware underground at the tail end of 1993 to sweep everything from its path, blowing away all of the industry’s extant conventional wisdom about what games would become and what role they would play in the broader culture. Other times, though, influence can take years to make itself felt, as was the case for another album of 1967, The Velvet Underground & Nico, about which Brian Eno would later famously say that it “only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, there was no doubt that the proverbial goalposts in rock music had just been shifted. Sometimes something appears and everyone knows instantly that it’s just changed everything when the Beatles dropped Sgt. The stories of how the two rose to such heady heights are a fascinating study in contrasts, of how influences in media can either go off like an explosion in a TNT factory or like the slow burn of a long fuse. And yet at the beginning of the decade neither genre even existed. They were so dominant that most of the industry’s executives seemed to want to publish little else. At the end of the 1990s, the two most popular genres in computer gaming were the first-person shooter and the real-time strategy game. ![]()
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