Funcom pick up the rights to make three DUNE video games

With excitement building over the new Dune movie, a gaming company has belatedly remembered that the franchise has had great success in the video game arena and has moved to create a series of new games to tie in with the film.

Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001)

Funcom has picked up the rights from Legendary Entertainment to make three games. The first of these will be an open-world multiplayer game, which fits Funcom's existing modus operandi: their previous games developed include Conan Exiles, Anarchy Online and Secret World Legends.

Funcom have also developed a model focusing on single-player titles, having recently scored a reasonable hit with the tactical combat game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. This opens the possibility that Funcom may develop one or two single player games alongside the MMO.

The Dune franchise has a long history in video games, starting with the excellent adventure/strategy hybrid Dune in 1992, which was swiftly followed by Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis, widely considered (possibly erroneously) to be the first real-time strategy game. The game was remade to great success as Dune 2000 (1998) and followed by a further sequel, Emperor: The Battle for Dune (2001). A further adventure game, Frank Herbert's Dune (also 2001), was not successful and remains the last officially-released Dune game, although fan mods for other games have been released since then.

The new Dune film will be out in late 2020, and I imagine Funcom hope to release at least one of these games around this time.