Before Command & Conquer, itself now an ancient series of real-time strategy games, Westwood Studios cut their RTS teeth on this: Dune II. The first Dune game was mostly an adventure title, but Dune II is a full on, base building, unit controlling, resource harvesting, building defending game.
As one of three houses, Atreides and Harkonnen from the original Dune book and Ordos created for this game, you must harvest the spice Melange on the planet Arrakis. This provides you with the resources to build more units and buildings to attack and destroy the other houses. It’s the exact blueprint for so many RTS games that followed.
In my opinion, in its field, Dune II was never bettered. Sure, newer games streamline the building process, allowing you to queue up jobs and simplifying unit management (including creating groups of units and giving them orders together), but I’ve never enjoyed any of them as much as Dune II. Maybe it’s the source material, or maybe it’s the recollection of playing a single map for eight hours straight one school holiday on a borrowed school Acorn A4000 which I was supposed to be using for A-level coursework. Who knows.
You can play it yourself here. One quirk of this emulation is that the mouse button doesn’t work so you have to press space instead of click. Why this is, nobody knows. Or you could play a fully online version here instead.
DOS emulator provided is DOSBox via archive.org.
I read a thing recently about old games – it might have been about the origins of genres, or just long-running series – where the guy claimed that “unlike some of the other games” he was talking about, Dune II didn’t hold up these days. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s still my favourite RTS. Simple controls, a clear map, the management side doesn’t get bogged down in detail… it’s like Tetris: this kind of game sprung forth fully formed, and any attempt to “improve” it has only diluted what made it so much fun. (Okay, it could maybe use a higher resolution these days, but it was designed for 320×240 and it works.)
It’s my favourite too, and I loved the original C&C. There’s definitely things that could be improved now, if not at the time – as you say, resolution, and I’d like to be able to queue builds, but they’d only add polish to an already fantastic game. Shame the Acorn version was a buggy port!