Homeworld was something of a departure from the standard RTS of the time – it was set in space, missions took place in a fully 3D “bubble” with little or no real terrain in place and it pared down the ever-increasingly intricate and important user interface to something more minimalist. Dune II was a huge influence on the games that followed it, from the original Warcraft and its sequels, to Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Total War and beyond.Īnother game influenced by Dune II (though, quite probably, indirectly) was Relic’s first game, Homeworld, released in 1999. In 1992, Westwood brought out Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, widely regarded as the first proper RTS: that is, it’s the first game that incorporated all of the elements upon which RTS games of the future would be built, and it forced the player to make their decisions and take all of their actions in real time (oh, and it used a mouse and keyboard!).
Over the years there have been plenty of games in which you collected and managed resources, constructed buildings, researched technologies and trained armies in order to battle foes and conquer worlds but, until 1992, those games were all turned-based, like playing a board game (possibly the biggest and best known turn-based strategy game, Civilization, was actually based on a board game). In 2003 Relic Entertainment brought out Impossible Creatures, their follow-up to the critically acclaimed and generally well-loved Homeworld. A strange mixture of RTS and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Impossible Creatures not only put an army at the players’ fingertips, but it let them fiddle, genetically, with the units themselves – and now, with Impossible Creatures: Steam Edition, it’s time to snap on your mad-scientist gloves and get ready to mess about with all the animal DNA you can shake a Cheetorilla at.īefore we get to Impossible Creatures, let me take the opportunity to give a (very) brief history of real-time strategy games.
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