A canceled Dune game comes to Steam under a new name, 20 years later

Westwood wasn't the main Studio publishing Dune videogames back in the day. French studio Cryo Interactive fostered an adventure game simply called Dune and released it in 1992, then, at that point, in 2001 released a connection to the Sci Fi Channel miniseries called Frank Herbert's Dune created by Widescreen Games. The latter was a lemon, and Cryo Interactive, already struggling due to the early 2000s recession, declared bankruptcy.

That left Soft Brigade in a tough situation. The Hungarian studio was working with Cryo Interactive on an arcade flight-sim for the Game Kid Advance called Dune: Ornithopter Assault, in which you played a House Atreides pilot on Arrakis, shielding spice harvesters from the Harkonnen. It was canceled — as was an internet based RTS called Dune Generations being grown internally by Cryo Networks — despite being almost finished. A playable ROM was eventually leaked on the web, yet now Soft Brigade's game lives on, thanks to crowdfunding.

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After raising $21,222 on Kickstarter (opens in new tab), the game previously known as Dune: Ornithopter Assault has finally been finished. Absent the Dune license and renamed Elland: The Crystal Wars, it's been brought to PC by Retro Room Games, who specialize in game preservation.

Instead of Arrakis, it's set on Elland, an existence where the Brem-Nar crystals vital for making galactic star cruisers are mined. As a raptor pilot for Elland Inc., you must convey crystal gatherers to the crystal fields and forestall smugglers and agents of the rival Trafford Corp from destroying them. There are 23 levels, and some modern quality-of-life features like the ability to save anywhere, regulator support and control remapping, cloud saves, and image scaling and smoothing options.

Elland: The Crystal Wars is available on Steam (opens in new tab) as of October 3. As for official Dune videogames, 4x strategy game Dune: Spice Wars is right now in early access, and Funcom is dealing with three Dune games, including open world survival MMO Dune Awakening, which has yet to announce a release date.