One of 2025's biggies is Funcom's Dune: Awakening, a survival MMO set on an alt-history version of Arrakis where Paul Atreides, the book's protagonist and (kinda) hero, was simply never born. PCG's own Josh Wolens had the chance to play the game recently, and found an unusual genre-blending mix that, above all else, strains to stay faithful to the source material. As the game's producer, Nils Ryborg, put it: "We're making a survival game, but we're making a Dune game, right? One of the design models we have is: make the game fit Dune, don't make Dune fit the game."
That's not as straightforward as it first seems: There are, after all, multiple visions of what Dune is. There are Frank Herbert's five novels, plus the follow-ons by his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. There's Jodorowsky's unmade 1970s film, a holy grail for some fans, then David Lynch's infamous 1984 adaptation, plus various TV shows, games, and comics, until we get to the recent David Villeneuve movies. So what exactly fits Dune could be a fairly broad church.
