Your Afternoon Time-Waster: ‘Dune II’ Is Now A Browser Game

It says something that an entire game from 1992 can be put on a website and played smoothly. It says something dangerous that said game is Dune II, one of the most important video games of all time. And by dangerous we mean “You don’t really have anything to do at work, right?”

Pretty much the only good thing to come out of David Lynch’s terrible adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune II is the grandpappy of all real-time strategy games. While some games had elements of it before, it was Dune II that brought them all together.

Seriously, if you’re a Command and Conquer fan, this is where is starts. Much of this game will feel very, very familiar to you.

The game is dated in some respects: This is a PC game that’s nearly old enough to buy beer, after all. But it’s still a horrific time sink, with a difficulty curve somewhere between “Give Me Your Delicious Tears” and “Your Hate and Rage Fill My Processors With Joy”.

This also isn’t quite a one-to-one port, but rather an open-source game built on the original. So it’s a bit rough around the edges, in some respects. That it’s small enough to essentially run on modern computers as cloud software is basically just a bonus.

If you don’t particularly care about getting that project done by Friday, here you go. We warned you!

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