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Tech

'League of Legends' Couldn't Exist Without 'Dune II'

Westwood Studios is gone, but its work is more important than ever.

With 67 million monthly players,

League of Legends

is easily one of the most popular video games in the world right now. But there would be no

League of Legends

without

Dune II

, a game that's rarely talked about today.

On Thursday, longtime video game journalist and host Geoff Keighley held the second annual Game Awards, a reincarnation of the low-rent video game Oscars that used to air on Spike, before the network canceled it in 2014. It's more of a marketing event for upcoming games than it is an award show, but its version of a lifetime achievement award—which went to Dune II developer Westwood Studios this year—was a shining moment. It did an excellent job of explaining the significance of Dune II and its developer Westwood Studios to the current game industry landscape.

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Dune II (1992) was the first real-time strategy (RTS) game, a genre that has faded in popularity in recent years. Whereas strategy games that came before it played out in turns, like chess, Dune II allowed players to move their units across the battlefield simultaneously, in real-time. These days, most people probably know the genre because of Blizzard, which picked up the idea and ran with it for its Warcraft and StarCraft franchises, shortly after Dune II's release.

For almost a decade, Westwood and Blizzard competed in the RTS space. Westwood moved on to develop the Command & Conquer and Red Alert series, but Blizzard eventually triumphed. While StarCraft became an incredibly popular esport in South Korea, Westwood was acquired by Electronic Arts. After several failed attempts to revive the Command & Conquer name, Westwood was eventually shuttered in 2003. There have been attempts to revive the series since, but these haven't gone over well, either. The latest attempt was canceled in 2013 before release.

StarCraft is still a popular game, but nothing like it used to be. The decline of RTS in general started from within—namely, with Defense of the Ancients (DotA), an incredibly popular user-made modification for Warcraft 3. Instead of letting players command entire armies, it focused on singular hero units players had to micromanage, and coordinate with other players in order to control a map.

Defense of the Ancients was the first multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), which over the years became more popular than the RTS genre it grew out of. In 2009, Riot Games copied DoTa's formula almost exactly with League of Legends. In 2013 Valve followed suit with Dota 2, and the rest is history.

Yet, none of these games would exist without the RTS genre, and that wouldn't exist if Westwood hadn't taken a crazy chance with the the release of Dune II.