Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

Dune II was released 1992, Warcraft 2 in 1995, C&C Red Alert in 1996. Dune II was the first RTS with mass market success and had a defining influence.

View on HN

CnC was a Dune successor. Red Alert was a CnC spin-off.

Warcraft (one) was a Dune2 clone with crappy pathfinding. But they did add ability to give orders to multiple units at once!

Mass market, yes. But Herzog Zwei for Megadrive was out earlier and was already a RTS. It was not very good (at least my memories of it are not good - playing with a gamepad was a nightmare) but it was already going in that trench.

As I recall, Herzog Zwei has a few key differences from modern RTS games:

1) The player fulfills the commander role by directly controlling a unit on the battlefield, not in "god mode". The commander unit isn't merely a stylized cursor; it also directly engages in combat.

2) No base-building or tech tree. The number, location, and capabilities of all bases are fixed.

3) No explicit resource gathering. Money is automatically accumulated based on how many bases you control.

It's arguably closer to a MOBA than an RTS.

You can go back further, the original Herzog on MSX had RTS elements, and 1984's Stonkers[1][2] for the ZX Spectrum was the first commercially published RTS (AFAICT). Whether it's sales constitute mass market success is a different thing.

[1] - http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/stonkers

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-TkuFVj48E

Dune 2 invented the C&C/Warcraft/Starcraft style RTS though. Other games had RTS elements to them before that, but not like Dune 2. And certainly not to the extent that subsequent games tried to copy their successful format.

I'm not sure I follow. I linked to a video of an RTS game from 1984. Stonkers (AFAICT) invented the RTS. It didn't have RTS elements. It was an RTS, similar to Dune 2 and the others to follow.

Most of the successful games that copied Dune 2's format were written by the same studios (Westwood for the C&C franchise, Blizzard for *Craft).

Dune2 did not require mouse, keyboard all the way. Same as with Early FPSes (I played Doom, Heretic and Duke Nukem 3d on keyboard)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com