Technosoft’s 1990 Mega Drive game Herzog Zwei is often labelled as a primary inspiration for Dune II, but according to Sperry greater influence came from a more mundane source. “Herzog Zwei was a lot of fun, but I have to say the other inspiration for Dune II was the Mac software interface. The whole design/interface dynamics of mouse clicking and selecting desktop items got me thinking, ‘Why not allow the same inside the game environment? Why not a context-sensitive playfield? To hell with all these hot keys, to hell with keyboard as the primary means of manipulating the game!’”

The influence of MacOS (at the time the text interface of MS-DOS still held equal ground with Windows on PCs) on Sperry is perhaps unsurprising given his initial game industry experience as an Apple II programmer. “I started programming in high school when I was 16 years old and initially I did ports to the Apple II, some utilities and six ‘edu-games’. My first big game was called Terra 12 but it was never published. Around 1984 I met Louis Castle during a port of Impossible Mission for the Apple II that I was working on. Louis did most of the art and animation on that project. In fact, after seeing his superior artwork, that was the end of my computer art career!”

“Louis and I started Westwood Studios in March of 1985 as a 16bit game company. Our early games were for the Amiga and the Atari ST. We were a three-man shop initially [with programmer Barry Green]. Louis did all the artwork, all three of us were programming, and each of us did some of the audio work.”

Sperry stopped programming in 1987, though, as the demands of design work, running the new company and overseeing production on all of Westwood’s games was all becoming too much. “With the rise of the 16bit machines, the rules and standards changed dramatically. We actually had to hire two artists and an audio guy. Almost overnight the industry went from one and two-man teams, to groups of five or six.”

Apart from proving that some things in the game industry never change, Sperry also recalls that by the same period he was getting bored with programming: “For me, game conceptualisation and design was the hardest and the most exciting job of all, and I was jealous of any time I spent away from doing that.”

Conceptualisation of Dune II itself began with an approach from Martin Alper, president of Virgin Games. “Martin asked what I thought about Frank Herbert’s Dune books and the Dune movie,” remembers Sperry. “I loved the books and I loved David Lynch’s movie as well, and I told him as much. Martin told me he had locked up the licence years ago and I could use it if I wished.”

Alper’s comments to Sperry had been made with the understanding that work by French developer Cryo on a Dune-themed adventure/strategy hybrid had already been cancelled. As Sperry later found out, however, Cryo hadn’t taken no for an answer. “They rushed to finish their game before ours,” he reveals. “The result was a branding nightmare – the Cryo game had nothing to do with ours and yet it was published first because Virgin was anxious for the revenue. Against my violent protests our game was called Dune II: The Building Of A Dynasty [Battle For Arrakis in Europe and for the Mega Drive version] and the rest is history.”