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

Westwood wasn’t the only Studio publishing Dune videogames back in the day. French studio Cryo Interactive developed an adventure game simply called Dune and released it in 1992, then in 2001 released a tie-in to the Sci Fi Channel miniseries called Frank Herbert’s Dune developed by Widescreen Games. The latter was a flop, and Cryo Interactive, already struggling due to the early 2000s recession, declared bankruptcy.

That left Soft Brigade in trouble. The Hungarian studio was working with Cryo Interactive on an arcade flight-sim for the Game Boy Advance called Dune: Ornithopter Assault, in which you played a House Atreides pilot on Arrakis, protecting spice harvesters from the Harkonnen. It was canceled—as was an online RTS called Dune Generations being developed internally by Cryo Networks—despite being almost finished. A playable ROM was eventually leaked online, but now Soft Brigade’s game lives on, thanks to crowdfunding.