Dune 2’s licensing hurdles
Westwood Studios’ Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty wasn’t the first real‑time strategy game, but it became an early blueprint that shaped the genre and inspired later titles such as Blizzard’s games.
In a new interview with GamesRadar, Marcin Paczynski, senior business development manager at GOG, explained how tangled the rights to the 1992 classic have become.
Electronic Arts currently holds the code, assets and all related materials, but it does not own the Dune intellectual property, which stems from a 1984 film rather than Frank Herbert’s books.
The 1984 movie was produced by Universal Pictures and Dino De Laurentiis, whose estate still controls part of the film license, adding another layer of complexity.
Legendary Pictures, which owns the rights to the new Dune movies, has a deal with Funcom for Dune Awakening, a survival game that includes an exclusivity clause, further complicating any attempt to re‑release Westwood’s titles.
Paczynski said the situation is frustrating because Dune 2 is a personal “holy grail” for GOG, yet the overlapping licenses make a re‑release uncertain.
He noted that fan‑made patches and mods often provide the only way to play such classics, since they avoid the legal hurdles that hinder official ports.
Nevertheless, there is hope that Dune 2 will eventually be offered on modern PC storefronts, allowing new players to experience a landmark RTS that paved the way for Warcraft, MOBAs and many other genres.
