Initial development was hardly any less problematic, as Sperry recounts: “Joe Bostic was my lead programmer, and I remember telling him about how I wanted the units to move around on the battlefield and the basics of combat. And so he put it all together, and the resultant game was really boring!”

At this stage, though, the game bore little resemblance to the final product, with only four to eight units fighting on each side. “When we played with it, the whole game was over in no time. So we worked in obstacles on the battlefield and later production dynamics, the base and unit construction, and the fog of war effect. The production dynamics were partly inspired by Civilization. Sid [Meier]’s production dynamics gave me ideas on how to make Dune II more interesting.”

According to Sperry there was no fleshed-out game design and development was largely organic. “I wasn’t very good at communicating what I saw in my mind,” he admits. “I knew how I wanted the controls and interface to work very clearly, but some of the unit dynamics and pacing were still murky. So we basically built the game iteratively and the design documents were often made up as we went along.”

This open-ended approach to game design is clearly how Sperry prefers to work, admitting that today he spends more time as a voyeur than a player. “When I focus on watching others play, I learn more about game design and entertainment, what’s working, what’s frustrating and how much or little players are willing to put up with and why. Game design and gamer interaction is still a source of endless fascination for me.”

Sperry describes Dune II’s core challenge as “combining combat, exploration and production at a particular pace and rhythm to make it all exciting and almost out of control. That was a key part of what made it so addictive.” Indeed, the experience was quite unlike more staid turnbased strategies, where success or failure rolled in slowly rather than rushing over sand dunes at the speed of an action game.

“You had to think and respond fairly quickly, and in realtime, or else your base and forces would all be overrun. And as we developed the game further, it became clearer how the pacing and battle scenario design were all a delicate balance.”